so Hi. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you
very much for attending this open education week event at
Virginia Tech libraries. My name is Anita Walz.
We have seven Panelists here from across the university faculty
and students, and we're excited to hear from them
about their involvement in open education. Yeah, and
, uh, teaching and learning. So I've asked
each person to give two minute introduction about themselves,
and we'll go from there. So let's start with
Mary. Yeah, My name is Mary Lipscomb,
and I'm from the biology department. I'm a senior
instructor. This is my 23rd year of instructing mostly
freshman biology courses, and I am just started using
an open stacks textbook for my non majors biology course
in the fall semester. I I had heard about
these books. I got some need to kind of
put a bug in one of our associate department heads
here, and we talked about the books off and
on during our, uh, instructors meetings. And
, um, since I had not taught this course
for three years, I said, Okay, here's
the opportunity. Since I'm gonna be revamping my course
anyway and updating it to switch to this textbook and
I've been very pleased with how it's worked out so
far. I guess I can stop there and share
more about it as we go. And my name
is Peter Potter. I'm director of publishing strategy here
at Virginia Tech and the libraries. Um, I
came to the libraries about a year ago from University
Press Publishing. Um spent 30 years in university press
publishing and worked on a number of textbooks over the
years. And I've followed the development of open textbooks
in recent years and try to think about them in
terms of how I see them fitting into the larger
environment of higher ed and higher ed publishing. Um
, here in the library's been working with Anita on
developing the the textbook open textbook publishing program, trying
to figure out how best to develop our capacity to
be able to publish more of them, um,
in direct relationship with the faculty and the faculty needs
. Um, and I'm also thinking about how I
as I think about it, um, it seems
to me that to be successful in the long run
, open open educational resources, there needs to be
a kind of a national conversation about these and the
building of an infrastructure to support open educational resources.
And so if Virginia Tech can be a part of
that larger national conversation and infrastructure, I would like
to see that happen. So I have thoughts as
well, on where I see the state of open
textbooks and open educational resources and where what the challenges
are and where I see the possibilities for the future
. And I can talk to those speak to those
when the time comes. So my name is miraculous
. I am a first year engineering education graduate student
and with an undergrad and a master's in engineering.
I am a victim of very expensive textbooks. Um
, that being said I when I joined Virginia Tech
last fall, I got heavily involved with the open
movement. Um, I started through open education because
of my own experience, but started slowly moving also
to the open access. Now that I'm an active
researcher, I'm Jane Robertson Avia. I'm a faculty
here in the statistics department, and I was introduced
to open educational resources about two years ago, Um
, through a colleague at Wesleyan and the um,
psychology department there, who uses the Online Learning Initiative
through Carnegie Mellon. Um, and I use it
like Mary primarily in the introductory non majors. Uh
, course I teach a big staff for social sciences
courses. Kind of. They're one and done,
um, stat course for most of them. So
, um, it's been very well received by the
students. Um, I like the materials that I
use. Uh, they're very, very well developed
and, um, accessible for that level of student
and foreign, especially in non majors. Population.
Um, so I do use also pieces of some
of the ol I resources with a few of my
major's courses, but primarily again with the non majors
students. Good afternoon. I'm Steve, script pick
. I am professor of practice in the Department of
Management and the College of Business. This is my
12th year at VT. Following a 25 year career
in industry. So I'm kind of a nontraditional faculty
member. I got involved with open education when I
saw the price of materials for my course just being
astronomically too high. And I am actually the lead
author officially of the book that gets used in the
course. Now I actually rewrote a a book.
I primarily I wasn't the only one involved, but
I I took a book that existed that was written
by a professor at Lehigh, and we updated it
, put into graphics, shorten the chapters, made
it more accustomed to the course. So, uh
, the reason that I am considered the lead author
is because the original author sold her rights to the
book, and, um, so she no longer
wants her name on the on the book. So
I get to be the lead author as a result
of rewriting primarily her work. So, uh,
I can't mention her name. Okay, What must
I'm Katie Cortez. I'm an instructor in the master
department, and I'm involved because of Steve, actually
, because we teach the same class and he was
he's been working on that book for, or Had
been working on the book for about a year,
trying to get it ready for fall. And I
happened to walk by the door, and he said
, I need someone to put it together and I
said, I can do that. And, uh
, then I had the whole summer to enjoy that
. I'm John Davina. I'm a junior finance and
accounting student here at Virginia Tech. So I've been
here for three years. Um, I actually was
involved with the movement, thanks to Steve over here
. I can attest to the cost of the textbooks
because of the cost of textbooks. And he approached
me about the opportunity to actually review a textbook that
he was creating and I thought would be an awesome
opportunity. And I was able to provide a little
bit input into the different, um, graphics and
whatnot that would go into the book. So I
had that opportunity. And thanks to Steve, I'm
part of the program. So I've asked my IRA
to give us a little bit of background regarding creative
Commons licenses and open educational resources. What are they
? Uh, and I should mention that Mira is
the recipient of an open Con Conference scholarship award from
this past fall. We sent her to Washington,
D. C. And, um, she came
back with a lot more information than yeah, Yes
. Um, So basically, um, as everybody
in the table here is attested, open educational resources
does begin with the textbook. It begins with textbooks
that are either very low cost or just free for
students. That being said, it does not stop
there. It really goes on into power points that
you may be able to create in class and put
a license on them. It goes to open courses
such as the M I T Open courseware system.
It does not go to things such as coursera and
X, because those systems charge in order for you
to receive acknowledgement that you've taken the course, and
if you choose as an instructor to use those materials
for their own course, you would be in copyright
violation. So as educators, we can move into
the open education direction without having to create a full
text book, sometimes just as easy as picking a
textbook and using it in class or copyrighting your own
. Putting a creative Commons license. Sorry on your
own power points. That being said, what is
Creative Commons? So creative Commons is a type of
license that you can put into your educational resources,
whatever they may be, and they focus on giving
you different levels of permissions with what are the five
ours so it's retained or be able to keep it
redistribute being able to share it remix, which is
a combination of more than one educational resource revised,
which is to change it or to tweak it.
And I forgot the last one, but essentially reuse
exactly so being able to use it for your own
course or for somebody else to take it and use
it for another course. So, depending on which
level of the five hours you feel comfortable with,
you are able to just pick a Creative Commons license
and stack it into your item and then be able
to share it with whoever may need it. Okay
, so how are open educational resources? And this
is for everybody. How are they different from low
cost resources or textbook rentals or free book that you
might find online? How are they different? So
I'll attempt that the opportunity for us was to customize
the book exactly the way we wanted it for the
class. So instead of finding something that sort of
fit or something that I actually prior to doing this
, expect a used textbook for the course intentionally.
That was one edition out of date. The idea
was that students would be able to find it relatively
cheaply, and that way I could save the money
that way without going through all the effort. Unfortunately
, when that book got priced at the bookstore,
it got priced over$200 even though it was online
for a small fraction of that. And so I
realized that since I had no control over the pricing
, when I use somebody else's resource, I could
work on the book. I didn't think it was
going to take as much updating or as many hours
as as it took. But once we got it
done, we just put each chapter into a pdf
file, put it out on the canvas site,
the students get it for free, and it's now
been downloaded over 10,000 times at VT and other universities
. So we're saving people money, so it meets
the objective of at least trying to help out with
costs. It targets the course exactly the way we
want it. We can. We can use examples
that we find to be most pertinent to what our
students are interested in, so we're coming up on
a small second. I mean, it's the second
edition with a minor amount of revisions, but I
was able to actually interview a local company and put
in a little insert about their experience in a particular
area. The textbook. And I'm also working with
a company that hires a lot of Hokies to serve
as an example in the book instead of the example
that I inherited in the first edition so we can
really make the book land right on top of what
we want to talk about in the class. And
it was a lot of work. I'm not going
to sugar coat. That was not something that I
anticipated spending as many hours on it as I did
. But I think the result is exactly what we
were looking for. A free resource that delivers exactly
what we want to talk about in the class.
And it is easy to keep current, uh,
with with just a handful of Emmanuel updates to add
to that, I would say for me especially like
I would never use every single piece of any textbook
, whether my students paid for it or or it
was free. So depending on the Creative Commons licensing
, I can pick and choose what I want to
put together. Um, I can supplement with technology
with applications. Um, those sorts of things in
my field and statistics, people use different language to
mean the same thing. So I can change out
languages. I want to to streamline it for,
you know, the way that I'm used to talking
about certain methodologies and things like that. So I
think the difference is you can really, really make
it your own. No matter where you're starting from
, as long as the Creative Commons licensing allows,
you can really make it. You're gonna make it
what you need it to be for your particular set
of students, I guess. To add on to
all of that you mentioned rentals as well. Uh
, the big problem with rentals is that you have
to return it. You cannot keep it. So
you're telling students Yes, this course is important.
For example, general studies in the first year this
course is important because we will not let you take
any other course after this unless you have this.
But you're probably not going to use that book by
the time you're done. So just rented up for
the semester. So it's this whole mixed message and
students should be able to keep access to the knowledge
that we're teaching them, and we're telling them that
is so important for them. So how our course
materials? This is a question for the faculty on
the panel. How our course materials selected in your
department or other departments. What kinds of patterns do
you see in how those decisions are made? Are
they your decision? Are they your department's decision?
Um, well, in my department, the instructors
are teaching a course, select whatever materials they want
to use. And if there's more than one instructor
or faculty members teaching the same course, then it's
a group decision about what's being going to be used
in the course. Does anyone have a different experience
than that? Well, in our department, we
have what we call coordinated courses because we have so
many sections of the same course being taught by different
people. And textbook adoptions, in that case are
handled primarily by a person who is designated as the
coordinator for the course. Um, so sometimes get
input from the other instructors. Sometimes it's just presented
to the other instructors. This is what you're going
to use complicated. Is there any question to follow
up on? That is their encouragement inside of departments
here to use open textbooks? No. So I
don't know that I would say there's direct encouragement,
but we have a department head has been here.
This is second year now. And he taught a
course for us because we didn't have somebody to teach
in the first year that he was here. And
he actually used an open educational resource in that particular
course. So, um, I think just him
modeling that was, you know, sort of indirect
support. But there's not been true discussion, I
would say in our department, and but is there
? Is there a move towards more? Do you
see more and more faculty being open to using them
or not? And if so, why? I
don't know that I could say I see that movement
necessarily. I don't know the answer for why they're
not moving that way. I don't see the movement
in that direction either. In fact, I would
tell you that I got some fairly pointed discouragement from
faculty members who had their names on books that were
being expect for their courses, and they were getting
royalty off the sales, and one faculty member looked
me dead in the eye and said, Why would
you do this for free? You know, I
mean, I got kind of thought the unspoken part
of the section or the sentence was You're making us
all look bad, But But it wasn't. I
mean, I don't know if I would have done
it for free if I knew I was going to
put the kind of time into it that I did
. But at the end of the day, I
felt like it was making a difference, so it
was worth it. But I don't feel any direction
or any encouragement anywhere in the college of business for
moving in this direction. Mm. Okay, because
I sort of think that's what's got to happen.
For open textbooks, open that just open textbooks but
open educational materials of any sort for them to become
widely more widely used. Right now, the the
structure of higher ed is isn't really organized in a
way that encourages the use of open materials. So
we still have, um, you know, publishers
, bookstores, all having their relationship with universities,
and that the system is set up to support regularly
published textbooks, and it's the challenges is how to
get past that. I think it takes support from
the top. Um, and I can tell you
that when the book was launched, we ended up
with an article in CT. The students were interested
. I didn't even get a phone call from anyone
in the in the university to say we're curious about
this. I got a phone call from There are
no times, uh, but I didn't get any
interest at all expressed in, you know, and
I'm not sure what other people's experiences are, but
I wasn't doing it for recognition. But if there
if we want momentum around an effort like this,
I think we need to support the efforts that are
being made and publicize them, make other people aware
of it. And I don't see that particularly happening
. The reaction that I got in terms of working
on it was, And I think if anybody noticed
that there's no tenured or tenure track faculty sitting at
this table, uh, they don't get credit for
doing this, Um, and so I would always
get the question Oh, Oh, that's nice,
but it wouldn't count for me, so I don't
have time to do that. So, yeah,
If the if the advancement system isn't going to reward
or even acknowledge that that's work, then the work
is not going to get done. That's true.
But to be fair, they don't reward, um
, paid textbooks, either. Right? Well,
there's a line for that on the there is no
sure. And there's checks for that. Well,
that would be the incentive would be more than other
kinds of the annual activity report. I had to
find a place to put what I spent my whole
summer doing. Whereas if I If I were the
lead author or if it were, you know,
a real textbook with a publisher and all of that
stuff, there's places for that. Mm. So
that leads me to a question. Yeah. What
kind of support? What kind of, uh,
both support for doing the work and higher level support
. Would you or colleagues, perhaps those on the
tenure track find to be satisfactory as an incentive?
I know that, Mary. You're department chair.
Associate Department Chair Richard Walker has adopted the open stacks
biology book for majors as an option in class.
Um, he's obviously post tenure, uh, or
he's 10 years already. Are there things that would
help? It sounds like acknowledgement is a big one
. We're just taking into consideration at the end of
the year. Review. If we're talking about using
materials, that's different than talking about developing materials.
Um, and if we want more people to develop
materials, I think we have to have more support
for the work that's involved. Katie probably should not
have had to do all the way out work,
right? So I'm glad that she did. We
wouldn't have made it to the with the book at
the start of the semester on time if she hadn't
. But we should have resources in house that could
take that work and do all the fact checking.
Make sure all the footnotes are still accurate. And
all the all of the things that went into making
that book ready. Uh, well, it would
have been nice to have some central support for that
and for other people to take on that kind of
effort. That resource needs to be in place because
you can't just depend on a friend every time you
want something done. I think outside of the development
, peace those who just want to use these resources
. I think there needs to be more education about
what's out there and the quality. I mean,
this is what I use from Carnegie Mellon is probably
better than any written text book that I've used in
the past, So I mean, just educating people
about what's available and how good some of it really
is. Um, I think it's key, and
I know Anita you've been really active on that front
, but I think it's gonna take more than you
know, just you. So I think we need
. We need resources around educating people. Converting a
course to using open resource materials to is not creating
your own, but adopting something that's already out there
like one of these textbooks. If you've been using
a published textbook for years and years and you had
their ancillary that you've incorporated into your course, you
know converting all that is a big deterrent because it
takes a lot of time and effort on your part
to search out so some kind of support system as
far as release time or having assistance to help you
find all the components to fit into your course would
would be also be incentive. So this question is
for students and John and Mira. What do you
see as the benefits to students besides no cost,
um, of open textbooks or open educational resources?
And then how does your participation? You're growing awareness
of this of this movement. How does that influence
your views on education and and teaching? I'm going
to start with this one, Um, besides the
no cost. I think there's a secondary benefit to
that, and it's that a lot of students,
instead of just for going purchasing the textbook and opting
to share a textbook, they're able to have the
resource no matter what. There's nothing standing between them
and having the resource. And that's powerful, because
when they go into the classroom, they've got all
the resources that everyone else has, and they're able
to study for the test like everyone else's, regardless
of whether they can afford a textbook or not.
And in my mind, the movement as a whole
has really changed in my mind, the focus of
education back to the student. It's easy for students
to be consumed with the eye, that idea that
maybe it's a it's a money machine and that where
is my money going to? And so this really
changes the focus. It says to students. You
know, we want to educate you and we're giving
you the materials because there's so much information out there
on the Internet, why can't we just find it
and use it? And so in this life,
we have to pay for the things that we expect
to benefit from. But since it's already out there
, it's great that people are going out and finding
these resources for us and letting us use them.
And so it really brings a lot more optimism into
the hole educating process when students are able to acquire
these things without shelling out 304$100 for textbooks.
Yeah, to build on that, I think for
millennials. So we're going to be on the Internet
whether we want to or not. Even if we
try to detox from social media and all those things
. And when you think about when the Internet began
more popularly in the nineties, what was one of
the first things Napster file sharing? It's all about
sharing, and it's really going to come down to
that. Whether we want to or not. Textbooks
that are copyrighted are already available on the Internet.
If you look deep enough that being said to be
able to share things and to adapt them to the
context that you're teaching, it really matters. So
I was actually just having a conversation here with Jane
before this started about how, in my statistics class
, we're using our and the fact that our is
open source. That means that resources multiply. And
if you ever have a question about are you only
have to write, how do you blank in our
on Google and the answer will actually pop up.
So the fact that these resources are open just opens
up a conversation not just in your own context,
but in all these other different context. It opens
up the amount of support you get as a student
, and it really just removes the elitism that is
around education and educational content. So what about the
argument that you get what you pay for? That
is a true argument, but we have to stop
thinking that just because something is open means that there
is no quality. The same argument is being made
in the open access movement. It's kind of like
, Oh, you just published an open because,
you know, do peer review. Well, that's
not necessarily true. So it really depends on what
are the motives of the person behind the open content
that you're trying to share? Yeah. I mean
, from a from the long time of publishing,
I see the investment that publishers put into textbooks.
That includes emphasis on helping people to write, to
learn how to how to write the book. Well
, the testing of of Having chapters, peer reviewed
having test students work with the textbook. And so
a big textbook from a big publisher has gone through
a lot of review. And the average person assigning
a looking for an open textbook might not know how
to distinguish what's so how would you How would you
respond to that? Only a student. I've not
been on the education side for open content, so
I cannot say, How would a professor filter?
But I would guess that does fall on the responsibility
of the professor to filter. What do the students
have access to as a sanctioned content of the course
? Yeah, so What do you hope to if
you could design the future? But would it look
like what kind of values, if incentives were not
quite so powerful? What kinds of values would you
bring to education that you think would be fruitful for
students and for both, both for students and faculty
? That's a little bit loaded, but just curious
. I think they kind of speak about something.
I heard both of these students say that open educational
resources help is a mechanism for equity, right?
And that's huge. I mean, I think that's
that's what I'd like to see. I'd like to
see this movement continue forward. To be able to
provide equitable access and resources for our students. I
would like to see us build. Um, you
know the point that the publishers have the resources to
be able to invest, that we need to change
the system so that the investment goes into the creation
of these textbooks that can then take advantage of the
Web technology to make them available and as adaptable and
reusable as possible. I think we've only begun to
really test what the capabilities of the technology, what
the technology allows us to do. And, um
, just before this session, I was reading online
as a sign of sort of where we are in
the publishing world. So the biggest publisher, textbook
publisher in the world, is Pearson Education. Last
year they released just a few weeks ago. There
, uh, earnings for 2016. They lost$3.2
billion last year. That's because the textbook market is
drying up and they are moving into online education.
But they're trying to figure out what to do with
textbooks. There's a huge hole there, and now
is the time to step in and actually find the
alternative solution because they're going to figure it out eventually
, and they're going to find a way to make
money off of it. And if there is a
way to short circuit that now is the time to
do it. So there was an article posted on
Monday, and I'm wondering, I'm wondering how you
would respond to an argument in this article that talked
about really only computer mediated learning being the future.
Um, how do you see that fit or not
fit with teaching in the future? With the way
students learn with the way you, as educators,
have been successful in having students actually exhibit and demonstrate
learning in your courses. Is that is that a
wave of the future? Is it part of the
future? How does that fit with them? Tax
materials. There's a lot in that question. I'm
not really sure I'm gonna answer it exactly the way
you asked it. But one thing I observe is
that students are decreasing. Li likely to read,
Um, and so I I don't know how long
this book is going to have legs, because student
, even even though we've shortened chapters, even though
we made the tone more conversational, Um, and
it's It's a much easier to read than a typical
40 page chapter of a textbook, and I think
it gets the essence of the topic across just as
well. But even then, students are looking for
shortcuts. You know, read the the high recap
at the end, go back and read just on
those words or whatever. So one of the things
we're doing increasingly is trying to go to video based
materials. They will watch something that takes just as
long to read, and it doesn't necessarily make sense
from a time conservation standpoint, but they're more likely
to watch something than they are to read something.
So we use some live cases in our course that
allow students to do most of the preparation by watching
video of interviews with various people in the company.
And one of the positives about doing that is that
those materials can be kept up to date much more
easily. You can interview somebody, edit the video
, have it on a website in hours a couple
of days. Really, if you if you put
your mind to it and you know to get a
chapter changed and reviewed, and then it's got to
wait for the next edition to come out. If
it's a published Publishers Print Edition, Uh, so
it's much easier to keep things up to date.
It's much more student friendly in the in the way
they seem to like to learn. So I mean
, I don't know if I'm answering your question,
but I would see a decreasing emphasis on written materials
and an increasing emphasis on things that students can watch
that are a little bit more entertainment but still get
the value and the concepts across. Yeah, I
think there's certainly some truth to that, right?
I mean, just the increasing number of students were
going to be moving more courses online, even here
at Virginia Tech. Right. Um and so absolutely
to echo what Steve said. It has to be
more than just reading. And I think even we're
gonna get pretty soon, we're going to get to
even more than just videos. I think it needs
to be applications where they can actually interact and apply
. You know what they're learning, and, um
, it's it's going to have to be more entertainment
for sure. Um, but ensuring that you know
their understanding, the concepts of being able to apply
, um, methods and concepts. Uh, you
know, through these online, um, open educational
resources. So my inner curmudgeon says, Oh,
I don't like it. Um, yeah, my
my inner curmudgeon says, Is it scholarly? Is
it Is it rigorous? Um, how do you
respond to that? Um, just give me be
a little bit of a devil's advocate here. Um
, those of you with higher degrees, those of
you who are students. Um, do do you
see that as okay? These are effective ways of
learning or or is there something that that kind of
gives you Pause? Um, and I'm not trying
to weigh the quest to load the question. Um
, I think that the richness of the media,
um, involved in So if it's going to be
online class and it does involve a lot of reading
, I think that does affect how much retention students
are gonna have. I think the richness of the
media and how much involvement is involved in the course
of themselves online is going to play a big part
on whether it develops a lot. But from my
experience is it's gonna come down to Are we going
to be able to still communicate this information? And
when a student doesn't understand something, is there going
to be a way for them to have it re
explain? That's why, um, peer to peer
is so effective, At least in my experiences and
from the people that I've known in my studies is
that when you hear it from someone who's on the
same level of you level as you, it makes
a lot more sense because they have the same information
as you and they're having the same struggles, so
I don't see that being presented a lot of information
without a lot of engagement is going to be able
to have that same interaction, the same ability to
work around where someone's not understanding something and travel back
and help them fill in those gaps at the end
when they're when they're expected to have that information and
take tests of the sort. So I think it's
gonna play a big part, whether there's a way
for students to come back and ask questions and whether
those questions are gonna be received in a way that
allows, um, whatever is teaching or whether there
is an instructor to understand why then understanding and then
come back and help fill in the gaps. So
I think richness of media and still an ability to
, um, circle back with the students questions is
going to be very important. I would even answer
that differently. I think that the fact that we
make the assumption that because it's not written in a
book it's not as rigorous holds a bit of cognitive
injustice to it just because people learn differently or because
millennials are being raised to just react to things differently
in their environment does not mean that it's not still
learning. So with regards to the quality of it
, it really just comes down to What are the
results in the assessment? Mhm. Thank you.
Thank you very much. What kind of disciplinary differences
do you see with regard to this question you're referring
to? Just like how students are required to follow
the course materials? I guess I'm referring to Yeah
, I'm referring to some of the more traditional humanity's
, um, Peter's laughing to the more humanity's,
um, centric areas of scholarship that maybe are very
print focused that relate to how publication previously happened,
how our record of scholarship was previously captured. And
uh huh, I'd certainly say on the on the
humanities and more of the qualitative social science or the
humanistic social sciences. Um, there is still a
real commitment to the long form argument that you need
to be able to write and read a long essay
or book. You need to be able to write
a dissertation, and you need to be able to
be able to express maintain an argument over a long
period, and I still I mean certainly in literature
. Obviously, you're going to read books that are
very long so that I mean, the one thing
I do worry about with all of this is that
we if we don't maintain the ability to read long
passages, long text, we end up with health
care bills that nobody can read. We end up
with, um, real policy problems in the country
, and so there has to be a balance there
. We have to figure out how to be able
to maintain. And that's why I think humanities my
little advertisement for the humanities. But why? I
think there will always be a demand for humanity's trained
students because the world needs people who can interpret,
can explain can communicate the way that they do in
the humanities. So I would like to open this
up to questions from yourselves as well as from our
audience. When somebody from the audience asks questions,
will you please just repeat it so that everyone could
hear it? So what? Questions have come up
or what thoughts do you have either from the panel
or from the audience is the results of this discussion
. Okay. Oh, come on. So I
guess I'll just ask a question to the audience.
Um, who here has been using or adopting or
developing in some way open educational resources? We've got
a couple three or four or so, Okay,
you know, or does everybody here? Is everybody
a believer in open textbooks, open materials? Or
is there anybody who's a skeptic? Any skeptics,
skeptical faces in the back? They wouldn't save.
So even though nobody asked about downsides besides the number
of hours invested, there are a couple that I
don't I don't want to just paint this. This
was perfect, elegant, flawless solution. When you
get paid materials, there are a lot of support
resources that come along with that power point. Pax
quizzes, uh, different access code Students can buy
for learning tools that support the chapters. We don't
have that. I haven't missed it, but I
don't know whether the students have missed it. I
don't I don't use power points myself in class.
So not having power points to explain the chapter for
me is not a problem whatsoever. But some of
my fellow instructors, who prefer to use power points
had to develop some, so there is a absence
of some of the supporting materials that many of us
have come to take for granted. Uh, when
you kind of go off in your own direction on
on your own book, if you want it done
, you gotta do it yourself. And since I
don't use them, I wasn't willing to invest that
kind of additional time. So it was. I
think it met the need the way we did it
. But there were some things that I think others
missed and I'll agree with you. That's certainly a
downside for some people. It it isn't for me
either. But, um, but on the flip
side of that, I'll go back to you know
what you said about? It's so easy to quick
to update this and to bring in new technology and
to, you know, to add in more current
supplemental information in this format. I think so.
One of the students caught an error in the chapter
that she pointed out to me on after I put
a question on the quiz and that's something you said
here and so we but we were able to make
that edit and have a new a new PdF up
on the Web sites within a matter of a day
, so it didn't necessarily make it through to the
outside people who who bought the who have downloaded the
materials. But for our purposes within our class,
there's a one day fix and it will be in
the next iteration of what's available outside as well.
I did add to that. I think that part
of what I said at the beginning about the need
to develop the infrastructure around open educational resources. That
part of that is the providing the alternative to the
ancillary materials. The textbook publishers provide that over time
I hope we'll see more and more that open textbooks
are accompanied by websites where people teachers can put up
there their material that they used in the class learning
resources that they developed to help teach. And so
you end up with a crowdsourced kind of of development
of materials that is developed from the ground up,
and that can really help in terms of teaching.
And it gives teachers also options for what they can
use. They can, and then they can adapt
them. Um, so it seems to me in
the long run that's That's one of the real advantages
, and it's one of the one of the areas
where I don't think we fully gotten to the point
yet where we've exploited the what the technology allows and
that that's sort of what has to come. Once
I adopted an open stacks textbook for my class,
I started receiving emails from some other organizations that provide
some of these ancillary materials for students to four professors
or for students to use as a, uh,
to help them learn. But there was a small
fee, of course, for the students to use
it, and that kind of defeated. One of
my purposes of going with open stacks is that students
can either buy a$30 book or they can use
it online for free. Or they can download free
PDFs. And so I decided to create all my
own materials for the course, and you just put
it on canvas for him. You know, a
resource videos off of YouTube, and there's all these
series out there for biology. You know, there's
Khan Academy and there's a crash course and all kinds
of stuff, you know, and I met them
to see if there up to delivering the material that
I want the students to have access to. All
right, madam quizzes and our freshman biology cohort has
developed all kinds of classwork activities that I adapt to
the non majors environment for them to get some practice
. So delivering it in the material in several different
ways for all the different groups of learners out there
in my class, you know, they could read
, they can watch videos. They can actively do
problem sets or solve concept maps and things like that
to help them master the concepts, but it definitely
time consuming to put all that together. I'm curious
about the invention and open stacks. You can also
purchase a printed copy. And when we had one
of the open stacks representatives here, one of the
things she said was that the what had surprised them
when they got the operation up and going was how
much of a demand there still was for the printed
text book. So I've been in publishing long enough
to have seen now probably 2025 years of people saying
Prince, going away, we're only going to be
online, and it's just gonna be the next generation
, the generation that grew up with without the without
books in their home. But every time I talk
to students, even in engineering, they say they
want to print a textbook. It's hard for them
to read the text book online. Is that what
what people agree? I'm an engineer. I will
say yes, my students to bring their book with
them. I mean, I still like to have
a book that I can get my highlighter out in
and and that kind of thing. I used the
online all the time because I can jump from section
to section and it's got embedded questions and things like
that for the students. So I think it's pretty
handy. Yeah, that's why I think, rather
than rather than being an either or kind of situation
where you either go print or online, that there
is this kind of mixed medium, like what Steve
was saying, that you're going to have video materials
. It's not what maybe online you're taking advantage of
multi multiple media, but that's not necessarily displacing completely
the need for a textbook. And so combining all
of those materials and figuring out how to how to
make that work, and we're still very early in
trying to figure all of that out. And and
I think that's That's the exciting area for thinking about
in terms of producing these materials is, um,
trying to get out of the the old way of
thinking about a textbook that it's just, you know
, the big thing that you assign and thinking about
it is just one part of multiple materials that you
can teach from and figuring out how to how to
do that. So I know some faculty use a
textbook as, um as reference. And of course
, some people use it to model very closely.
Their syllabus, for example, In in your case
, um, Stephen Katie, where the textbook really
has a very close connection to the the learning objectives
and the course structure and that sort of thing.
I'm wondering about courses where we think about learning content
, maybe a little bit differently. So have you
, and this is mainly directed towards students. Um
, have you been in courses And I guess faculty
answer to. But have you been in courses?
Have you taught courses where you're more interested in having
students create and you have. There's a goal in
mind, but you're not quite sure what students will
create. You want them to have some agency in
the classroom, so moving from having a consumable item
to read to building and developing something. Um,
have you experienced that? And your classes here attack
and And what? How did that change your views
of what a class could be? I would say
my use of the textbook and the use of other
students that I've experienced, Um, it's the use
of the textbook is like a way to round out
everything that you know, and it has all the
information, all the little points of information that you
need to know. So when you go to take
the test, you can answer a through D,
and you can know that what you read in the
textbook is going to be on one of those lines
. It's it's similar to, um, not so
much creating your own interpretation of what the information is
going to be, but it helps make sure that
you have all the facts. So in that sense
, I would say that it's most useful as a
way to outline the course and make sure that all
the information is within the box of your understanding.
So rather than to create something out of it,
like, make your understanding. So, um so
I'm sort of getting away from the idea of,
um mhm of learning resources as a static entity and
talking more about learning as a process. And what
kind of learning materials support that process? What?
Um, do you see that sort of stretching our
definition of of learning resources? I know that all
of you do really interesting things in your class with
group projects with lemonade stands with with very interactive kinds
of experiences. And I'm wondering if if how do
you see do your course materials support those things?
Do you feel like there's too much too much focus
on course materials and there should be more on teaching
? I guess that's maybe my question. Okay,
I would say it depends on the nature of the
course because, for example, in engineering, if
you go and take a thermodynamics course, odds are
you're going to have a textbook that you're going to
heavily rely on because there is a sequential form to
the information and you're being processed, and you need
to go from one through 20 or whatever the number
of chapters are. However, if you move into
the capstone course of engineering, which is really just
open ended, which is what you're trying to get
at, you need multiple resources, and one textbook
is not going to have the answer. And very
often, textbooks themselves will not have the answer.
You're going to have to move into the journal space
, which is a whole other open problem. So
I think it really depends, at least for engineering
. And what is the content that you're trying to
get at with the course? Um, just I'm
curious, but for both of you, then it
sounds like the textbook is not. You don't necessarily
read it cover to cover right or even chapter by
chapter. It sounds like it might be more of
a reference. Is that a fair description? I
would certainly say so, especially in a lot of
the courses where you're trying to learn a code.
So it's in something like accounting. You know exactly
what you need to learn. There's certain rules to
the way things work, and it has all the
rules, so If you don't know something at a
time, then you can look it up. It
is exactly that a reference for most part and all
the learning that you do any interpretation you do,
whether something is going to be valued as X or
y. That's something that you learn in the class
, and the the judgment says you have to make
aren't something you go to in the text book.
It would have to be some other more, um
, something like a classroom teaching. It depends.
It depends, but mostly just at the graduate level
. There are things you are expected to read,
cover to cover, and there are things you just
use this reference. So it just really depends.
Yeah, and that's where I'd say in the humanities
that it really is still, you read. You
got to read cover to cover because it's it's not
the sort of thing you can dip into and get
the point. You know, it's an argument.
And and I mean, I did that throughout graduate
school, trying to skim something and and getting to
class and realizing I missed the point. So it's
it's a challenge. Yeah, uh, I have
no other questions. Um, so we can keep
talking or we can receive questions from the audience.
Um, if you have come up with some,
we'd love to hear them. Mhm. Okay,
thank you very much for your time today and for
having this conversation. Thank you. Also for engaging
your students in creative ways and, um, taking
risks in, uh, an environment. Maybe that
is not so supportive of Of, um, some
of the work to to really save students money.
Um, we hope to see this grow. And
we are working in the university libraries to raise awareness
of these types of of issues. Uh, financial
issues, access issues, equity issues that students have
. And so welcome your your continued collaboration. Thank
you very much. Mhm.