Course Title

Discover, Select, and Adopt Open Textbooks with the College Open Textbooks Collaborative 

Course Tweet (200 characters or less)

Make Education More Accessible: Discover, Select, and Adopt Open Textbooks with the College Open Textbooks Collaborative 

Facilitators

Una Daly, Associate Director College Open Textbooks Collaborative, adjunct Computer Technology Instructor at Foothill Community College, and ePortfolio coordinator.

Other Potential Facilitators:

Jacky Hood, Director College Open Textbooks Collaborative & Community College Consortium for OER

Course Description (no more than 500 words)

The course is a 3-step process to adopting open textbooks for educators.   The 3 major steps include discovering open educational materials and selecting appropriate ones based on various criteria; secondly following an adoption process where you work with other stakeholders on your campus including students to promote a best-use model, and finally the third step is the advocacy of open educational materials to others in your discipline, campus, or learning community.

Discover & Select

This phase is where you discover the work that has already been done to identify high-quality, accessible, and culturally-relevant open educational resources.  There are open educational material listing sites and repositories where you can browse and search for materials for your course.  Many of these include peer reviews and some of the repositories have authoring platforms where you can remix materials and post new ones.

Taking your course outline, you can choose materials that best meet your needs and combine them into a textbook or set of modules.  Reading peer-reviews and talking with colleagues is highly recommended as well as understanding accessibility needs of your target student population.

Adopt & Use

After locating one or more educational resources that meet your course requirements, you now will want to decide when and how to announce this to stakeholders in your learning community including students who are interested in taking your class.   Assuming a diverse student population, you will want to ensure that materials are accessible to all students regardless of disabilities.

In addition, you will want to determine if you will be adding new materials to supplement those you have found and how you might combine them for delivery depending on the format of your class and available technologies.   The Creative Commons licensing options that build on traditional copyright will be explored and how those can be used to license new materials and remix existing and newer open materials.

Share & Advocate

The final phase is sharing your newfound knowledge with decision-makers on your campus and collaborating to find new solutions for delivery of open education materials to benefit students and faculty.   Some campus bookstores may be able to provide a printing option for students who want a hardcopy of digital resources.  This can be much more efficient than having students print out materials in the library or at home.

Some faculty may be unaware of high-quality materials and thus resistant to the idea of using open educational materials.  Through faculty discussions and workshops, you can demonstrate how to browse and select to most efficiently find the high-quality resources available.

Administrators can help advocate with other stakeholders if they can see the benefit of more affordable materials for students and how this can empower faculty to create and adapt high-quality open educational materials.

Prerequisites

Since this is an online class, I assume that everyone is fairly computer literate and can use web browsers and even social networking sites.   Discussion between participants will be an important component of the class and most of this will take place asynchronously using online forums.

Motivation

The high cost of textbooks presents a barrier to college success for many students. According to the Open College Textbook Act of 2009, the high cost of textbooks prevents 200,000 otherwise qualified students from pursuing a higher education.

By providing free online learning materials, open educational resources offer one way to mitigate the cost barrier.

P2PU and the open educational resource (OER) movement are closely aligned in their motivation to remove barriers to education and make learning materials widely available.   We have provided this open and freely available open textbook adoption course in many formats over the last year and look forward to collaborating with P2PU to reach even more educations and self-learners.

Audience

Target audience is primarily envisioned to be college faculty and staff who contribute to the textbook selection for courses but could also include students particularly education students and self-learners as the search for and identification of high-quality, accessible, and culturally relevant open textbooks to drive faculty adoption is the College Open Textbook Collaborative mission.

Experience

Over the past year, the staff of the College Open Textbook Collaborative has presented this material twelve times in several different formats.  Over half of these were a 6 hour face-to-face class with a one hour pre and post webinar.  In addition, it has been offered entirely online in a web conferencing synchronous mode over 3 days and has most recently been offered asynchronously over 3 weeks with Moodle.  Of the students who participated in these classes, approximately 40 have give shorter, more targeted versions of their own at their own college campuses.