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!
Textbook and Academic Writers Invited to 2012 Conference in New Orleans, June 8-9
Network with the Text and Academic Authors Association (TAA) community, build your knowledge, and expand your publishing opportunities at the 25th Anniversary TAA Conference, “Academic & Textbook Authoring—Evolving Arts”, in New Orleans, LA, June 8-9, 2012.
Kim Pawlak, Associate Executive Director at Text and Academic Authors Association
This year’s conference wi
ll feature two 2-hr workshops, “Thinking Well, Writing Well: How Smart Academics Write to Get Published,” and “Textbook Authoring Basics, A Holistic Approach. Choose from more than a dozen sessions and several small-group discussions on topics, including copyright, self-publishing, ebooks, writing productivity, digital pedagogy, and more. You will also have the opportunity to meet one-on-one with a veteran author or attorney specializing in educational publishing, and several networking opportunities, including a Welcome Breakfast and an evening Networking Reception.
Joy Hakim, author of the ten-volume K-12 textbook series, A History of US, and three-volume textbook series, The Story of Science, will give a keynote presentation on June 8, entitled, “Textbooks Should Be Great Books!”
In honor of TAA’s 25th anniversary, registration has been reduced to $125 for members and $155 for non-members. The first 30 conference registrants will receive a copy of Step-by-Step: Building a Research Paper, and Internet Surf & Turf Revealed: The Essential Guide to Copyright, Fair Use, and Finding Media. To learn more about the 2012 TAA Conference or to register, visit http://www.TAAonline.net/2012TAAConference/register.
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.
Hats Off to Minnesota! (Part 1)
With their students facing the same pressures from the economy and rising textbook prices as everywhere else in the country, the staff and faculty at the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU) have stretched to find solutions. Comprising 25 community and technical colleges and seven state universities, MnSCU is administered by the Office of the Chancellor in St. Paul.
It has been to this office and to Todd Digby, System Director of Libraries, that the leadership role has fallen.
Digby explains that there was a legislative push in the state to reduce textbook costs for students, and because he was involved in both online education and library resources, he was recruited to look into possible alternatives, including the development and adoption of open textbooks and educational materials.
While meeting a favorable response to the concept among many faculty members, Digby found that he needed to put practical tools in the hands of instructors if they were to actually go forward, develop, and use open resources. Aware, too, that individuals and institutions around the country were engaged in efforts to create materials and make them available, he has put his energy into providing what he sees as the critical “wraparound services” that can contribute to success. From the outset two needs were identified: first, creating an online repository for Minnesota schools, and second, providing adequate development tools to faculty so they could create teaching materials in useable formats.
The first of these, building and maintaining a repository, is now being implemented through the Minnesota Learning Commons (MNLC), a partnership of Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, the University of Minnesota, and the Minnesota Department of Education along with public K-12 schools. Not just a home for online textbooks, MNLC hosts a wide range of learning resources, including introductory learning materials and course parts. The MNLC site also provides a gateway link to the National Repository of Online Courses (NROC), which is hosted by the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education.
To be continued.
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
MERLOT Panel: Latest Trends in Open Textbook Research
At Merlot’s recent conference, Mitchell Levy – marketing chair, COT – led a panel of industry who’s who’s in Open Textbooks and the OER initiatives. Talking to a packed room, Dr. Judy Baker offered a view on what the true cost of open textbook adoption is as well as the impact they have on enhancing teacher and learning. Clare Mortensen, ISKME shared with the challenges and barriers to wide-spread open textbook adoption that they found through their reserach. She also offered suggestions for how to address them. Joel Thierstein, Connexions offered insights into accessibility and the role it plays in open textbooks and why they need to be addressed by all involved – author, faculty, university and more.
A copy of their presentations is available via download.
Action in the UK: Draft OER infoKit Release From JISC
There are lots of things going on in the UK. In addition to all the volcanic ash playing havoc in the atmosphere there this week, JISC has been busy putting together an OER (Open Educational Resources) Infokit.
OK, who and what is JISC? Their About statement says; “
Their OER Infokit is in draft format right now and they are soliciting input. Check it out, it will be worth your time. There is a wealth of information in the infokit comprising of info you are familiar with as well as alot of new info and points of view.
I encourage you to to send comments to the JISC as well as replying to this post. Looks like they are a good organization to work with to help promote the concept of Open Textbooks.
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