College Open Textbooks BLOG
Driving Awareness and Adoption
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.
Washington State Open Course Library hits 10,000 visitors in 11 Days
Tom Caswell, Program Manager for the Open Course Library, reported 10, 000 visitors to their site since its official launch of the first 42 courses on October 31, 2011. He sums up the project which will contain 81 open courses targeted at the highest-enrolled general education classes for lower division college students as thus:
1. High-Quality
“The Open Course Library is a collection of expertly developed educational materials designed by faculty and openly shared with the world. It includes textbooks, syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments for 81 high-enrollment college courses.”
2. Affordable
“42 courses have been completed so far, providing faculty with a high-quality, affordable option that will cost students no more than $30 for course materials.”
3. Adaptable
“Faculty (anywhere) can modify and build on some or all of the course materials. There are no strings attached. We only ask that faculty cite the Open Course Library in their course and fill out our short adoption form.”
Preview or download courses now.
Read the full blog posting here and press release available here.
Image Credit: Timothy Valentine & Leo Reynolds CC-BY-NC-SA
MyOpenMath.com, a free and open online homework system for mathematics, now available online!
In the last several years, we’ve seen the release of many excellent open textbooks, yet adoption still remains a challenge. From my perspective as a math instructor, I see two major barriers: discovery and ancillaries.
The first challenge for adoption of open textbooks is an instructor finding one. There are many instructors who are not even aware that open textbooks exist. Second, if an instructor is interested in open textbooks, even the reasonably well-culled listing at collegeopentextbooks.org can be daunting, and very few listed books resemble complete, ready-to-adopt textbooks. For a busy instructor, the prospect of having to remix resources from multiple sources is often more effort than they’re willing to put in.
To start addressing the second part of the discovery challenge, I built OpenTextBookStore.com. This site lists a subset of open textbooks I felt are really ready-to-adopt without requiring remixing or supplementing, and that are available in printed form. I’ve started with math books, but I hope to expand the listing with recommendations from subject matter experts in other fields. The site recreates the experience of browsing a publisher’s website; each listing shows a summary of the book, license information, the available formats, a table of contents, and a list of any available ancillaries.
David Lippman
Instructors have become accustomed to publishers providing extensive ancillary materials for textbooks, providing the second challenge for adoption of open textbooks. Many excellent efforts are contributing to addressing the ancillary challenge, including open courseware efforts like the Washington Open Course Library (which I was part of). In mathematics, online homework has become commonplace, and for a majority of faculty is a key part of their textbook adoption decision.
To help address this, I’m happy to announce MyOpenMath.com, a free and open online homework system for mathematics. It is built on open-source software I’ve been developing for six years, and that has been used by tens of thousands of students. It provides randomized, algorithmically generated homework with automated grading of numerical and algebraic answers, similar to WebAssign and other publisher products. It also provides a course management system with gradebook, file posting, discussion forums, etc. (To their credit, WebAssign has produced online homework for several open textbooks, but this comes with a cost to students and is not open.) MyOpenMath has homework aligned with open textbooks in pre-algebra, beginning and intermediate algebra, pre-calculus, and trigonometry. The courses can easily be copied and modified by an instructor and used with students as graded homework. Many courses include video lessons, classroom activities, or other supplements as well. These courses are also available to students for self-study, review purposes, or as ungraded practice. These courses were contributed by faculty in Washington and Arizona; please see our “About us” page for credits.
Increased adoptions of open textbooks will only come by making it easy for faculty to find open textbooks, having open textbooks that can easily replace traditional textbooks, and providing ancillaries that instructors rely on. I hope OpenTextBookStore.com and MyOpenMath.com can contribute to that effort.
–David Lippman
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
Connexions Conference 2011 (Part 2)
Part 2
The first panel discussed Connexions in Higher Education. Connexions co-founder, Dr. Sidney Burrus, gave a brief history of Connexions, describing how it started in the Electrical Engineering Department of Rice University 1999 with a text written by Dr. Richard Baraniuk. Later, Collaborative Statistics, of which I am a co-author, became a Proof of Concept book. Dr. Andrew Barron explained his current project of including lots of cross references in modules for searching for techniques in the Chemistry discipline. Tom Caswell from the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges described its open course library with a project to design and share 81 (summer 2010 – fall 2012) high enrollment gatekeeper courses (face-to-face, hybrid and online). The goals of that project are to improve course completion rates, lower textbook costs for students (< $30 per text), provide new resources for faculty to use in their courses and for the WA college system to fully engage the global OER discussion. The 81 courses will be included in Connexions. Jim Berry from NCPEA discussed his project, peer reviewed journals for K-12 principals. This is a free market of education global, not locally. He discussed the peer review so that manuscripts published are high quality. An organization goal is “educational administrative professional knowledge that is captured by the profession and
made accessible via the internet .” The journals are housed on Connexions. More information is available at: http://www.ncpeapublications.org/
Perhaps most important to Connexions end users will be this technical update. EPUB (eReaders) has Connexions content on it. This eReader is used for most mobile devices (except for Kindles). Connexions content is on iTunesU (18 collections), is available with an Android App, has Mobile downloads, and has new math support that is better looking for users. I am excited that Connexions pages now load faster due to a technical change to have better load balancing.
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.
How to Gain Massive Adoption of Open Educational Resources
People love “how to” articles. They simplify things, provide a sense of direction, and decrease ambiguity. Gaining mass adoption of open educational resources, in reality, is not terribly simple, clear, or unambiguous. When we talk to the education community, we have heard that it is a very complex and challenging problem that often puts roadblocks in their way. This motivated us to create NIXTY, our educational technology that empowers education on all levels. This thinking drove us to define what open educational resources should be:
Guest Blogger, NIXTY CEO Glen Moriarity, Psy.D
- Readily Accessible & Customizable – people need to be able to access the materials and tailor them to their local contexts. An educator should be able to quickly grab entire courses, learning modules, videos, and docs from around the Web and remix them to meet his or her students’ needs. Materials should also be accessible to everyone, so Section 508 Compliance should be a priority.
- Research Supported – Education is finally getting empirically supported religion. It has happened in a variety of other fields (medicine, psychology, etc). It is no longer enough to vaguely state learning outcomes and hope that students meet them. That time has passed and some may disagree with it, but it is now a reality and no amount of disagreeing is going to change things. The trend is increasingly towards showing how educational resources result in real learning . The good news is that this is not terribly challenging to accomplish. Once we have research support, coupled with #1 (readily accessible and customizable courses), then it will be very hard to argue with the mass adoption of OER. For example, let’s compare two economics courses:
Economics Course A – Free & Open materials; Research support indicating that students taking this course meet learning outcomes at a higher rate, finish the course several weeks earlier, and have increased semester to semester persistence.
Economics Course B – Expensive Textbook & Closed Materials (cannot be remixed or updated and could cost students up to $1000 per year for all the courses); No research support.
Which course would you choose?
Most of us would choose Course A, because (1) it doesn’t cost the students any money for course materials; (2) it can be readily remixed and updated; and (3) it has research support. In a few years, we will have a catalog of these types of courses/textbooks via the Gates Foundation NGLC (nextgenlearning.com). Researchers are doing great work in this space and making it easier for us to apply this knowledge with less technical know-how.
This research was a catalyst in helping us focus our efforts at NIXTY (http://nixty.com). Our mission is to create and deliver an education technology that seamlessly structures eLearning content, providing students, educators, and institutions with a central place to take, create, and sell online courses.
This means helping to deliver content that is readily accessible and customizable as well as having the research to support the learning outcomes. We started by building 200+ open courses out on NIXTY from MIT and others. We then made these courses “WikiCourses”, which means that anyone can add content (html/text, videos, documents etc.) to the lessons within the courses and customize them. Our goal here is to build scaffolding around the content. The next step is to improve the ability to add test questions in WikiCourses and provide a means of up-voting and down-voting content.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s Dr. Ryan Baker (http://users.wpi.edu/~rsbaker/), an expert in Human-Computer Interaction, has partnered with us to design and implement a feature-rich set of tools to help educators receive granular feedback on student performance. These new 
features (scaffolding, hints, embedded testing, self-explanation prompts) are the key to realizing real learning. The trick is to make sure that we don’t over design it. It is critical that we keep it very simple and intuitive to use, so educators readily see the value in and want to utilize the functionality.
We feel that readily accessible and customizable OER coupled with research support will help gain the mass adoption of OER. For more information on NIXTY and our efforts in open education, visit our website or this tutorial on YouTube.
We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below or via email: glen@nixty.com
How Open Textbooks are the Path to Textbook Affordability: A conversation with Nicole Allen, Student PIRGs
Nicole Allen of the Student PIRGs shared an update on the open textbooks initiative such as the Higher Education Opportunity Act with the OER community. She pointed out that there has been tremendous progress made and accessibility to open education resources are growing.
“We just released a survey, How Open Textbooks are the Path to Textbook Affordability where we found that open textbooks can reduce costs by 80%, which would reduce average student spending from $900 to $184 per year,” said Nicole Allen. “Although open textbooks aren’t yet available for every course, the savings can still have a significant impact for students. For example, Professor D. Steven White at U-Mass Dartmouth saved his students $11,000 by using open textbook and other open resources in two of his Marketing courses,” continued Ms. Allen.
Nicole Allen
New federal law: On July 1st, a provision from the Higher Education Opportunity Act took effect requiring publishers to disclose textbook prices, revision histories and alternate formats when marketing textbooks to faculty. Our studies have shown that publishers often withhold prices in sales conversations, so the new law ensures this information is readily available to consider on students’ behalf.
Further reading:
Analysis of HEOA Textbook Affordability Provisions – The Student PIRGs
Guidance for colleges and publishers – U.S. Department of Education
Cost of textbooks must be disclosed - Pittsburgh Post Gazette (Jul 22)
Are publishers following the law? Click here to report your experience to Student PIRGs.
Open textbooks on the rise: With more than 1,300 adoptions this fall alone, open textbooks — which are offered under a license allowing free online access and low-cost print options – are rapidly gaining momentum. Options are available for several new courses, including Sociology, College Algebra and College Success. .
Lists of open textbooks:
Open Textbook Catalog, our list of the most widely used open textbooks.
Orange Grove Texts, a project of the Univ. Press of Florida and Florida’s digital repository.
College Open Textbooks, a list of open texts that have been reviewed by experts.
Are you using an open textbook? Click here to let the StudentPIRGs know!
For more information, you can contact Nicole at nicole@studentpirgs.org or visit the site, www.studentpirgs.org/textbooks
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