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.
COT Adopter Community Grant Awards Announcement
It is with great pleasure that I announce the 8 winners of our Adopter Communities’ Small Grant program. Each community proposed an outstanding project that uses open textbooks or open educational resources to improve teaching and learning for their students. Disciplines ranged from the highly enrolled general education subjects of Chemistry, Physics, and Math to American Government and Developmental Reading & Composition. Professional and career disciplines were also represented with Business Communications, Advanced Water Mathematics, and pre-teacher Educational Psychology. Overall 27 faculty members are participating from 17 colleges and 4 universities with approximately 3200 students anticipated to be positively impacted during the grant period alone.
- 3-D Molecular Models in ChemWiki: Dr. Ron Rusay and colleagues, Diablo Valley Community College
- Educational Psychology: Dr. Brian Beitzel, State University of New York, Oneonta with other colleagues in Florida, Illinois, New York, and Manitoba, Canada.
- Introduction to American Government: Dr. Mirya Holman and colleague at Florida Atlantic University
- Business Communications: Professor Danielle Budzick and colleagues at Cuyahoga Community College, OH
- Physwiki Dynamic Textbook project: Professor Erik Christensen at South Florida Community College and colleague at Monroe Community College, NY
- Developmental Algebra: Dr. April Strom and colleagues at Scottsdale Community College, AZ
- Advanced Water Mathematics: Dr. Regina Blasberg & colleagues at Community College of the Canyons, CA
- Indigenous People’s Reader: Professor Jacqui Cain & colleague at Community College of the Redwoods on the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation.
For the purpose of this program, an adopter community had to contain at least two college or university instructors who have adopted or commit to adopting 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 timeframe. Collaboration between multiple colleges and inclusion of peer reviewers, staff, and students as community members was highly encouraged. In addition, all enhancements, new materials, and ancillaries produced by the community in the grant period (2011-2012) must be made available to other educators using a Creative Commons license that allows further modifications such as CC-BY.
A huge thanks goes to our panel of judges who read all 17 grant application and finalized their results with conference call on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Using a rubric to help ensure inter-rater reliability, the panel included a community college dean, a higher education program manager, and the technology director for a large OER project.
Finally, I want to commend all the adopter communities who applied for their thoughtful projects that used open textbooks and open educational resources to improve teaching and student learning at their colleges. In the end, we were limited by our overall budget and not the inspiring visions of all of the applicants.
Please check out our College Open Textbooks community site for more details on these amazing Adopter Communities and to watch their progress over the next year. Webinar with grantees scheduled for November 17 at 1:00 PM (Pacific).
Image:Some rights reserved (CC-BY-NC) by EpicFireworks
iTextbooks? Continuing the dream – a commentary by Dean Florez, President of 20 Million Minds Foundation
With the passing of Steve Jobs, I had time to reflect on the painful lug of my then newly purchased Apple Macintosh around the UCLA campus during my senior finals week back in 1986. I remember shouting over a blasting boom-box about the futuristic power of personal computing as my classmates skeptically eyed me typing on the glowing box while they frantically hit return on their typewriters amidst bottles of whiteout on desks piled high with expensive textbooks.
Dean Florez
Today, I write this blog from an iPad the size of a composition book while listening to Pandora and watching my email annoyingly pop up as past college friends Tweet the latest gossip or post updates on Facebook. I think few realize that Steve Jobs gave us the future back in the 1980′s. But there is one constant relic that somehow persists as a reminder that we have yet to reach Steve Jobs’ vision for the future. THE EXPENSIVE COLLEGE TEXTBOOK. That book still sits on the desks of over 20 million college students today, right beside their iPods, iPads, and the plethora of e-devices glowing with the social rants pouring out of Facebook and Twitter.
Today we have the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, but what we really need is the iTextbook—and it should cost students under $30. Steve Jobs created NEXT, a great company, but today we need somebody to complete his vision for education by pushing every college and university to make the final transition into what I call the “NextBook” era, removing the unnecessary weight on the wallets and backs of our college students.
I left the California Legislature to head up a new non-profit, the 20 Million Minds Foundation (20MM). Our goal? To completely disrupt a complacent and lucrative textbook publishing industry by asking the simple question: do we really need bounded, heavy, overpriced copy-write protected books in today’s ebook, ibook, and Nextbook environment?
Just days ago, 20MM and powerhouse educational software company Kno, released our answer to that important question by announcing a new digitally enhanced NextBook for college students based on open content. We have our eyes set on producing open source NextBooks for the top 25 undergraduate courses in the nation, starting with general statistics. Why? Consider that in our California Community Colleges, nearly 120,000 students take general statistics EVERY year with an average new book price of $150—that is an estimated cost of $10 to $15 million per year for just one course!
Our next step at 20MM is to empower our faculty. Beyond offering professors NextBooks, 20MM will focus on the reusing, redistributing, revising and remixing capabilities of e-textbook material, utilizing faculty’s unique talents and expertise. Who wouldn’t take quality, customized, and student-centric material enhanced by the instructor over a high-cost, standardized, static, and closed publication?
Clearly, we understand that as we move toward this type of customization, the major issues will be quality and built-in assessment. Our statistics Web 2.0 NextBook is better than statistics books out on the market given it is specifically designed for college students to improve their learning experience and results with built in assessment capacities. We are partnering with assessment companies like BenchPrep so that every open source NextBook in our library of 25 has assessment as its lifeblood.
According to the latest report by the social learning platform Xplana, within the next five years digital textbook sales will surpass 25% of sales for the higher education and career education markets. But even with the changing winds, enhanced academic freedom, creative assessment tools, and a price point under $30, our major challenge remains. Will faculty adopt these books for use in their classrooms? We may have the best free and open general statistics e-book on the market, but will faculty place it on the syllabus the first day of class?
Much like those skeptical past college friends in 1986 who stared at the glowing box during finals week, I am confident that our faculty can get past the incertitude and finish the next chapter of the revolution Steve Jobs helped usher in decades ago. They just need to say yes to the future and embrace it as their own.
—Dean Florez
About 20 Million Minds Foundation
20MM Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to greatly reducing textbook costs. Headed by past California Senate Majority Leader Dean Florez, the foundation is currently leveraging leading edge technologies to create more affordable, engaging, and effective educational materials for college students throughout the nation.
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
Saylor Foundation to Launch Multi-Million Dollar Open Textbook Challenge!
Writing about the rising costs of textbooks here would be a classic case of preaching to the choir. So I will not waste time rehashing what you all know and will instead jump right to what we hope will be a valuable contribution to the efforts of this site and the OER community to provide cost-free textbook alternatives to students: the Saylor Open Textbook Challenge.
The challenge aims to license open texts for over 200 courses currently residing on Saylor.org used in twelve of the most popular college majors enrolled in by U.S. students. Before we delve into some details of the Challenge, let me give you some background on our Foundation.
Our Mission:
The Saylor Foundation is a 501(c) (3) nonprofit organization working to drive the cost of higher education to zero. Working with over 150+ credentialed professors and peer-reviewers from higher-education institutions, we are compiling open-licensed course content styled after a traditional academic program.
In deciding which courses to offer, Saylor first devoted resources to develop courses that would fit under traditional college majors in popular, high-enrollment areas of study. We then engaged professor consultants to build course blueprints to fill out the majors. These courses are designed to route a student through the material he or she would need to know in order to earn credit from an accredited institution in the U.S.
The Saylor OER Approach:
We decided that we could best make a unique contribution to the OER movement by developing a structured content aggregation and curation process, by which our professor consultants seek, vet, frame, and—where appropriate—add to existing resources in order to yield complete courses, hosted on a central site and tied to user outcomes, assessments, and predefined learning taxonomies. Each course is also peer reviewed for further fine tuning.
Importantly, in addition to utilizing OER materials, we decided to include and link to copyrighted materials in our content aggregation process. Through our Permissions Initiative, many copyright holders are allowing us to host their materials on the site within the relevant course context. When permission to host is NOT granted (and when OERs do not exist), we work to paper over the gaps in each course and/or replace the linked resources by stimulating the development of original content and the Creative Commons re-licensing of complete and newly open texts.
Back to the Open Text Book Challenge:
To spur authors to openly license their work, the Saylor Foundation will offer a $20,000 award for submitted textbooks accepted for use in our course materials after a round of peer reviews. To be eligible for the award, the author(s) must agree to license the text under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY) license. We plan to formally launch the Challenge just after Labor Day so please visit our site at that time and keep your eyes out for more information. If you have questions or suggestions, please comment below – we would love to hear your thoughts!
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)
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