College Open Textbooks BLOG
Driving Awareness and Adoption
Advanced Water Mathematics Online Textbook – an update from an adopter community grantee
Regina Blasberg, College of Canyons
Mike Alvord, Director of Operations for Newhall County Water District, and I are working on writing an Advanced Water Mathematics online textbook. Mike has basically completed the first draft of the textbook which is already in use in our Water 031 Advanced Water Mathematics course. I have been focused on completing edits and identifying any inconsistencies in formatting. Since the text is currently being used, we have found that the students are enjoying providing comments, pointing out errors, and indicating topics that aren’t clearly explained as well. Once this draft is final and we’ve received additional student feedback, we’ll add more homework problems, figures, and any other final updates.
What’s New in OER at Scottsdale Community College?
Faculty in the Mathematics Department at Scottsdale Community College have been working hard this year to create, revise, and organize materials for our OER project in several of our courses. This is exciting for all of us!
Our goal is to offer all of our MAT 09x Introductory Algebra, MAT 12x Intermediate Algebra, and MAT 150 College Algebra courses using OER materials starting this Fall 2012. During the 2011-2012 academic year, we have pilot tested our materials, formed a learning community of very talented mathematics faculty, and collaborated with each other to further refine the OER textbook, student support materials, and online homework assignments. This summer, several faculty (Bill Meacham, Judy Sutor, Jenifer Bohart, Donna Guhse, and Linda Knop) will be working hard to take what we have learned from our spring pilot and, once again, refine these materials. The exciting part of the refinement process is that we have complete control over the quality of what we adopt to support our classes! We love this!
Recently, our OER team received the SCC Innovation of the Year Award. Only 1 team per college in the Maricopa Community College District receives this award. As a result, we were invited to give a presentation in hopes of receiving the widely sought-after District Innovation of the Year Award. The presentation slides are available at: OER Innovation of the Year. Wish us luck that we are awarded our District IOTY Award very soon!
As part of our OER project, our learning community has restructured the course so that we provide meaningful support for students, both inside and outside of the classroom. 
Before class, students can complete a “mini-lesson” to help prepare them for the next class session. During class, they receive instruction and engage in paired board work. After class, they use iMathAS and problem solving activities to support their learning. The next class session then allows for more active learning and engagement with the mathematics. Outside of the classroom, students’ learning is supported by the OER textbook and video tutorials created by MathIsPower4U’s James Sousa, as well as the Khan Academy.
Students have been appreciative of our efforts to use free (or nearly free!) materials for their mathematics courses. In fact, feel free to watch a couple of student testimonials about their experience in an OER math class. It’s exciting to hear that they are using technology — their smartphone, their tablet, etc. — to complete online homework and to access the textbook.
It’s a wonderful time to be teaching college mathematics!
Exemplary open textbooks and methodology: ChemWiki and its Progeny
ChemWiki not only shines as an exemplary series of open-licensed chemistry textbooks, it has spawned
Professor Delmar Larsen of the University of California at Davis heads the ChemWiki project, a series of online textbooks including Analytical, Biological, Inorganic, Organic, Physical, and Theoretical Chemistry plus the History of Chemistry and Lab Techniques. All are licensed Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike. Students and instructors contribute to the textbooks that are constantly improved.
ChemWiki includes more than 6,000 pages with high-quality illustrations. Individual pages in ChemWiki can be printed or turned into Adobe PDF files. Contributors include more than 30 chemistry professors and students as well as web technologists and publicist Richard Osibanjo.
ChemWiki provides maps to popular commercial general, organic, and physical textbooks.
Here are the pages showing how other colleges and universities are starting to incorporate the UC Davis ChemWiki into their courses:
- Columbia University
- Contra Costa College
- Diablo Valley College
- Hope College
- J. Sargent Reynolds Community College
- New Mexico State University Alamogodro
- University of Minnesota at Morris
- Truman State University
College Open Textbook grantee communities include two based on the UC Davis series:
- 3-D Molecular Models in ChemWiki: Dr. Ron Rusay and colleagues at Diablo Valley Community College
- PhysWiki Dynamic Textbook project: Professor Erik Christensen at South Florida Community College and a colleague at Monroe Community College, NY. Erik was named a College Open Textbooks Outstanding Open Textbooks Advocate/Trainer in 2010.
A special feature of the UC Davis wiki texts is the Student Ability Rating and Inquiry System (SARIS) , a tool for tracking student progress based on PracticeZone.
PracticeZone is part of the ChemVantage academic program learning and assessment program for General Chemistry that includes jargon used in mastering video games. Chuck Wight of the University of Utah founded ChemVantage. “We have configured the software to allow students to submit proposed solutions to the problems as often as they want, in order to improve their scores. The objective is for students to use the feedback to correct their errors prior to the deadline for the assignment.” ChemVantage carries a Creative Commons Attribution license.
College Open Textbooks delights in publicizing the wiki texts from UC Davis, the use of these by several institutions, and the exciting approach to chemistry education from the University of Utah.
Business Communications Adopter Community Update
Our eight adopter communities have been making great progress with their open textbook or OER projects. Focused on using these to improve teaching and learning for their students, adopter communities are required to have at least two college or university instructors who have adopted or who have plans to adopt an open textbook(s) or open educational resources as the primary text for a course they teach or plan to teach in the 2011-2012 time frame.
Professor Danielle Budzick
We just got an update from Professor Danielle Budzick and her colleagues at Cuyahoga Community College, OH on their business communications adopter community.
Here is her report on the progress they have been making at Tri-C with their grant:
The Tri-C grant team is diligently working on modification to the Flat World textbook. As a team, we are coordinating the re-ordering of the chapters to align with our official course outline.
I’ve been adding embedding video content to all the chapters and started to work on the modification of the PowerPoint resources. 
Here is what the rest of the team is working on!
Fran Brady is taking the lead on editing the Intercultural communication as her day job is with Sherwin Williams and she works with international clients. She’ll be adding more examples and building out chapter.
Pam Grant is adding examples of emails, memos, and letters to provide a stronger context for students, as this is the first chapter in the revised book.
Linda Glassburn is ramping up with example of business proposals and reports by creating her own to include within the textbook. Linda also imported several grammar and punctuation chapters from two different Flat World books at the end of the text to provide an “appendix” area for a refresher to students.
Getting Ready for Summer Pilot
All of the grant faculty are going to be teaching Summer Sections of Business Communication using the modified textbook. Our next steps are finalizing the textbook, so we can share with an other instructors who are teaching college-wide.
I’ll continue to update as we finish the editing and get ready for summer. I can be reached via email at Danielle.Budzick@tri-c.edu.
Thanks,
Danielle Budzick
Education Champions Work Together to Find Solutions for Open Education Design Challenge at Big Ideas Fest 2011
By Carol Hedgspeth, Senior Research Associate, ISKME
ISKME’s 3rd annual Big Ideas Fest (www.bigideasfest.org) was held in early December in Half Moon Bay, CA, and as promised, creative doers and thinkers from diverse levels of education gathered to learn from and share with each other. This convening yielded creative, inspirational, and often revolutionary ideas about current educational challenges, while providing the opportunity to interact and engage with a mix of teachers, researchers, administrators, entrepreneurs, education leaders. Central to Big Ideas Fest is the “action” component, called Action Collabs–design-oriented labs where participants brainstormed, prototyped, and ultimately create scalable solutions to major education challenges, such as achieving universal literacy and math competency, and leveraging open education to transform teaching 
and learning.
In a major shift from traditional educational conferences, the event is designed to bring together kindred spirits on a level playing field, where a person’s work or role becomes less important than how they share and collaborate within their group. In this way, the mix of students, teachers, administrators, researchers, inventors, and executives operate as peers in solving a common problem. These common problems are referred to as “design challenges” at the Big Ideas Fest.
One of the design challenges that was taken on by the Action Collabs was to create solutions around leveraging open content, data, and research to transform teaching and learning. During the Action Collabs, teachers, administrators, and students worked alongside noted leaders and policy makers in the field of open education. The Action Collab process facilitates moving from brainstorming ideas to creating tangible manifestations of those ideas (using pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks and other craft items), in a rapid low-investment way, and results in a visual representation of a solution that helps to see the idea in the real world.
Many of the Big Ideas Fest’s rapid-fire speakers were full participants in the Action Collabs as well. Speakers on open education included Brewster Kahle, Founder of the Internet Archive; Martha Kanter, the U.S. Under Secretary of Education; Neeru Kholsa, Co-Founder of CK-12 Foundation and pioneer in the OER movement; and Barbara Chow, Education Program Director at Hewlett and champion of open education resources. Additional speakers included Jody Lewen, the Executive Director of the Prison University Project; Kaycee Eckhardt, an award-winning charter school teacher whose science and math academy is housed in a FEMA trailer in the 9th ward of New Orleans; and Adora Svitak, the 13-year old recipient of NEA Foundation’s Award for Outstanding Service to Public Education.
THE ACTION COLLAB
The Action Collab groups that were focused on “open” provided innovative and inspired prototype solutions to the question “How might we leverage open (content, research, data) to transform teaching and learning?” One solution, “Pandora for Learning”, was designed to connect students to content that students are passionate about and that they have curated. A second solution to the open education design challenge focused on creating a virtual learning experience that is learner- and teacher-curated, linking the end user to open content about the arts.
ISKME is committed to support the further development of these and other design solutions on the soon-to-launch online Action Collab Network.
OCW People's Choice Award: Most Open! And the winner is College Open Textbooks!
Great News!
Education-Portal.com just announced the winners of their first annual OCW People’s Choice Awards, which honor the best of the Open Education Movement. Over 4000 people voted for their best educational resources in this inaugural contest.
College Open Textbooks was recognized as the OCW People’s Choice Winner for Most Open. According to Education-Portal.com, “Openness is a key part of any OCW – after all, it’s in the name. But what providers excel at giving their users a wealth of material to access and lots of different ways to do it? The nominees in this category all understand that to make courseware truly open, variety and depth are key.” The finalists included Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) and UC Irvine OCW.
Other winners included Open Course Library, FGV Online, African Virtual University OER, Open Study, MIT Physics and more. For more information on the complete list of winners, go to http://education-portal.com/articles/OCW_Peoples_Choice_Award_Winners_Final_List.html
Poetry is Not a Widget: The Priceless is Right
A Jenny Holzer plaque showing a poem engraving. (Photo by gredaline on Flickr.) Courtesy of MIT OpenCourse on Reading
Poetry is Not a Widget: The Priceless is Right
Suggested listening: Alice Coltrane, The Impulse Story
I write this now listening to the late harpist, pianist, organist, virtuoso Alice Coltrane cast spells in her ethereal “Journey in Satchidananda.” I am privileged to have seen her perform with her son Ravi and members of the original John Coltrane Quartet in San Francisco, November 2006, one of only two performances before her untimely death, and after her protracted spiritual reclusion from the stage and the public. For me, her music, especially this exquisite creation, is an analogue for the best of poetry: deft in its experimentation and breadth; precise in its openness; welcoming of warmth, musicality, emotion; wise in its scaffolding of history; innocent in its play; and, generous to both the creator and her audience for, as a work of high craft, when the work is ineffable, one is still encouraged to explain it for there is always something familiar in the seeming unfamiliar, always something intimate in the deepening canvas of seeming generalized experience. As a writer and artist myself, I know that Alice Coltrane did not choose her craft. Her craft chose her. And we are most grateful for this arranged marriage!
I speak to the luminosity of Alice Coltrane because her body of work as well as her actual life illustrate the profound gifts art offers the mundanity, discord, and ravages of daily human life. At this time in our present history, the public display of contempt for intellectual vibrancy and its artistic articulation in the verbal, written, visual, and musical arts is at an all-time high. One can look anywhere in our mainstream landscape and find disparagement of that which is sophisticated, complex, and beautiful in the way only the search for truth, wisdom, and humanity can be. This attack has now infiltrated the very protectorates of art, intellectual integrity, humane humanity, and those who teach and live within such purview: public colleges and universities. Specific attacks are now being waged upon disciplines that encourage free thinking, intellectual diversity, and artistic expression, especially humanities and arts.
Because of the current groupthink among powerful decision-makers such as private industry moguls, government officials, and college and university administrators, all of whom are now forming alliances for profit-centered, assembly-line educational models, then certainly those courses and disciplines most vulnerable are those that provide intellectual space for human expression and possibility, not profit generation. Nationally there are stories of humanities, arts, and social science courses being cancelled or usurped. There are now instances where entire programs such as creative writing or music appreciation are being discontinued. When colleges and universities become businesses and teachers become sales executives, then students become products, commodities for sale in the market of linear conformity. This sabotage will result in intellectual docility and, most disturbingly, artistic death. Without art, culture does not survive.
Musical compositions, philosophical dissertations, visual arts, and poems are not widgets. Humanity is not a widget. Though the leadership efforts are dramatically in this direction, human experience – and the minds creating it – are not yet entirely for sale. Poetry is an acute reminder and reclamation of that which can never be bought or sold: truth, justice, generosity, compassion, beauty, and love.
Thus, the open education movement provides critical resistance to such nefarious profiteering by making art – especially written art – widely accessible and free. Moreover, because poetry is the elegant articulation, defense, and honor of organic experience, its accessible and free status via the open course environment ought to remind wayward educational profiteers that there are better, creative, humane ways to save and generate money in the noble profession of education. For artists and teachers, the issue is moot: art is human and humane. Art, simply, is self-sustaining.
There are some fantastic things happening in literary arts inside and outside academia. Yet, the most robust resources are housed and nurtured by academic institutions. There are ample offerings in traditional and experimental poetics, within a variety of platforms, such as open courses, open formats, institutional programs, electronic archives and magazines, digitized books and papers, and the viral glee of social networking technologies. Below the closing poem is a brief listing of innovative resources, by no means exhaustive. Please use and share generously.
In acknowledgment of the redemptive and restorative energies that poetry gives the world, I will close with one of my favorite poems by Lewis Turco. This poem is written in the Japanese form called Somonka, an epistolary love poem made up of two tankas, an extension of the haiku, wherein each tanka follows a line syllable count of 5-7-5-7-7. The first tanka is a statement of love, and the second is a response.
Epistles: The Tarot IX of Swords
I am writing you
from a pit. It is quite dark
here. I see little.
I am scratching this note on a stone.
Where are you? It has been long.
Thank you for your note.
I do not know where I am.
I believe I may
be with you. It is not dark
here. The light has blinded me.
–Lewis Turco, Poetry Magazine, July 1972
Open Licensed Internet Resources for Poetry
MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Courses (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license)
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/literature/21l-004-reading-poetry-spring-2009/
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/writing-and-humanistic-studies/21w-756-writing-and-reading-poems-fall-2006/
The Open University (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license)
http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=3007
Free but not open Internet Resources for Poetry
The Poetry Archive (copyright license)
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/home.do
The Internet Archive – search for “poetry” (copyright license)
Electronic Poetry Center at New York State University, Buffalo (copyright license)
OCW Consortium Partners with Leading Community College Consortium, CCCOER, to Expand Access to Open Education
open courseware consortium logo
The Open Courseware Consortium (OCW Consortium) announced a new partnership with the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) to maximize the impact of open courseware to community college students, faculty, and learners worldwide. CCCOER has over 200 affiliated colleges nationwide and in Canada while the OCW Consortium has 250 colleges and universities worldwide, which will benefit from their combined resources.
Dr. Judy Baker, dean of Technology and Innovation at Foothill College and one of the founders of the CCCOER stated “Both CCCOER and the OCW Consortium serve to increase access to education for students with limited means, which makes this partnership powerful. When educators pool their expertise to foster a culture of shared knowledge, everyone benefits.”
Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources
The partnership between CCCOER and the OCW Consortium allows us to raise awareness and broaden access to higher education with new audiences”, commented Mary Lou Forward, executive director of the OCW Consortium.
Read the entire press release here
Irynsoft: Mobile Access to OERs
Guest Blog: Sandy Khaund is Founder of Irynsoft, a mobile software company in the California Bay Area
Several years ago, I took a distance education class. Having spent eight years in higher education across four degrees and three schools, I was fascinated by online learning as a viable alternative to traditional (face-to-face) education–especially for those who otherwise couldn’t access a college education. However, the limitations were clear. I was tethered to my desk to watch the class. I didn’t really interact with my classmates and had no way of bringing my existing friends into the mix or even knowing if those existing friends were part of the school. When I completed the class, there was no way to find out what other classes I might want to take. Overall, it was a very disconnected experience. At the time, I accepted it as that was the difference between a residential experience and an online one.
But then something happened. The world changed. Smartphones began appearing in pockets everywhere. Facebook created a new model for 500 million people to interact with one another online. Sites like Netflix and Amazon began giving us suggestions based on our past behavior, introducing us to things we didn’t even know. And with all of this, we at Irynsoft were inspired to re-imagine how people access higher education instruction.
We set out to boost student success through easy-to-consume content at an affordable price. Content that ideally adapts not only to the student’s skill level, but also to his/her lifestyle. By increasing the customizability, convenience, and affordability of educational resources while optimizing user experience, you can advance engagement, retention, and ultimate success of students. That’s our mission.
Irynsoft offers a platform called VIRT2GO, which consists of several key components: Interactive Video with concurrent note-taking capability, community elements such as ratings and discussion forums, Facebook connectivity to enable sharing and personalization. VIRT2GO’s portability and community helps students to overcome the biggest hurdles that plague on-line education today: finding the time and finding the help. A short YouTube demo can be found at: http://bit.ly/c7vsUG
We’re at the intersection of three powerful trends: online learning, social networking, and mobile devices. VIRT2GO couldn’t have existed five years ago as the technology and the social graph didn’t exist. But now, we are leveraging Facebook and mobile devices to adapt to the lifestyles & wallets of online learners. We bring valuable learning content and the equally valuable learning community to students wherever they go
.
As an initial showcase of VIRT2GO, we created “VIRT U”, short for the virtual university, a marketplace of open content that appealed to current students and lifelong learners alike. Featuring content from top schools, VIRT U offers content on a broad range of topics. This product was released to iTunes free of charge and has generated thousands of downloads with no marketing. Our OER offerings to date have been about validating our product, experimenting with new product features (not every feature is in every product), and giving back to the OER community of which we are huge fans. We weren’t looking for a huge audience as our business model is to sell our product to online universities looking to expand access to their content to increase attraction, retention, and participation in their degree programs.
With the success of VIRT U, Irynsoft established relationships with additional partners: MIT, Cornell, and Khan Academy. While we were aware of the power of OERs, I don’t think any of us anticipated the huge groundswell of support for our apps. In 2010, Irynsoft has built sizeable user base as hundreds of new users download our apps and access educational content through their mobile phones everyday. As a result, Irynsoft gained a greater appreciation for customer behaviors and desires. With tens of thousands of downloads and a strong body of feedback and data from over the last year, we have recognized some key learnings:
- Students appreciate guidance on what to watch. When Irynsoft experimented with recommendations, users would be motivated to try it and seemed more likely to log in again in hopes of seeing another video. Much like Netflix and Amazon where recommendations engines help point out what can be of interest, students appreciate insight into what they “didn’t know they didn’t know”. This is something that makes sense for all OERs–how do you get encourage subsequent use of addition OER materials?
- Students prefer shorter content. In every app, the viewings of the five minute videos far outpaced the full-length lectures—even when the lectures were delivered by noted MIT professors or business leaders such as Jeff Immelt of GE. It’s no surprise that the app for Khan Academy has been very popular given not only the quality of the videos, but also the brief, concise nature of the lessons. We’ve become a bite-size culture when it comes to content.
I hope you’ll join our community and share your thoughts. If you have an iPhone, you can find our apps at: http://bit.ly/irynsoftonitunes. We have a beta version of VIRT U for Android which will go to full release soon and we are working on tablet versions. As the year continues, we’ll be rolling features in and out of our OER versions of these apps and we have a few exciting surprises in store. Plus, we are experimenting with some new business model ideas that are more in line with how people have been using our apps. I welcome your feedback and suggestions. We have an easy feedback tab on each app, you can access our feedback website (http://getsatisfaction.com/irynsoft/), or I can be contacted directly at sandy AT irynsoft DOT com.
Smarthistory: Toward the Reinvention of the Textbook
We first heard from the folks at College Open Textbooks when Kate Jordahl, Professor of photography and digital imaging at Foothill College, wrote a review of our site (giving it an “excellent” rating) and then again a little more than a year ago when they nominated our site, Smarthistory.org, for the 2010 Text and Academic Authors Association Texty and McGuffey Excellence awards. The idea was to break new ground in promoting web books in the traditional bound textbook field. We didn’t win the award but we were honored to be nominated.
At Smarthistory.org, we have indeed tried to break new ground by imagining what a textbook might be when no longer constrained by the the economics and physical structure of the fifteenth-century technology of the bound book. We felt it was especially important to explore the potential of multimedia for learning resources given the tendency of some authors and publishers to simply take existing text, turn it into PDF files, and put it up on the web.
We also see value in offering curated links to closely related material. Its interesting to note in this regard, that many valuable resources come from institutions with an extremely high level of expertise, but that are outside the university, namely museums and libraries. The availability of so many free, high-quality learning resources has prompted us to wonder whether the very notion of the textbook, a format that has historically sought to offer a complete overview of a given subject, makes sense in an age when information has become so fluid and easy to obtain. Will our students trust that a single static resource reflects the most recent discoveries and debates? Why do textbooks have to be a separate genre? Recently, Louisiana defined “any medium or material that constitutes a principal source of teaching and learning to be a textbook.” That makes a lot of sense to us.
We were really pleased when College Open Textbooks gave us a grant to write two syllabi for Smarthistory. We recognize that, as Smarthistory becomes more widely adopted as an enhancement or replacement for the standard textbooks, teachers will benefit from example syllabi. In fact, we plan to offer more support for teachers and students in the near future. This support is critical, since in the past, art history instructors would gather in the slide library and informally exchange teaching tips. With the advent of digital image libraries however, selecting images for teaching became a solitary experience. We are exploring ways we can retrieve this lost social space for informal conversation among both teachers and students. Recently, we’ve been impressed with openstudy.com – a site that provides a social layer on open courseware – helping students to connect and study together.
We look forward to future collaborations with College Open Textbooks. They have an incredibly important role, namely, promoting the reinvention of the affordable, high-quality learning resources our students need.
By Beth Harris and Steven Zucker
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