Yeah. Mhm. Okay. Yeah, Yeah.
Hello, everyone. I am Julie Speer, associate
dean for research, Informatics University libraries. And I
am going to just provide a very great thank you
and welcome to the event We appreciate your time and
your your interest in open education and educational resources.
And, um, we thank you for coming.
Um, the library is thinking a lot about this
year's around open education and its changes in spelling communication
. And so it's important for us to involve the
community in these discussions. So we hope that this
is the very beginning of a series of conversations with
the campus community. So, please, we encourage
you to leave your information in the back so that
we can contact you and continue the discussion at this
event. So thank you again for coming in the
Hamptons over to any walls. Our assessment, open
education and online learning environments. Librarian who coordinated event
. Tremendous job. Mhm. Mm. Hi,
everyone. Thank you so much for coming today.
Um, we are here for a couple of different
reasons, and one is to celebrate open Education Week
. And the other one is to have a really
great conversation. Let me first switch these slides.
Um, just to give you an idea. What
you see around you are some examples of open educational
resources as well as, uh, some student feedback
we've gotten in the last few days. Um,
and some resources that we've used to teach people,
um, how open educational resources can be of interest
. So go ahead, Scott. Mhm. Mhm
. So you might ask, Why are we here
? We are here because the cost of supplies and
text books for students has gone up extraordinarily between 1978
a couple years ago, this went up over 800%
. Um, this is higher than the increasing cost
of medical care, the increasing cost of new homes
and higher than the consumer price projects. So we're
talking about the blue line, which rises exponentially,
exponentially but rises very significantly. Um, let's take
a poll. What do you think students spend on
average during an average year, or should expect to
spend during an average year? Maybe you already know
this, um, on textbooks and supplies. Any
guesses? Let's taste it yourself. 6 to 700
. Okay. Yes. 1200. Okay. 1400
. Yeah. A crisis. So according to the
College Board. The number is$1214. That's what
students should expect to pay. Um, what students
actually pay, according to the National Association of College
Stores, is closer to$600 a year. That
means that there's a gap between what students should expect
to pay him what they actually pay to add to
that research through the, um, student perks.
A national study of 1200 students over over 150 campuses
indicated that only that 65% of students at given time
said this textbook is too expensive. I'm not buying
it. So our students are going without learning materials
in cases. And we want this conversation to not
be only about, um, student learning, but
about faculty teaching, because the existence of open licensing
gives a tremendous amount of opportunities for faculty to do
really creative things to adopt resources for their courses,
too. Right? Um openly licensed materials to share
them to have and others reuse them. Um,
there are also some wonderful opportunities that allow us to
not have to go through a fair use analysis.
Um, there's some copyright reasons why, um,
open educational resources. Openly licensed resources are really wonderful
. It's easier. So with that, I would
like to give the rest of the time to the
panel we're going to do is have each person speak
. We'll take a couple questions, have the next
person speak, take a couple questions and go until
we're done, and then we'll we'll just I'll talk
at one time. So, um, I'd like
to I would like to, um, yes.
So this is the face of our students. Just
to make this really personal, the didn't go over
. Okay, so just ignore the slide over there
. So I'd like to introduce to you our Panelists
. Um, starting on the far end is Mohamed
Siam. Um Mohammed, a doctoral student in computer
science, is from Egypt. He is also the
winner of the Open con scholarship, which was funded
by the graduate school and the library university libraries this
fall. So he won himself a trip to Washington
D. C. To explore many of these concepts
. And those of us here at the library who
have heard a little bit about his, um,
his experiences there would have loved to have been there
. So next we have a peak heart. Um
, he is a senior instructor of mathematics. That's
OK. Oh, I'm not a senior. Well
, you are now the mathematics department here at Virginia
Tech. I had the pleasure of teaching in one
of his classes as a librarian to some of his
students. Um, that was really fun. Um
, Greg Hartman is a is an associate professor,
also of mathematics at Virginia Military Institute. He is
also a hokey, um, received his PhD,
earned his PhD here mathematics department, Um, and
Dr Peter Doolittle, who I understand, was also
teaching math. Oh, yes. To middle schoolers
. Yes. Not the same. Yes. Okay
, so three of our folks, and probably all
four have math connections. But Dr Dolittle is the
assistant photos for teaching and learning the at Virginia Tech
. He's a professor in the school of education,
and he is the executive director for the center of
for Instructional Developed Cider. Yeah. Cider instructional development
and educational research. So welcome. And thank you
very much for coming. So come on. Hello
. My name is Mohammed, and as I will
introduce a PhD student in computer science department, I
don't have slides, so I'm just sharing some point
experience related to the conference I attended and my life
as an assistant. They have a researcher and sometimes
like assistant who is using, UM, Graduate box
and material and papers and publications as a student and
sometimes as an instructor for my students. So basically
my story with open access began when I was back
in my country, it was really hard to find
some material. I was a Masters student there,
and when I wanted a paper or I wanted to
use some reference, it was quite hard for me
to access this paper because of my university wasn't subscribed
to as much journals and magazines as virginity. So
when I came here for my PhD study, it
was like a paradise for me because I was able
to get whatever papers I, especially in the computer
science department. We need lots of papers because it's
very, uh, rapid based field. Every day
we have lots of papers we have to follow up
with, so it was great and I felt that
everything is at my fingertips. But then I knew
that Virginia Tech spending how many million dollars for these
subscriptions. So I began thinking okay, that's not
the case. That's not the right thing. Because
I felt that it was Operate was free but wasn't
free at all. Because these millions of dollars millions
, actually, 67 something like that are being spent
, uh, from the budget that we are all
paying for it so these millions can be used for
so many other things. So the things that okay
, I began to read about this issue. I
began to be interested in open access. And then
I applied to the school er shape and I went
to D. C. And I think the conference
and people, we're discussing some very different topics starting
from open access in general to open publication and to
open education resources that we are talking about today.
And the thing for me was that moving from discussing
the cost of education, which is the main problem
that you were talking about today through the value of
education, because we know that education can be considered
that most valuable asset. If you want to invest
in for your kids or for yourself, you have
to invest in education. So moving from this value
of education to only talk about the cost of education
is not directing to do so. What can we
do to help this for me? Personally, I
was more interested in open applications and open data and
open access to whatever data I want to use.
Either My research, Um, I mean, open
data repositories or for being able to publish my material
and get more material online for free. But then
it seems to be not for free at all because
people who are working with research and people who are
putting this material online still need to be funded by
whatever source. So currently, this fund and this
money is coming from people who are using this material
. So the first step is okay. We need
to find some resources to help us offering these free
material one of the most important things that can help
you. There's actually things like what's happening here at
Virginia attack, because this semester I was thinking to
publish in an open access journal. But the first
, the problem I face is that okay, It
would cost me$1000 to published in the journal,
which for the journal it's reasonable because readers later do
not need to pay for this, but John John
needs to have some money to appear in. So
the first question is that Okay, how am I
going support for this$1000. And the thing came
by checking the library website and I found Okay,
this journal is Virginia Tech is subscribed to a partnership
with the journal and they can find me with they
have a discount so it would cost only 800 then
they can even pay for this 800. So that
was great. And that was a very good first
step toward promoting open publishing and open education material in
general. But then what would be the case with
other journals? And what would be the case with
other universities that I don't even know about this kind
of subscriptions and journalist? So this should be the
thing that we have to move forward in our discussion
, promoting for open education and promoting for open access
. So for me, moving from the open access
and open publications to dealing with my students and because
back in my country, I was teaching as a
teaching assistant and here in some classes I do the
same But I remember that back in my country,
I when I was teaching, I was forced to
use some source of books which can be free online
. But the problem is that they were not always
the best box in this field. So now we
have two problems. The cost of books and the
credibility of the resources. So to move forward with
this, we need to deal with the issues.
The cost actually will be related more for them managers
and administrators, administrators to find sources to fund the
authors. And I believe that Virginia Tech is having
one more step towards this, which is I saw
advertisement that encourage authors to work on open access box
, and they can find him some way. I'm
not sure about this, how it works, but
still they are having something to help with this.
But the other important thing for me is credibility.
How can I make sure that this book is reviewed
and it's really a good book? So one of
the initiatives was that Okay, we will ask.
I believe you are doing something like this. We
will ask professors here Is that in effect, to
read pots and to commend are both the reviews on
these books, and then if these books are credible
enough, we can use this in our classes.
So moving in these two tracks in parallel, that
how to fund these education materials and how to make
sure that they are really incredible. And we can
trust what's inside and that we can move from our
, especially my feed the computer science field. Every
day we have new books, so it would be
easy to promote for some free access books because we
have millions of them every day. But being free
in education and being free in our field doesn't mean
only you can read this book for free. Because
the definition of open access and open education materials should
be, you are free to read and re use
this material. So here comes the question related to
in our seas or most the open access classes that
you can find online and they are promoted as free
. But when you see the licensing behind these smokes
, you will find that it's not the definition of
free, because you can only watch these classes attend
these classes and get your certificate. But you cannot
use any part of these classes. You cannot reuse
them. You cannot put them and you work either
box or paper whatever. So this is kind of
, um, a version of free over a minor
version of freedom. But it's not the free access
. So this is the third important aspect with that
besides the coast and credibility. Is that how we
define free? Actually, the definition of free X
free books free online material is clear. And I
believe that maybe you have talked a lot about the
Creative Commons and this kind of stuff and how they
give the offer his rights, um, trying to
get him to be acknowledged that we get this material
from this open. However, we should make sure
that for the open access material, it should be
fully open access material. And currently we find some
journals like Springer or LCV or this kind of stuff
. They are offering some subset of their publications and
they are claiming that it's a free journals. Some
of them are moving towards a really free obligations,
but most of them are still on. This small
version of freedom is that you can access these articles
but you cannot use it. You cannot say that
you cannot do anything actually, with them. Just
read them. So I've been talking about several aspects
, from open access to open publication to an education
. But still what I want to conclude and the
basic ideas that I want and I actually used when
I promote for open access either was talking with academics
. My supervisor when I was talking with some of
those applications that I wanted to publish this paper,
that it should be all about the value of education
, the value of the learning process for the cost
of it. So still, we are here talking
about the cost and all of these pictures and this
students who are feeling very sad because their mind is
still thinking about the coast. So we should help
moving towards the mentality of thinking about the value.
And I think that's all what I wanted to do
. Thanks for listening, and I am not taking
much more. Yeah, let's take a Let's take
two questions. If anyone has questions from Mohammed right
now, maybe sometimes no questions right now, there
may be some Thank you for listening. Mhm.
Yeah, and we were good teeth set up here
. Yeah, in full screen. Yes. There
. That's close enough. Um, my name is
he part I teach in the math department to Virginia
Tech. And of I wanted to talk for a
few minutes about what I'm calling a rousing success and
mitigating disaster. And I had this conversation with some
months ago that I have been in the audience at
presentations before where the presentation after a while start to
feel evangelical because everybody is saying how great these resources
are. And so I do want to talk about
a negative experience that I had with open source material
because I think that means the panel seem more honest
. But I also wanted I didn't want to spend
the whole 10 minutes talking down about this. I'm
going to talk about something. I didn't work out
really well. And then it's been a little time
to talk about something that didn't work out well and
sort of contrast. Both of these experiences. Um
, so, yeah, I'm learning how to use
your computer here. Mhm. Okay, I'm just
gonna do it this way a little bit about my
own background. I've been teaching with open source software
in my classroom. Since 2000 and four, I've
been using open access textbooks and what I'm saying of
nexus textbooks. I mean, somewhere along the,
um, continuum that Mohammed described it. Not all
of them were open in terms of reuse and liberties
and rights. Some of them were only just You
can download them and read them at no cost.
But from a security point of view, no cost
is still important. So open access along some place
in the continuing Since 2000 and 7, 2007 class
, I thought was not a Virginia Tech class.
This was a summer program that I taught somewhere else
. But I've been using open sacks suspects both here
at Virginia, Texas 2000 and nine for a total
of five different courses after, um and I don't
think that necessarily qualifies me as an expert, but
it doesn't mean I have some experience with Got it
The success that I want to talk about it,
I'm gonna switch over. There's nothing on this line
about a that in addition to the textbooks, we
want to supplement the textbooks with interactivity. We want
to come up with ways of engaging the students because
we know even if the textbook is free, we
don't necessarily guarantee that the students are going to read
the book We would like them to, but they
don't always read the book, and there are ways
that we can engage them by having them use software
outside of the classroom. And what is the software
programs that have you had a lot of experience with
? And a lot of positive experience with is a
software program that came out of Union College in New
Jersey. Originally, it has been attitude by other
contributors. Cold, wet work. It is now
a project of the Mathematical Association of America and right
, I think I can just do this right.
Uh huh. See if that works. It will
ask you to log in, Um, what work
is and Web based application that generates interactive content,
generally in the form of homework style questions. But
you can you can design it to be other types
of content based on um, parameters, YouTube's and
it comes with a library of contributed problems from different
places around the country that are credited when you when
you bring up one of these problems, so I'm
going to pull up a couple of these examples.
This is a problem that I used in my multi
variable class last semester that asks students to interpret a
graph in and do some work with the There was
a credit line up here this little cryptic because it
is the source of the problem. This one came
from the University of Michigan. Mm. And so
contributors to the cooler are acknowledged as we use the
full okay. And there's, you know, you
can include graphics. You can include text with the
problems. You can ask the students to work this
out. I've actually already entered an answer for this
one. You can make a solution available to the
students outside of the either before or after the deadline
. This case, good answer is negative. 0.61
So I made it actually the wrong answer up here
, but giving it the wrong answer gave gave the
solution to pop ups, and you can see the
correct correct answer. Um, I'm going to show
one more problem if I can find it just to
give in an example of something else that we can
do. And then I won't talk about a completely
different experience. That so you have Java disabled on
your computer, don't you? Okay, You mind
if I give it permission? Okay. Okay.
Well, try the upper right hand corner where you
see a little X. Nothing. Yeah, I've
hired as a red X up in the menu bar
right there. That one there. Somebody who knows
how to work one of these things. All right
, All we does he just run all plug ins
this time. How about that? Your versions.
You need to give me an extra minute for this
. Yeah, Um, this is a feature that
I like because because you can include in addition to
text and flat graphics you can use, including interactive
java applets, where the students can drag and do
things with the program. And all of this is
available to download and install and contribute to at no
charge. By the way, this is the credit
lines as local. This is a problem that we've
created here today. This is not part of the
contributor library. I lifted because I did not know
how to co Java apple. It's I lifted some
code from other things. So the code credit everything
. But it was a locally created a problem that
we did. And apparently I'm just not going to
get the job is for it to work. So
that's okay. That's not a problem. Let me
back up out of here. Yeah. Anyway,
I've had a lot of success with the program except
for right here. And my students have responded well
to it because, um, it gives them something
to do other than just read a book outside of
class, and it gives them immediate feedback and some
of the things that we use sometimes publisher based software
to do. I know that Pearson and MacMillan have
have there their software for this as well. This
doesn't require students to purchase a code or an access
or anything like that. Um, I taught history
math course for the past couple of years. This
is my disaster story where used a proprietary textbook in
2013 because it was my first time through the courts
and I wanted not to rock the boat. I
wanted to be able to take advantage of my predecessors
work and then having taught the course once that switched
. An open access book of the proprietary book was
by David Burton. And it's an excellent book,
but it's a$220 textbook, and so it is
a significant tribute to the$1200 a year spread,
and this is just an example of a two page
spread from the book. What am I bring up
, though, is the little tiny print that's right
here underneath one of the photographs where this is the
section of the book that talks about the Ryan Papyrus
and the Ryan. Papyrus is a property of the
British Museum and the British Museum. Um, keeps
it in a secret vault, and they have their
own curator's that photograph it and licensed photographs out for
other things. And when you pay$220 for this
book, you get to pay for access to some
of these resources. Whereas when I switched over to
the open access text, there are almost no photographs
in the book. What, you find our links
to sources that have the photographs in. We could
not include these. We can't afford them when to
make it look free or make the book, Open
License. And so, if you want to look
at these interesting resources, we have to send you
somewhere else. And I did not realize how much
of a burden my students were going to find it
, too. Click and go somewhere else or visit
some other website or somewhere else to find the resources
that would have just been right there in the book
. They almost never followed the links because they were
trying to read the book quickly and get through their
assignments as fast as they could. And I am
out of time. But so I tried this book
. But the fact that the museums do not license
photographs for open source exploits turned out to be a
limiting factor that made this book and less successful to
its form. And so this is a call to
museums. Get on board. All right, I've
got well, absolutely all right questions. I'm surprised
people don't that response. Yes, I think over
the course of the semester, it got weary for
them. I think they did it first. And
then as the semester went on, and as they
had papers and tests and things in other classes,
they just stopped engaging with the book. I think
it was a matter that having to do that every
single time for every section of the book throughout an
entire 15 semester got to be a chore, to
be honest. And I think their willingness to follow
through those links diminished over time. Mm, I
didn't contact the museum. I mean, I have
not contact Museum, but yeah, given the fact
that the other sources that I have have credit lines
for these photographers, photo photographs and these sources,
I think I understand the pattern is, is I
think it's more effective as a teaching. Think that
just switch over to a book that students will engage
with better. I'm sad about it because because I
I do believe in open source and open access materials
like this was an example where the extra hoops that
students have to jump through two to make this work
was hoop that they think grew tired of jumping through
. That seems like a lot in August and then
by November, and it's kind of long ago.
Is that you're right. You're right. Engaging as
much with that paper. Where is it? At
the end of the semester. Remember examining those pictures
in between those credits? How are you? Ways
that subjectively I I I started noticing. The problem
is that the, um, amount of confusion they
had between two different types of resources were we're different
. So the kinds of questions that they were asking
class changed when the photographs were right there in the
book, um, and discuss it. Somebody would
sometimes bring a question like, Why did they make
this diagram so big? This one so small and
I don't want to answer these questions. But there
were questions that would be asked about the pictures.
The pictures sometimes generate interest in questions in the topic
being studied. Um, or why didn't they design
this with a handle on both sides That would have
made it made sense. And I'm like, Yeah
, that would have made sense. I don't know
why they did. Not that they would ask questions
. The class that showed me that they were thinking
about what they had seen and not just what they
had run. And those questions started to vanish in
the second quarter. So Okay, so did you
say you're switching? Wow, I am switching I
don't know if I'm switching back to the$220 textbook
yet. I'm looking at a couple of other options
. That is, that's on the table. I
have not eliminated, but I would like to find
some happiness I can find, like,$120.40 dollars
textbooks that has has what I'm looking for. I
would be happy to do that. Oh, I
have about three more months before I have to decide
so of message. Well, then, thanks for
your time. Come on, my expert, it
is great. Pertinent from all that's a bonus costume
. This is not an open source Task. Thanks
. Um, Sunita, for inviting me here.
Thanks for coming. I've been back to check for
. Graduated in 2000 and two. It's been a
while since I've been back here. It's fun to
be back in campus again. This pulls up thanks
to Bud Brown for being here, who was on
my control committee and sat with me during graduation,
and my own adviser was unable to make it there
. It's cool. I've seen him quite often as
well. Still, thanks for coming. Um,
So, um, we sort of alluded to this
, and I've given similar presentations, um, within
math meetings. So I thought I would throw a
definition up here that I often use. Um,
it kind of echoes what Mohammed was saying about women
. Open textbook is and there's just one little board
that seems contradictory. That says I use the word
freely earlier on Mexico Open doesn't necessarily free. The
idea is that you can have access to things,
but you can also still pay for things, so
I'll get to it later on. Um, I've
written some open access books. Um, you still
have to buy this if you want this, but
you can have a pdf for free, and all
the source files are online and freely available, and
then you can edit them under a creative Commons license
. So, um, in some sense, Oh
, get to all these kind of things later on
too. But not everything that I do is completely
altruistic. Frankly, I'd like to make some money
to out of all this. So how I got
started as I came to be m I in 2000
and 51 of the things they gave me as a
new faculty member is they created a new course called
Matrix Algebra. In the math world, there's this
high level thing called linear algebra, and below this
, we call it Matrix algebra, which is from
the nuts and bolts. Without all the theory here
, here's a course description. Flush it out into
a syllabus, find a textbook. We're gonna teach
this next fall. So all right, we'll go
for it. And one of the things that I
had difficulty doing is finding a textbook that was suitable
for the course. All I could find a linear
algebra books that cost a lot of money, and
I knew that my students would be needing most of
that material. So here at Tech, we have
a similar course on 11 14, and they use
some online materials. They wrote their own JavaScript kind
of things. And so I finally email people in
my old department and said, Can we just use
your website to teach class? And they said,
Sure, you're all part of the Commonwealth. Go
for it. Um, and then I realized my
students hated it, not because the quality wasn't there
. They just didn't like going online to find their
textbook and so I would give them my own homework
assignments. But I would say, read the book
and answer these questions and they just wouldn't do.
It may be the world's changed since 2000 and six
minutes a long time ago in terms of the Web
and things like that. But I started writing the
lecture notes for them, too, to look at
. And then one day I like to Oh,
my lecture notes and I had 80 pages of lecture
notes and that's a lot, Um, that's a
book. And so I went to my department head
and I said, This is important. What's in
bold? I said, Okay, I mean,
faculty member, Frankly, not that we want anybody
to feel this way, but the big thing in
my mind is tenure and promotion. So can I
get tenure if I if I work on this as
a book or should I just scrapped this, leave
it at 80 pages, election notes and start doing
research that I'm going to publish in a journal somewhere
? And he said, No, go for it
. This would be great. And so I started
working on this, and then when I was done
when I had my book done, looking at publishers
, finding out what the requirements were for publication,
how they want to submit things and also started talking
to other authors in the math world that we're in
my region in Virginia, Maryland and things couldn't find
a single math professor who has written a book and
published in traditional format that had a pleasant experience.
They all hated. And for a variety of reasons
, Um, but basically, they'll say you will
take something that's very near and dear to your heart
. You're gonna give it to them, and they're
going to change it in ways that you don't want
in order to make it sellable, um, and
make it more marketable and all those kinds of things
, And then they're gonna come back to every couple
of years and make you write a new addition and
you're gonna worldly objected to that. But you still
need to do it because it's your contract, all
those kinds of things. And I decided that I
was going to self publish it, and I went
through a company called Lulu that I found online.
And then later on, I switched to a different
publisher. That's part of Amazon because everyone knows Amazon
, it makes it easy to work with. So
that's That's how I got started. Um, when
we look back at the process and I thought this
actually was a, frankly, a great process for
me. Um, even though Matrix algebra is a
lower level thing, and now I know it even
better than before because I had to write the book
. I learned a lot of cool stuff about lots
of different things. And so we and the department
starts saying, Why don't we do this more often
? I can tailor textbooks, course books to the
needs of my students. And so a colleague of
mine then said, Okay, we teach a class
about how to use Matt Lab math Cad. Why
don't I just published a small little thing that we
sell them for six bucks if they wanted that kind
of thing, So he jumped into that and so
behind. This is this philosophy that says Okay,
there's all this content out there in the world.
I think in terms of math, there's all this
math content that nobody owns. It's just it's the
knowledge that we have accumulated over time. And then
you wanna take a subset of that and write a
book on that. And as the author, you
take all this content and then you take the subset
that you want to write about. Oh, but
wait, you can't choose that you're on your own
because the publisher has their hand on that, saying
We still want to sell this. We've got to
make it marketable, so we will help you choose
the content that you want. I talked to a
guy recently. In the last three months, he
said, Yeah, bread and I wrote a book
. We specifically wanted to write this much, and
then we gave it to the publisher. They send
it out to 30 different schools to give us reviews
, and all 30 schools basically came back and said
, It's a fantastic book, but it needs this
extra section. But of course, it's 30 extra
different sections that are really needed. So now they're
a little book that they wanted to be. This
was now much bigger and again, he said.
I hate it. It's not what I wanted.
So once you figure out what you want for your
core content, then the publisher does a great job
package you get for you. In general, textbooks
look great. They're hard cover their high quality.
There's no doubt about that. But then the analogy
for me is Alexis, I am told, is
a very nice car. I've never been in one
right, but it's a very nice car. Isn't
worth the money that you pay for? Apparently,
for some people, yes, it is. For
me, it's not because I've chosen not to buy
a Lexus and I have a choice. The text
books that we have traditionally are very high quality.
Are they worth it? That's a debatable topic,
but there are expensive and that's not debatable. I
don't think, and then you give it to the
user. The open workflow says. Everybody owns this
content. The author of The Instructor gets to choose
the core content. If I want to use an
open resource like a tailored to my needs and then
you package it and it's in the cloud, I
hire someone to do it for me to print on
demand and then we get it to the user and
then you don't have to get to this part here
where you're supplementing things. You've chosen that long time
ago to make it what you want. Why would
you adopt the big thing? We talked about a
lot. Lower cost of students, more control of
the content. I get the things that I want
. If I think this is a great book missing
a section, I can have one and that's pretty
cool. It's work, but I can do that
. I want to Better feedback loop. You only
make changes when you need it. Not because the
new editions out and you need to make more money
. Why would you get involved? Why would you
write something like this? Um, same two reasons
. And then the third one is in bold because
this is sort of where I'm going to become an
evangelist and say there are reasons to get involved Apart
from the cost, this is an incredibly wonderful creative
opportunity for people. I ended up writing in calculus
textbook, and I loved it, absolutely loved it
. It's not my creative outlet. Um, if
some people make music that's their creative about that.
I wrote a calculus book strange, but I love
absolutely minute of it. And so you can get
involved too. So eventually we decided to write a
calculus book. Um, just to make a greater
impact. And I looked at the world of open
calculus books at the time, and frankly, I
didn't like them for a variety of reasons. I'll
skip over them right now. Um and so I
try to do some NSF grants that failed with some
colleagues. And so we finally decided we're going to
write it in House and me and my game makeup
, Of course, releasing So of course releases.
So it has some time. Um, we got
started and then after a semester, basically had one
written, um And then I gave a presentation to
the board of Visitors. They said, You know
, that sounds great. We'll give you another course
released to keep on going, and you can look
at the timeline. Don't worry with that, but
eventually Tom, I got all of our calculus sequence
cut 12 and three written, so we broke it
up into smaller chunks. Sweet semester. You only
buy a book that's this big instead of this big
you're carrying within the full time, each one costs
$11 that you can buy through Amazon. Our bookstore
sells for 13 with their markup. Um, and
then the last line there, Um, I asked
, am I can I make a modest profit on
this? I wasn't going to do it. I
was going to be altruistic for a while, and
then my colleagues kept and saying, You know what
? You really should charge something for this because you
spent a lot of time on this and finally,
frankly, my wife said, Greg, you spent
so much time given at home on this. I
would like to see some money out, right?
So and I'll just tell you I make about$2
a book. And so it's not a ton of
money, but it also is. It's fun on
the side, I hope, frankly, to make
, well, not more than$2 of what we're
safe. It's not all altruistic. It's not.
It's not all for free. I am actually making
a profit out of this. Um, so this
is just a little quick blurb about Apex calculus just
to say yes, I did a lot of work
. I don't worry with all the different things.
One thing that's kind of cool in here, though
, um is manipulable graphics. It's in progress.
I've made a website. You need to go there
later on. If you get bored, in which
I do more evangel evangelical things about open books and
things like that, I was surprised that I did
. Over my Thanksgiving break, I made this website
and then since then I've gotten a ton of hits
. It's not like a YouTube video where you get
millions of hits, but I was surprised. Okay
, I've gotten almost 2000 hits since then. Lots
of downloads. Um, and I know at least
two schools. I think they never actually talk to
me personally, but I'm pretty sure they found out
about the book because of the website, and they're
using the book now, so it's a pretty quick
turnaround since December. I was. I was floored
. Frankly, Um, and then there's a couple
of miscellaneous things. I'm pretty much out of time
to go quick. It's a lot of work.
No doubt I might not have gotten started if I
knew how much work it was gonna be, but
it was well worth it. Um, we need
to make sure that it's each institution is different,
but it should be recognized. The work that you
do for an open book should be recognized towards 10
year promotion, and that's ties. And then you
need to have a measure. Equality somehow. And
that's how I kind of got interested in the open
things. Well, where is the way of peer
review? Setting collaboration should be encouraged. We try
to get lots of people to work together on the
calculus sequence. Lots of people told me they are
interested in when push came to shove, everyone said
, Actually pretty busy right now, not everybody.
Most people said I'm too busy and so the number
of people narrowed down to me doing 98% of the
work and a handful of people doing a couple of
things. I understand everyone's busy, but I would
like to see that change, and it's rewarding this
part here. I think it's pretty cool Opportunity for
innovation Bound. This is my last slide here.
Um, we're working on this for for the fall
. Here is the intersection of two planes, and
there's this little line right here, which is defining
the intersection of two planes, and it looks cool
. It's nice to have these graphics here, but
we're working on in the pdf. Now. Just
click on it and then you can move things around
and say, Oh, that's what's going on.
Right? Okay, that makes more sense to click
on this one here. And then I can see
what the surfaces, and you can see this little
curve part of a sign curve. You spin around
the Z axis, and I get this surface.
Traditional textbook companies can't do this yet because they're not
sure how to make this electronically available that you don't
just give to everybody. Um, And then I
say, Give it to anybody you want. And
again, I'm not completely altruistic about this. Give
it to everyone you want. And I'm pretty sure
that there's a certain population that's still going to buy
the printed copy. And I still get I still
get something in return. But I can do things
without worrying about the cost that they are worried about
. And I can go on and on, got
stuff, but I'll stop. That's what contact information
. If you want to talk more and then,
um, there are some places. These are specifically
the first last three are all about math places,
but college open textbooks is a great place to go
to find more educational. Alright, went over my
time. But what kind of questions can I answer
for you? She having mhm? Yes. Teacher
. Did you have a review process for group of
built in? Or was that something you got from
your colleagues? Yes. Mhm. Um, yes
and yes. Um, one thing that I did
is, um there was a colleague at a school
in Ohio that I would send material to, and
she would edit it for us. And so I
had at least someone an external person editing for me
, telling me whether I was on track or not
. One thing that I found out about the traditional
publishing world is that there really isn't that great of
a of a vetting process. Either. We send
the book out to lots of people to look at
, and they'll tell us whether they like it or
not. It's not any one of them actually has
to look through all the theorems. It's just it's
almost crowdsourcing, um, in in some way and
people do get paid. I was I was actually
paid at one point in time to do that for
another textbook to look through it. Um, but
when I talked to those authors, they said the
feedback we got from those people was was not that
great. Honestly, Um, and they would catch
typos, but they wouldn't necessarily do a whole lot
. And they sort of just assumed it was already
okay. Um, it was surprised me. I
kind of thought there was someone who was just very
closely looking into everything. And it turns out a
peer reviewed paper has far more peer review than a
textbook does, at least in the mouth role.
So, um, and then my colleagues come by
and there was a place where one of my theories
as long I I made a mistake and they said
, This isn't right, Thank you. And then
they come by all the time. There was too
many typos. I thought I had them all cleared
out. And then I started giving extra credit to
my students to find typos, and they found a
lot more. They read the book. I was
like, That's pretty cool, you know? Yeah
. So kind of thinking about leaving some in there
just to say you find them, I'll give them
extra credits and then I haven't planted just they would
find it and read the book. Yes, sir
. I'm really interested in the tenure conversation. You
had better department. And I wonder, uh,
I wonder about the differences between graceful idea, my
great research institution. Right? Right. And based
on your experiences, you know, right, Would
this have qualified you for tenure to place like Virginia
Tech? This one? I think the short answer
is no. I think, um, that's just
the truth of the matter that we are not a
research one institution, and so we put value in
different places. But I also think that there are
lots of good quality for for your college is that
are trying to become research one where they try to
push their faculty to publish papers, and that's not
where their heart should be. And I think BMI
has had that internal quandary of who are we as
a school. And there are some people that are
pushing us to publish more and more, and other
people saying our focus should be on our case,
pocket debts in teaching, and so there should be
some sort of peer review to this. Otherwise,
it's just teaching materials at the same time. Um
, this is a worthwhile endeavor, and you're bringing
something quality to the school. So that's the trick
to to, I think Regina attack. A lot
of energy is spent trying to get tenure. And
then once you have your tenure and once you're promoted
, then sometimes your energy wings and I think there
should be some sort of reward. Still, for
doing this kind of stuff. Some sort of evaluation
says this is still worthwhile. And I don't know
how to attack another research. One stools that figure
that out, I think within, like, IBM
and other schools, there should be rewarded. Yeah
, but two questions. I'll sit down. Thanks
. Thanks. I've looked through them. I didn't
want No thanks, Mark. All right, well
, we're waiting for Peter to come up, but
you're going to say something. Oh, okay.
I just wanted to add on the 10 year conversation
we have seen faculty dependent on the department sometimes receive
credit for offering open materials. I don't know if
it's a departmental decision or if that's at the college
level, but I think that's something you want to
chat about? Okay, sure. Does that sound
right? Sorry I lost in the process and I
have my notes on this gigantic screen. But since
I turned 50 it got smaller. So So I
want to kind of build on some of the things
that have already been said and take us in a
slightly different direction. I do like Mohammed's differentiation between
free and free. Some things are free. Some
things are really free. So part of as this
field develops, we need to figure out what is
free, what's really free. And then, as
Greg was talking about, where should people be getting
credit and should be just kind of free? And
so oftentimes, the$250 textbook something becomes$10 to
support other people who created these things Back in 2000
and five, Just a little bit of brief history
created the first international journal and teaching and learning in
higher education. I didn't know it was the first
one until somebody later on, by the way,
it was open. It's now a creative Commons access
so you can do free whatever you want. You
don't pay for it when you submit it or when
we publish it. We published it for about 10
years, and now it's moved on to the University
of Georgia. There's only so many years you can
run a general, all right, that's not Uh
huh. So we've also started by having thought about
this. And until I was the the talk,
I started a conference seven years ago that's free and
open to everybody who wants to come and essence on
sense. That's open source. The proceedings are freed
with those online, and so the only thing pay
for us getting here. So so at some level
, the open access free issue, I thought was
fascinating. And then thinking about open educational resources in
the whole open movement, thinking beyond textbooks to things
that are online, from activities people can use to
lesson plans, thinking about various resources, such and
such articles or experiments, assessments, components of the
teaching and learning process. So it's one thing to
think about books as being mostly content. The only
things that really like that he's talking about is using
textbooks as a form of processing the way of getting
students interact to interact with information. But there's still
a fundamental component of context when we start talking about
textbooks. And so one of the things that the
open movement has done is a lot of people who
are publishing up in textbooks realize they've got to have
something more than just content because they are up against
textbook publishers who have a huge advantage on them.
In a lot of schools, there's certain authors that
people want care students to read. Yeah, yeah
, come here, understand them And so that creates
an issue. So one of the things that a
lot of the publishers and open world done because they
really tried to work in a lot of processing,
getting students to understand. So if we look at
this the open movement from a teaching and learning perspective
, leaving behind costs just a little bit because cost
is important. The student doesn't buy a textbook at
all, or they don't buy a textbook until three
or four weeks, and then they're gonna be missing
some of the activities interaction processing that they might otherwise
do. When we think about what we're looking for
, our students, we want them to build flexible
knowledge. I want them to build knowledge that goes
beyond solving specific problems in specific ways that they can
use this knowledge across domains, in life or across
various problems. In order to do that, five
things have to happen. They have to learn the
information deeply. You have to learn under various context
. We have to learn it for various purposes.
You have to learn that a principal level, and
then they have to become owners of. They have
to be aware and be in control of what they
know and what they can do. One of the
things the open market does for us is that allows
us to access various tools and various information so that
our students can experience them differently. So if students
have spent$200 on textbook, that's the only view
they see unless we bring in other views. Well
, if I can grab the Greg's books and say
, Well, here's a book and you can access
this for$15 and then here's another one you can
access for$5. Here's another one that you can
access free multiple views of calculus and problem solving,
and I can use those in my class to get
students to interact in ways they couldn't before when we
all bought the same. Can I make a buck
? And now I feel like in some ways I've
got to stay with that all the way through.
And so the open market gives us access to looking
at information in different ways. Gives us access to
looking at information within different domains, so you can
imagine a calculus book where all the examples are coming
from. The science is very specific sciences, because
that's what we're training or coming from engineering or coming
from. I'm not sure how you do calculus in
some of the social sciences, but there's gotta be
a way there. We go to my dad's so
that would make sense. And it could be Well
, here's the basic content. And then here's a
primer in different topics. Okay, well, that's
going to be hard for a regular publisher, because
then they're gonna have to somehow figure out how to
package this in ways that they can sell it.
And having worked with books as well, One of
things I've figured out is they don't want to work
on a book that's not going to sell. And
so they say, I got this great calculus book
just for social science. We can sell at least
15 of them. It's not a lot of people
knocking at your door, but it might be exactly
what's needed. And so if we start to create
pieces that we, as educators, can put together
to enhance the cognitive social behavioral affective processing, the
learning of our students, that's going to be a
huge advantage. And there's a lot of people out
there who are excited about these kinds of things that
are writing their own books. So we have three
people here who are creating these resources, not because
they're going to be on the New York Times bestseller
list because they see a use for it. And
I like the whole idea that I think at some
point it's okay to get paid a little bit of
money for all this work. I was looking at
time. I'm like, That's two years of work
. Yeah, I can see$2 a book that
seems more than reasonable, but there are things that
we're willing to do within the educational sphere that publishers
aren't because we work for different reasons. There is
a level of altruism. There is a level that
we care about our students learning. It's not just
about the bottom line. Now, this is kind
of a young area, and so obviously we haven't
really figured the whole thing out, so we need
to start thinking about this in a creative fashion.
NSF might not be interested in funding it, but
would you attack? And Andy and Cuba might all
want to come together and create resources for certain areas
that we can then leverage beyond just the status text
books that we have. When we think about fostering
teaching and learning, we have to think beyond the
content to think about how our students processing and why
is that are meaningful so that their hearts are.
And then we need to integrate that into teaching and
learning approach. That makes sense. So we need
to have a sense of other learning outcomes and indicators
are you then need to figure out what instructional strategies
we're going to use, how we're going to assess
it. Mhm open source can help with all of
that. So strategies. I use all sorts of
experiments in my educational psychology teaching that I give out
every time I teach and I stick them online and
people use them. And I come back to a
different conference saying, You know, I use that
activity used That's how it ought to be. I
need to teach Jack's who's got a good activity for
that? Because right now they're all hidden. They're
either in our computers or they're somewhere in scholar.
People can't access them, so I need a good
differential equations activity. I don't know what that would
be. Somebody, that somebody has a good interactive
activity for that. That might be nice to see
how they're doing to see how they're sharing. So
what kind of instructional materials will be available? And
then the last one would be assessment At some point
. We need to know what students know and what
they do and what they care about, and oftentimes
we get locked into certain types of assessments. But
there's people out there were using really interesting assessments that
sometimes we only hear about conferences. The guy who
said he heard that four or five years ago because
a good teacher is it has to be very willing
to beg, borrow and steal. But if it's
open, then stealing is encouraged because it's got a
little see around it. We know we can use
this in ways that make sense. So we think
from a teaching life perspective. Open sourcing allows us
to number of things. Access to content allows us
access to processing for students, access for teaching and
access for assessment. I think as we think in
this area, it's important not to get stuck in
textbooks. That's important. We can save hundreds of
thousands of dollars for students, but they've got to
become more than just textbooks. So how do we
foster them as learning tools for our students? That's
kind of the to me, the flip side of
the whole market. I think there's lots of potential
there that we're just now getting to, so I'm
within 58 seconds at the end, so I'm just
gonna stop there. But no lips on the end
. That's just yeah, clearance. Great moments.
Flexible knowledge. Five things. Reflexive knowledge. The
first you have to learn deeply. Okay, it's
hard to be flexible, urologist yellow. We have
to learn different contexts and for different purposes, so
you need variability. If you learn the same problem
to the same solution, the same solution to the
same problem. You get really good at that one
problem. Somebody gives you a different problem and suddenly
you can't do it. So varying conditions vary the
purpose of the problem learning at the principal level.
So we move beyond basic facts and concepts to understanding
the underlying rationale for what we know. And then
the last one is a meta cognitive approach where we
have awareness of what we know and we can control
it. And a number of experiments where we teach
students lots of really cool and groovy things. Let
me ask them to do it and they don't.
We just spent two weeks on that until they learned
that they can control what they know and what they
can do. Then they're not enacting. That's probably
does that make sense come other funds? I was
So I'm sorry you're Adam out this idea of open
resources beyond just textbooks, Um, so, like
, there's the merlot and in California, and there's
, like, connections out of rice. I think
it is. I've looked at some of those things
in some sense. There is so much there.
It can be kind of hard to weed through and
find what I'm looking for. Do you have?
Do you have the solution to that? Do not
. That's a huge problem. There are lots of
things out there, but we don't have is a
good organizing structure, and I don't know what that
organizing structure is. I would I would hope that
don't know somebody Google esque would come up with ER
, Google or something. But you're right. It
sometimes part of the issue is finding out what's out
there and then typically, you have to modify it
for your class. That the original thought was that
we would create these elements and we could just stick
them into our class unfettered. But we really need
to have some control over them, and that's one
of the things that hasn't been available. Is to
be able to get in and modify. But I
think that's that's mm. Let's see that is attacking
. All right. Thank you. I have a
lot of questions as usual, and I would love
to hear further questions from the panel as well as
the audience. Um, so there is a quote
, an idea in education that the one who does
the work is the one who learns most. This
is familiar. Okay, so I'm wondering, Are
there ways to engage students mashing up all kinds of
things in their spare time? Are there ways to
engage students? A. A learning sort of way
in a production sort of way to create openly licensed
things, both to teach them about open licensing and
to create some materials that would allow them to deeply
engaged with? Yeah, How would that fit in
your courses without 50 C and application? Any of
you, it's This might not be a direct answer
. Um, this is 10. Essential. Perhaps
these are math words of the covers of my books
are very boring. There's just a solid color because
I'm not a graphic artist. And if I tried
to make a cover, it would look worse than
a solid red cover. Um, it would just
look terrible, and it turned people off. I
think Vietnamese. A smaller school. There's one thing
that I think Virginia Tech has. I'm sure a
graphic design school where your training students to one day
design covers of books, and so why not have
it as the capstone project of of a Student to
design the covers of of my book, um,
and and make it look nice. And I spent
a lot of time making all the grass look good
, but it's also it's a graphic design problem.
Um, I laid out the book myself, but
that's there are professional type setters. And what's the
word when you lay out a page that's they study
that kind of thing? And why not get students
to do that for us to make it actually look
better? Um, and that wouldn't engage them in
the calculus side of it, But it would be
it would engage them in their particular field, and
I think there should be opportunities for that. I
think part of it is we also need to think
about educational differently. And so what we're designing is
real world problems to solve, which is which is
what you're talking about that capture some of their curiosity
challenges them at a deep level where they have to
learn tools to create the solution. But it's a
real live solution because oftentimes students get well imagine,
except when they're like, Well, I don't care
if one train runs into the other train. So
, uh, if we give them that the real
world solutions, like something that they have to actually
design, then they're going to engage and learn the
tools to create a solution, not learn the tools
just for the tools. Six. So we've got
to figure out how we motivate students, and there's
lots of different ways that we motivate them. Curiosity
, control and challenge, or just kind of three
of them. But we can create real world problems
that suck the students in so they don't think Oh
my gosh, I'm learning calculus there thinking I've got
to solve this problem and I need to do these
equations in order to figure that out rather than Oh
, I'm doing calculus. I think that's sort of
where your your students finding typos comes in. Find
the formula that's incorrect. That's a wonderful way to
get deeply. Yes, I think we have a
similar thing in computer science when we have the open
software open source software because students are encouraged to.
I mean without any encouragement, they're just do this
work and they can publish it for people to see
it. But The motivation here is that they get
acknowledged for how smart they are, because when they
published a software code that they didn't, they solved
certain problems. So they get acknowledged for this.
So if we for the open textbooks or even open
access or whatever, if students can be acknowledged for
you talk about curiosity and motivating them towards this.
So the best thing is to motivate them to get
technologies for that. How how good they are graphic
designers, how smart they are. Problem solvers and
this kind of stuff. This would be very beneficial
for them for the work of open packages. Okay
, gentlemen. And the scarf. I'm wondering about
her husband. So I was wondering about the creativity
. Yeah. I mean, I thought that was
a fascinating It didn't really occur to me before.
So it was an interesting and intriguing idea. Yeah
, if you were. If you were designing a
curriculum, that or if you were designing the university
to the turnout professors of what would you do different
to encourage creativity, an instruction or instructional design or
or Yeah, you know, creative solutions to the
teaching. The key word. That's deep. Yeah
, because I see the problem that you're sort of
highlighting is that in some sense, you're getting your
PhD in math. You're so focused on your on
your dissertation that you don't see the forest out there
. You see the roots of one tree, you
know, and it takes a while to step back
. And then as an undergrad, you're doing the
same thing you're think of getting a job or whatever
it's going to be. You're not necessarily thinking about
the creative process in all of this. Yeah,
short answers. I don't know. I guess how
to foster that creativity. Apart from trying to display
it myself in the classroom, it's very challenging question
. Frankly, yeah, can I check? And
I know you're waiting for a question, but I
think one of the things that I feel is an
instructor is a schedule and a timetable that when I'm
covering teaching a class in calculus, I have one
day for the chain rule, and I have one
day for the product rule and I have, and
the time to cover the content limits. How many
perspectives I can I can introduce in that class?
Um, and I've taught the same classes over and
over again and sometimes out of different books that I've
seen lots of perspectives on a topic. And I
like seeing how this one plays out and how this
one does something else and how this one has an
interesting application in art and that sort of thing.
And I'd love to be able to sort of take
one of these topics and share all of them all
of things, different ideas about that topic. Oh
, I could I could spend for anyone topic in
my class. I could spend two or three weeks
talking about that one topic if I had that luxury
. And and I feel like sometimes my students are
diverse enough that the one choice that I've made for
this semester on, How am I going to present
it? I'm trying to present it in a way
that makes it understandable. Um, but that doesn't
necessarily make it lovable or exciting or inspiring, um
, and that the necessity of moving on to the
next topic limits limits the ways that we can engage
things other than just understanding the content. And I
would follow up with that. We live in a
very weird, weird world where students are taught to
learn. Faculty aren't taught to teach, but that's
what we do in this environment. And so when
we're not, when we don't have that background,
we tend to teach from the content side. So
I I have to teach calculus one content. And
in fact, that's not what calculus is about.
Calculus about solving problems, right? And so when
we when we take it with without stepping back to
take a look at it, we teach it from
the content side. So we teach bits and pieces
, hoping that downstream they're going to make something from
it, rather than starting on the performance end,
where they're going to need to know this information downstream
and working that back into the class. So we're
solving problems that need this information rather than teaching an
equation that three years from now, hopefully they'll remember
enough of it to apply it to something I teach
at cycle teacher pre service teachers. I need to
get them to the class as fast as they can
. I need to get them in front of people
teaching so they understand what works and what doesn't work
and not just teach them bits and pieces and hope
when they graduated in the class. Somehow it magically
all comes together. So part of this is also
backing up and thinking about how do we work with
with teachers, that we work with people who are
PhD students who are going to become professors and work
on some of these things that we're talking about So
they do come out with what you're talking. Next
question. This lady, I never asked. Yeah
, smell a lot of movement. That system.
Mhm. Mhm. There is some stuff. Listen
to my defense. 30 40 50 miles per year
royalties. There is the strongest Not to do,
sure. I mean, you're making tens of thousands
for years, so this might be a little off
topic. But where where an often publishes that brought
determines how much the student may have. David.
That range is about$250 a book 20 uh,
published publisher where I can buy that book as a
librarian, get it online, and they can download
it from the student. There's nothing for So how
do we get to learn out the professors who say
you publish with more than one place or you published
a Springer or you published Elsa. Here I begin
that book for zero cost of the students. And
if you publish never I can't do anything. Just
needs to go dollars. I noticed open resources,
but it certainly ties him with how much students are
. What? How do we get the word out
? How do we let professors know that your choice
of publisher makes a difference how much the students pay
per semester for your book? I think for me
being an evangelist that I am now for this is
that, like in the math world, Dr Brown
and I both go to the section meetings of the
M A Mathematical Association of America twice a year.
And for the last four years in a row,
twice a year, I've been giving a presentation on
open open textbooks, basically just saying over and over
again, sometimes the same crowd books cost too much
money, and then when you have lunch with somebody
, just sort of slide it in. There aren't
textbooks expensive. I've been looking at this cheaper one
. You know, that kind of thing. I
think just talking on a personal level. I don't
know what your professional meetings are, but right.
Educational resources. But it's just a commercial publishers.
A huge difference. Which commercial publisher? Publisher?
Yeah. Uh huh. I don't even know where
to start. It's very frustrating because I know there
are textbooks out here that I can get zero cost
. I can pay$1000 for a book that goes
out to 100 students and they don't have any right
down. This is free to them and another culture
. I can't touch it. McMillan Also mhm.
So then I guess my thought to just some things
I had to do with vm I trying to get
the word out of a completely different things. I
realized no one reads my emails. But if I
go and talk to them face to face, they'll
listen to me for five minutes. And so I
had to talk to. I wanted all the faculty
know something. So I emailed all the department heads
and say, Can I come to your department meeting
the next one and have three minutes of your time
? Um and I got half of the departments to
say yes, and so I still got far more
coverage that way and maybe face to face conversations with
heads of the mechanical engineering division. Um, and
say, I can just tell you real quick.
Here's a bunch of mechanical engineering books that are real
expensive. I think these are probably good too.
I don't know because I'm not a professional. You
are. Perhaps, but they're a third of the
cost. Would you consider? And then maybe they'll
get the conversation started. Yes. Okay. Yeah
, a certain amount. Long. Pretty good.
Okay. Yeah, they're really good. Thanks.
Oh, a wide variety of cost. I have
? Yeah, yeah. Especially for mhm. Classic
. It's usually don't numbers. Here it goes back
mhm way, Way before. Yeah. And there's
some older books have been re friend. Yeah.
Have all the information you can suffer. This is
a senior, and then there are new. Yeah
, the standard book number theory that would I have
been having this huge is by three years or it
was 140 off. Yeah, Yeah, the best
players in the field. Yeah, you got to
do that. You have to make You can make
your own. This is this is an alternate.
This is not open source. Business Halt! Autonomous
. That's right. Yeah. I mean, we
can't get the idea. Mhm. I don't think
just go for education is decreasing the burden of the
students. And maybe we'll get you know, the
distance because one of the things that you can say
to Well, if you Google NPR textbook costs,
um, you'll probably run across our planet money through
that in there, too. You run across a
couple different articles they have and one of them highlight
some of the things that neither had which textbook costs
over the last at least 12 years has gone up
800% versus 8000. Whatever you show. I mean
, it's pretty steep as it is, and then
it shows the amount students have been paying over the
last 10 years. And it's this. It's because
they're buying fewer books, and that's not what we
want. I mean, that's so not what we
want. Um, and yes, this is a
paperback, and this doesn't work for everybody, but
if you buy it for 13, you might just
keep it because it's not worth the$2 at the
bookstore is going to buy it back for her and
then you have a book, and then you also
have the pdf. And then that's a selling point
to me is that the students will actually have the
books. We want them to have the books.
Yeah, you can get. You can get to
the students. One has one. Why is this
book the text said? Well, if you're not
gonna buy it Uh huh. They used to.
You're going to have a choice. Fine. Not
going to buy the book because it's so expensive.
Maybe go back. I dropped the ball. Say
, Well, that brings up an interesting point.
Do you see students in your class engaging? Are
they doing better because they have access to tax?
I assume you haven't done a study, but anecdotally
, Um, yeah, it's hard to say about
that when we didn't formally do a study in pretty
imposed Um, mhm. Yeah, I haven't been
to study. Their studies do exist, though there
are studies that indicate that through open source you can
get an increase in student performance for a number of
different reasons, one of which is they buy the
book at the beginning of the semester rather than three
or four weeks in so they can smell 12 bucks
. You know, the week before class starts,
rather than trying to figure out what am I going
to be in this class? Is he really gonna
use the buck? Because that's one of the things
that are going to spend 100 50 bucks, and
then nobody ever uses it. And so so,
part of it is, is letting them know I'm
going to use this, but it's only 12 bucks
. That's, you know, less than one night
out top of the stairs. So I want to
recognize there is a student here, Hannah Thomas,
who has heads up the Academic Affairs committee of student
Government. And I want you to feel free to
jump in at any point about what you, you
and your group your committee learned about this past week
, especially with regard to students having an experience where
faculty maybe assign a book and the students by it
. And then they decide not to use it and
say, Hey, basically, it's especially and we
just had that where you can see officials on the
screen. We just wanted to see Whoa and thinking
that I was that bye And that's what Yeah,
worse season. That was I mean, yes,
that's good to store sensitive and is very good news
, because anything recently, even in the way,
I will open a special. But I would say
it's very inspiring sickness. Okay, you're talking about
. Tend to go to see that system. That
means mhm. Yes. Was left. I want
to direct this first rate. How are you going
to do another mhm. And you have library publishing
services. Uh, how what do you think the
library could do to help present publishing units? I'll
give you my ignorance. I'm not sure what library
publishing services can do for me. I'm very ignorant
to what they have available for, right was some
scholarly journals and some software that helps fired up process
. Oh, papers with your committee publishing. And
we have some constant services. But we haven't done
it. Mm hmm. Have a faculty sent us
a finished product. Okay. You'd like to help
them? I think open textbooks the way we can
get us. But I don't I don't know from
you. I don't know that. What? Their
look they might be looking for. What? Help
they give them because it's not going to be right
. But are there things to do with putting it
together? Indexing it? I don't know. I
don't know either. So I just want to do
any of you have some balance. I think certainly
you mentioned indexing and that's it's a It's a hard
task. Um, uh huh. You guys are
professional at indexing information, in some sense, and
I was not professional. I had create the index
after reading a couple of things online about here's here's
some advice for how to do that. I mean
, having even a 10 minute conversation with the librarian
about Here's some things you can think about might have
been useful. Um, maybe this isn't necessarily a
cup of tea, either. Um, apart from
the mathematical side of things, I'm not necessarily a
writer, Um, and so having someone who's not
necessarily mathematical read my book and say this is a
run on sentence. Use far too many comments and
and you think semicolons are free and they're not.
To have someone from that perspective would have been very
beneficial to me in the point where I, um
I've toyed with the idea of hiring someone to do
that for the book just to make it better again
. I I used to think publishers did that for
you, and I talked to the different authors.
I found that that wasn't the case. And again
it was we sent out to people. And every
once in a while we get a comment from some
person in Albuquerque saying, You know, this sentence
right here happens to be too long. I just
happened to notice that I thought I got it down
. Okay, I'll fix that one sentence but fixes
one problem of perhaps a poorly written book that no
one else has mentioned. So from Pisa encouraging a
dialogue. Uh huh. Posting online environment for a
book or open educational resource to be able to allow
readers of students to be I uh huh, mhm
period. So, yes, getting good student feedback
about a book, especially anonymous feedback. They don't
feel like they're pressure to give you. No,
it would be great. True user experiences of How
does the book field are you? How does it
read? What do you find? Complicated? I
think that would be great, I think. Promoting
for the box among university and among students because I
believe you are currently promoting for this open access box
and everyone coming to the library can find them and
check them, and they decided to buy or not
. So if the library publishing services can do something
like this, which is collect, professors and students
know about this kind of open access books. I
believe it would be a good thing to help their
authors write more books or even write better box.
I also think that part of this is a necessary
building, a better book. It's building a better
experience. And so as I listened to Keith and
Greg talk, what they're talking about is going beyond
this book structure like the three dimensional images that I
can now manipulate this be a much better sense of
that and some of the things that he was doing
as far as the Java applications of things. So
it goes beyond building a better book to building a
better experience, and so I need to do some
reading. But I didn't want to see it,
so I want to see those planes interact, and
how do I do that? And how does that
create a better learning experience. So I think sometimes
we've got words that mean certain things, like a
buck. When I think of a book, I
think of this, But in the conversation, I
think this is limiting because I know what he has
online is more than this. You've got all the
interactive kind of components that don't fit in a book
. And so on some level, and you say
what what can we do to help? My thought
is, how do we move beyond the word and
start to move into the idea which is going to
require different types of media, which is what you
guys are doing and how do we leverage what you
guys are now entering into, And that builds a
better learning experience? Mm hmm. Where is your
online version hosting? Is that sitting on a server
on your desk or as a secure place? It's
mhm. I started off with just on the VM
, my website. I made a page for it
, talking about yeah, what we call Apex,
the affordable print and electronic textbooks. Then we try
to get a lot of people working together, and
it hasn't grown as much as we want it to
, but that's where the apex of Apex cotton fields
comes from. Um, so we started doing that
. And then when I found out I wasn't promoting
the book all that much just because I wasn't sure
it was ready. I want to make sure it
was good before I told everyone about it. And
then, um, a large state school in California
contacted me and said, We're thinking about we're gonna
We're gonna pilot it in the spring, maybe full
adoption in the fall. And, um, we
have 26,000 students and, uh, so that I
thought I should I should be more proactive about advertising
this. That's where I had that website. So
on fx calculus dot com, you can find out
more than you ever want to know about the book
. So I hosted it there. And then there's
a place called Git Hub, which has a code
. Um, I post all the source files there
so people to download. So that's sort of where
it lives. For people to find into the impact
Mhm. Right. And then And I personally in
all my computer at school, I I back up
every week. Um then we have our own servers
at school that I back up to. And then
every week I put something in Dropbox and then on
my Microsoft live, I mean exists in lots of
secure places, just in case something crashes. I
won't cry. Have a safety there back to some
things you're saying to about. And how can a
librarian help? One very practical thing that's that's not
all that exciting is the process of taking my files
and actually making a book out of it. Um
, there's a bit of a learning curve to that
. And so from the librarian standpoint, you maybe
you could help saying, Hey, we have resources
if you want to. Actually, you have course
materials. We can help you compile this into a
book like my friend, um, who made this
little Matt loud thing. He has noticed no dreams
of people adopting this across the country. It was
for our students, but it's still a nice little
package for him, and it took him a little
while to figure out how to get that done.
And that would be something that you know, for
a localized thing, just I have materials. It
would be nice if I had a little package.
How can How can you walk me through that process
? Then the better thing that you're alluding to is
sure I've looked at your book. That's great.
I saw someone else in a different field doing this
kind of thing. I wonder if you could look
at that because you guys have such a broad scope
of what's out there and I have such a limited
math scope of everything. And then if you could
say, you know, I saw Veterinarian Sciences doing
something like this, I wonder if you could do
something similar in Count three. I have no idea
what veterinary sciences that do, but you guys seem
to have your fingers and everything. At least the
librarians. I talked to a B M. I
do. And so the next. Oh, that'd
be pretty cool. And I don't know how to
get that dialogue started, but it would be something
that I think would be very useful. Okay,
Mhm feel like the students, one goat and online
content and the hard copy. I do. I
at first. At first I didn't care if they
printed up a copy had a paper copy. And
now I tell them, Get a paper copy somehow
. Um, I do make a profit off of
it, and I tell them that. So if
you bite in the bookstore, I get about two
bucks back. But you can print BME. They
have free printing, which is stupid, but they
do and so just printed for free if you want
to, um, and go forward. But I
think you're gonna want to have the electronic version and
a paper copy that you can write in. And
then again, this is It's like I'm plugging my
book and all that kind of stuff. It's not
really but one thing we realized when I sat down
to design the page. Um, my friend Troy
, my department had said, Is there a way
that we can look at the page and design it
differently? And we realized that textbook companies try to
maximize information on a page, and if you look
at a regular book, it can be very,
very dense. There's colors everywhere these big orange boxes
and green box in the blue box and all this
stuff, and they pack information on there. And
so then his idea was at the bottom of each
page. Put a white space two inches for notes
. I want you, I want you to write
in the book,$12. Just write in the
book. Don't try to sell it back. And
so I find my students doing that. Either in
this copy or the things they point out that they're
actually writing in the book and they'll come into me
and they have it all dog here. Then things
are written in there and they have that space there
, and I think that's pretty cool. I'm glad
Troy had that idea. Um, because again,
it's their book, and I hear people talking that
the next generation of students are going to live in
the cloud. They're going to do everything on their
ipads, and maybe that's true. Um, right
now it's not. They still want a paper copy
when when my students are working on things and they
have to write in them, even though they're very
literate with all the various tools, they say they
need to print them out for that kind of process
through them. So I think that it's valuable to
have something they can do that? Yes. So
you mentioned writing something. Visual 100 books. And
with software job usually loverboy. Mhm. I was
wondering if has had issues where the environment, uh
, we're using for the media have changed. What
you had was working a mhm, um, Keith
answering the second two out jump in. But so
right now, that three d thing that I showed
you that works Natively and Adobe Reader, Adobe Acrobat
only, um, there is something that will be
supports and most other pdf readers. It's just it's
overhead that they don't want to take on, which
I think is fantastic for most of my pdf reading
. I don't want that either. So I only
use reader when I want to manipulate that in the
back of my head. I'm not sure how long
and nobody is going to support that. And so
I kind of wonder I had these cool graphics and
then in a couple of years, Adobe 12 comes
out and they said they dropped it, and then
I'll cross that when I get there. But I
do kind of wonder about that. Oh, you
look fairly young that I suspect you probably at least
remember that at one time of Apple Macintosh is used
, um, a different operating system than the one
that they use. Now, Um, we were
using a software package for a course that I taught
that did not have a Windows version. It ran
only on Mac OS, and this was Mac OS
six or Mac OS seven. And we used it
for the first couple of years on the Macintosh is
that we had in the math Emporium and when Mac
changed from they're old os to their OS X,
or whatever they call it now that stopped working.
And it was actually One of the impetus is for
me to look for something else that I could use
with this course. And so we found we found
an openly licensed software that had a steeper learning curve
. To be honest, it was is a harder
software to learn how to use than than what we
had been using. But it worked, and and
that was a a big thing for us. So
, in fact, yes, that happens, and
at least something good came out of it because we
actually ended up using a an open source program to
replace a close source program. Um, and there
was there. Like I said, there was a
little bit of a we had to budget time for
teaching the software because the learning curve was a little
more difficult. It was a little more sophisticated than
what we had been using, but we were very
happy with the results. Yes, Mhm. Good
questions. Okay. Lots to talk about. Well
, we were at 5. 45. There's food
and love for folks to You want to stick around
? Thank you so much. Each of you for
coming and oh.