Chapter Overview: Open Pedagogy

This section presents theory, practice, and praxis of Open Pedagogy.

The first part of this section, Open Education: 7 Things You Should Know, presents a series by Educause that discusses main points about Open Education content, practices, and policies.

The second part of this section, Case Studies: Projects, offers a selection of Open Pedagogy case studies presented in the OER book, A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students, edited by Elizabeth Mays.

The third part, Interviews, Faculty User Stories & Case Studies, provides interviews with Open Educators David Squires and Gabriel Higginbotham, who have worked with students to create OER textbooks and materials. It also links to videos from OER instructors and learners from California OER Council member colleges and universities.

The fourth part, Student Rights & Faculty Responsibilities, discusses the ways that faculty have a responsibility to keep student rights front of mind when making open textbooks with students. Privacy, licensing, and digital literacy are among the main issues to consider. Also included in this section is a sample memorandum of understanding for student authorship of OER textbooks and materials. 

Table of Contents: Open Pedagogy

1. Open Education: 7 Things You Should Know — Educause
2. Case Studies: Projects — A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students & Elizabeth Mays
3. Interviews, Faculty User Stories & Case Studies —A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students & Elizabeth Mays, California OER Council
4. Student Rights & Faculty Responsibilities — A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students, Elizabeth Mays, Zoe Hyde Wake, David Squires

Open Education: 7 Things You Should Know

This section offers a series of articles from Educause on 7 Things You Should Know. This series of articles focuses on Open Education content, practices, and policies.

• Open Education: Content
• Open Education: Practices
• Open Education: Policies

Open Education: Content

Scenario

Melinda McGyver, a professor of environmental studies at Parkview College, was initially skeptical about using open educational resources (OER) as curricular material. Several factors led her to change her mind. One was that a growing number of her students were showing up to class without the required textbook; students said they simply could not afford the high price of that book. In addition, she was intrigued by the possibilities of OER after hearing a presentation at a conference about how colleagues in her discipline had used them successfully in their courses.

George Masters, a librarian at Parkview, offered to help McGyver locate a number of relevant OER for her to consider. With his help, McGyver discovered a rich lode of pertinent OER that were available at no charge from several repositories. She assessed a wide range of materials thoroughly and was pleased to find OER that would work well for her students. One item McGyver found was an open textbook. With the assistance of Parkview’s IT staff, she was able to revise the textbook to better match her goals for student learning. The inherent flexibility of the openly licensed material enabled her to seamlessly integrate course modules and resources from several sources.

McGyver was also pleased with how well learners used the open textbook. In one assignment, students documented local environmental issues, including air pollution from a local factory and concerns about the impact of fracking on drinking water. Once their projects were complete, the students integrated them into the open textbook so that future students could learn about these local issues. McGyver noticed that her students were motivated by this real-world application of their work, and she was excited that the open textbook she was using was being continuously improved by her students.

Student learning assessments showed that students in sections using open content scored a bit better than those using conventional materials. Based on her own day-to-day observations and anecdotal end-of-semester observations from students, McGyver theorized that students using the open content had performed better because they learned the content and concepts more deeply when they were asked to co-create knowledge used in the course. Many students thanked her for assigning free course materials and for empowering them to co-author improvements to the course.

1 What is it?

Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain or that have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation, and redistribution by others. OER include textbooks, curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, video, audio, simulations, assessments, and any other content used in education. OER provide ubiquitous access to high-quality, effective learning materials that can be easily tailored and freely adapted, revised, expanded, translated, and shared with educators and learners around the world. OER support the practice of open education, an umbrella term for the mix of open content, practices, policies, and communities that, properly leveraged, can provide broad access to effective learning opportunities for everyone.

2 How does it work?

Most OER are available in digital form, which allows them to be stored, copied, and distributed online at minimal cost. OER also includes printed content that is openly licensed. In some cases, students prefer online materials; at other times, printed content is necessary when computers or high-speed internet access is not available. Advocates believe open resources should be provided as editable files with the legal permission to engage in the “5Rs”: retain (make, own, and control copies of the content, including downloading, duplicating, and storing that material); reuse (use the content in a wide range of ways, such as in a class, on a website, or via video); revise (adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself, such as translation to another language); remix (combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new, such as a mashup of content); and redistribute (share copies of the original content along with revisions). Open licenses, such as those provided by Creative Commons, make it simple to allow such free and open use of content while retaining one’s copyright for that work.

3 Who’s doing it?

OpenStax, based at Rice University, has developed 35 textbooks that are used by students in college and in high school Advanced Placement courses. The Open Textbook Network, based at the University of Minnesota, provides the Open Textbook Library, a growing catalogue of over 480 free, peer-reviewed, and openly licensed textbooks and anchors an alliance of higher 7 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT … ™ Open Education: Content education institutions committed to open content. The BC Open Education Textbook Collection, via BCcampus, is a curated library of more than 240 open textbooks used by thousands of faculty and students. Lumen Learning has a catalogue of over 45 complete sets of OER course materials. Examples and repositories of open resources can be found at the Open Education Consortium, OER Commons, and MERLOT. The Washington State Community College System operates Open Washington, which helps faculty learn about and find OER. Creative Commons hosts a list of OER repositories and runs CC Search.

4 Why is it significant?

Open educational resources are flexible and adaptable, free to use, easily shared, and can be kept forever. They enable faculty and students to readily adapt educational content to meet local needs. For students, OER confer significant dollar savings while also giving learners ready access to a wide range of high-quality, highly flexible educational materials. Many practitioners argue that open education could be positioned as a core education practice, with learners producing, evaluating, using, revising, and sharing OER. For faculty, open content affords rich opportunities to shape educational materials and tailor them to learners’ needs, share knowledge across higher education, and participate more broadly in their field than might otherwise be possible.

5 What are the downsides?

Although OER are free to use, like all educational resources they require an investment to create, adopt, and maintain. Not all institutions are prepared to provide compensation, service support, and policies to support the development of open resources; institutions could investigate redirecting funds away from other content models to support OER development. One impediment to adoption is that some in the academy still consider open content to be inferior to traditional educational materials, and resistance to the concept of open education persists. Work is needed to raise awareness about the value and quality of OER and research about its impact of OER in the academy. Work is also needed to develop policies—particularly for tenure and promotion—that support the development and distribution of open content.

6 Where is it going?

As evidenced in the steady rise of open resources on ELI’s annual survey of key issues, acceptance of OER in higher education is growing. To the extent that the open education movement becomes more fully developed and endorsed—and if pushback continues to build against expensive textbooks, static educational materials, and business models that provide limited and costly access to educational resources—faculty and students will create, adopt, and share more OER. The breadth of open content will expand across a wider range of disciplines. Institutional policies concerning the use and sharing of open resources and their impact on tenure and promotion decisions will continue to evolve, enabling OER to be more commonly accepted as a fundamental tool for learning and contributing to academe. More funding will be dedicated to the development and maintenance of OER. Governments and governing agencies for higher education will continue to increase their recognition of open content, and research in this area will expand.

7 What are the implications for teaching and learning?

In an era when questions loom large about access and affordability in higher education, OER provide a channel to address some of those concerns. Research shows that students save money and can have better outcomes in learning environments where OER is used. Open content offers faculty a means to customize curriculum to better align with learner needs and interests and to collaborate in new ways with peers worldwide. The nature of open resources directly supports some of the most fundamental principles of education in that they are readily accessible, learner centered, collaborative, flexible, and capable of being adapted to encompass new knowledge. Working in an open education environment might better prepare students for work in today’s increasingly collaborative and interdisciplinary workplaces.

Open Education: Practices

Scenario

Having once been skeptical about open educational resources (OER) and open education in general, Professor Tony Abruzzi now considers himself an advocate for open educational practices (OEP). His change of heart began when he realized that OER offered students a viable alternative to increasingly expensive traditional textbooks. To address that challenge, he started using open textbooks in one of his history courses. Gradually, he began to adopt other OER materials into the course, including openly licensed videos and images.

As he learned more about open education, Abruzzi became intrigued by faculty who reported that adopting elements of OEP was helping them approach pedagogy in creative new ways. Just as intriguing were reports that students were becoming much more engaged in their learning through these practices.

To test these findings himself, Abruzzi decided to convert a history course to an OEP approach. He identified a wide range of OER curricular materials that he considered suitable. Rather than curate the OER for his students, though, Abruzzi invited them to choose from among the materials based on what most interested them. He asked students to identify a particular question and develop a learning plan for exploring that question during the course. He also required that students update and improve the course OER, create new OER where needed, and decide how they should be graded.

Abruzzi continued to lecture periodically and retained some classroom traditions—such as occasional quizzes—but he made sure most of the course time was devoted to helping students pursue the questions they had identified and reviewing their contributions to the course OER. As part of their learning plan, students also wrote or edited a Wikipedia article relevant to their particular focus area. Success in that course prompted Abruzzi to use a similar approach in other courses he teaches. When colleagues expressed interest in what he was doing, Abruzzi helped a biologist and a social psychologist adopt OEP in their courses.

Abruzzi regularly fields requests to present about his experiences with OEP at professional conferences. Through contacts he has made at such meetings, including some in other countries, he is now sharing techniques, tools, and experiences with a growing community of OEP practitioners. On his home campus, Abruzzi was instrumental in helping the provost craft new policies for tenure and promotion that take into account work in OEP.

1 What is it?

While educators often initially embrace open educational content as a way to maximize access to curricular materials and significantly reduce their costs, many instructors leverage OER to reconceptualize and improve pedagogy and advance authentic, participatory, engaged learning. One definition describes such open educational practices (OEP) as the “use/reuse/creation of OER and collaborative, pedagogical practices employing social and participatory technologies for interaction, peer-learning, knowledge creation and sharing, and empowerment of learners.” Open educational practices are seen as a means for students and faculty to develop new approaches to co-creating knowledge, assessing student outcomes, and designing programs. In these and other ways, OEP align with the principles of open scholarship.

2 How does it work?

Open educational practices seek to fully use the potential inherent in OER to support learning and to help students both contribute to knowledge and construct their own learning pathways. Embodying a commitment to learner-driven education, OEP involves students in “active, constructive engagement with [open] content, tools and services in the learning process” in ways designed to help promote learners’ self-management, creativity, and ability to work in teams. OEP also provide a framework for revising the practice of teaching to engage students in actively shaping their learning (e.g., by developing personalized learning projects) and contributing to public knowledge (e.g., by creating and sharing OER). Speaking to the importance of OER in making OEP possible, the term “OER-enabled pedagogy” has been proposed to define “a set of teaching and learning practices [that are] only possible or practical when you have permission to engage in the 5R activities”—that is, practices only possible when educational content can be retained, reused, revised, remixed, and redistributed.

3 Who’s doing it?

Art history students at the University of Wisconsin– Madison developed chapters to create an OER textbook based on their study of Frank Lloyd Wright architectural sites. The final assignment in a course on “Women and Medicine” at the University of Oklahoma was to create or expand a Wikipedia article on a female physician, healer, or biomedical scientist. To help students reach a deeper level of understanding, a psychology professor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University asked them to develop test questions rather than merely answer them. To help students take ownership for what they learn, a biology professor at Keene State College provides a wide range of OEP-related principles, “how to” information, and links to other relevant materials. Further, the professor requires students to identify topics that are of the most interest to them, how they want class time to be used, and what percentage of their grade should be attributed to various activities of their choosing. The Open Pedagogy Notebook details many examples of OEP.

4 Why is it significant?

OEP provide the architecture and philosophical underpinning for fulfilling the promise of using OER to expand collaborative, inclusive, accessible, and active learning and related pedagogy. Advocates contend that by making possible new pedagogical techniques that enable and facilitate more flexible and collaborative learning, OEP help faculty develop more agency and autonomy by providing new tools and a broader framework to help them revise, remix, localize, and contextualize pedagogy and curricular resources. OEP also give agency to students by giving them more control over the structure, content, and outcomes of their learning and by creating opportunities for them to create learning materials. In those ways, OEP broaden learning from a focus on access to knowledge to a focus on access to knowledge creation. In learning environments that adopt OEP, for example, students and faculty can collaborate on building and remixing openly licensed course materials in ways that facilitate engaged learning and the development of new course content that contributes to knowledge in a given field. A key tenet is the positioning of the learner as a central, active player in the learning experience.

5 What are the downsides?

Faculty may find it challenging and time-consuming to adapt their pedagogy to an OEP model. Some faculty perceive a loss of control when students are invited to co-create and contribute to course goals, activities, and content. Students accustomed to a more traditional approach may find it difficult to adapt to an OEP-structured course. Other challenges include lack of awareness about what OEP are, confusion about the multiple pedagogic options that OEP afford, and lack of institutional support to redesign one’s course to incorporate OEP. Further, many institutions do not recognize OEP in promotion and tenure policies.

6 Where is it going?

Broadly speaking, OEP are continuing to gain acceptance in the academy, and a body of research about OEP is building. Going forward, practitioners and researchers envision that the focus around OEP will evolve from a relatively narrow emphasis on development, revising, and distribution of OER to further development of related practices, architectures, principles, and policies. OEP practitioners have considerable interest in “moving beyond the textbook”—not just developing open textbooks and other OER but also pursuing broader efforts to develop, practice, and test new ways of thinking about learning and pedagogy. OEP advocates suggest the time is right for more experimentation, including developing the community—of educators across institutions and countries—that is seen as essential to mainstreaming OEP.

7 What are the implications for teaching and learning?

OEP have the ability to reduce barriers to access higher education for multiple types of learners. More broadly, OEP have the potential to empower students to be engaged, active participants in more authentic learning than they might otherwise undertake. Further, OEP go a step beyond active learning by engaging the learner in creating and revising OER and hence contributing to the learning of the students who come after them. Moreover, OEP offer potential for new approaches to pedagogy that, by one observation, can create “a site of praxis, a place where theories about learning, teaching, technology, and social justice enter into a conversation with each other and inform the development of educational practices and structures.”

Open Education: Policies

Scenario

Mavinda Blythe, an associate professor of environmental science at Royal Heights University, is an advocate for open educational resources (OER), having used OER in her courses for several years. Colleagues from numerous disciplines seek her expertise as they adopt OER and open education practices (OEP). The more they use OER, the more Blythe and her colleagues have been frustrated that Royal Heights has not articulated an institutional commitment to OER or OEP. That gap has created confusion about how OER can be used at Royal Heights. Further, the absence of relevant policies leaves unanswered questions about how working with OER or incorporating OEP impacts promotion and tenure.

After discussing these issues with the provost, Blythe agrees to lead a committee to develop a comprehensive open education policy. She consults with colleagues at another university that had written open education language into its guide for faculty promotion and tenure. She talks with a librarian at a different institution that has developed a policy that supports faculty creation and sharing of OER. An online guide to developing open education policy, published by a nonprofit advocacy organization, provides invaluable advice.

Those resources and Blythe’s further research help her guide the committee in developing an open education policy for Royal Heights. The committee starts by drafting a rationale for why an open policy is needed. They propose a series of actions that intentionally address issues such as the development, adoption, and sharing of OER and the integration of OEP into courses. The committee reviews existing employment contracts to determine who holds copyright to work produced with university funding because only the copyright holder can openly license a work. Much of their work is devoted to writing policies about how a professor’s work in OER would be treated as part of promotion and tenure determinations. They clearly align the open education policy with the university’s mission statement and strategic goals. The draft policy is discussed at length and then approved by the faculty senate. The administration endorses the policy, which is subsequently approved by the Royal Heights Board of Trustees. Having the policy in hand has sparked further interest in OER and OEP at the university, where more faculty are adopting OER.

1 What is it?

Open education policies are formal regulations regarding support, funding, adoption, and use of open educational content and/or open education practices. Such policies can take many forms, including legislation from national, provincial, or state governments; institutional policies and guidelines; funder mandates; and declarations from influential bodies such as UNESCO. Increasingly, colleges and universities are developing open education policies, which link the use of OER and OEP to specific educational goals—such as making access to high-quality education more equitable and affordable—and express a concerted commitment to use OER and OEP for these purposes.

2 How does it work?

Open education policies are designed to support the creation, adoption, and sharing of OER and the design and integration of OEP into programs of study. Such policies identify open licensing standards, technical formats, and accessibility for OER, and they articulate appropriate and permitted uses of funds in support of OER and OEP. They promote good stewardship of those resources by sharing in public repositories. For example, foundations, governments, and other public entities often have open licensing policies to ensure the resources they fund or procure are OER and are shared broadly. Policies at colleges and universities support the academic use of OER and OEP. Policies by international nongovernmental organizations often seek to frame broad standards and articulate accepted practices for OER and OEP and to promote their adoption.

3 Who’s doing it?

A notable example of an open education policy is the US Department of Labor’s 2010 Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) Grant Program, which requires that all educational materials created or revised with grant funding be openly licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (skillscommons.org is the public repository for TAACCCT resources). A guide to faculty reappointment and tenure at the University of British Columbia includes language about how contributions to open education repositories and resources can factor into decisions about promotion and tenure. The California Community Colleges System requires open licensing on publicly funded materials resulting from contracts and grants issued by its chancellor’s office. The Open Educational Resources Policy at the University of Edinburgh sets the default to open and provides guidelines for the use of open licensing and OER in teaching and learning. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation requires grantee resources to be openly licensed, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation requires all of the research (articles and data) it funds to be openly licensed. The OER Policy Registry (to be merged with the OER World Map in 2018) maintains a database of current and proposed open education policies from around the world. SPARC maintains a similar repository of US state open education policies. The OER Policy Development Tool and Institutional OER Policy Template help institutions create open policies. The Policy Brief on OER helps national education policy makers understand the value of open education policies. The Open Policy Network helps national, state, and provincial governments create, adopt, and implement open policies.

4 Why is it significant?

Open education policies provide clarity and frameworks for creating, licensing, adopting, using, and sharing OER. Open policies can help define effective practices and guide more efficient development and scaling of OER and OEP. When issued by governments, such policies ensure that content created with public funding is openly licensed and made widely accessible to the public. Similarly, open policies issued by foundations guarantee that grant money generates OER, maximizing the impact and reach of foundation programs. Further, open education policies underscore the viability and value of OER in teaching and learning and can inculcate OEP at institutions including colleges and universities. Having a critical mass of open education policies in higher education is an important step in ensuring that OER and OEP are scaled and sustained across courses and institutions.

5 What are the downsides?

To effectively influence behaviors and practices, open education policies must be specific (with respect to open license requirements, downloadable files from public repositories, editable files that can be opened in nonproprietary applications, accessibility requirements, etc.). Administrators who are charged with the development of open education policy may not fully understand the opportunities inherent in OER and OEP, particularly for learners. In these areas, training is vital to increase awareness of open policies and what they mean in practice. Consensus around certain open education definitions remains elusive, which presents a potential barrier to the development of universally adoptable policy. The grassroots ethos of the open education movement can sometimes be at odds with top-down pronouncements that are not fully informed by open education practitioners. Development of open education policy can be hindered by a lack of consensus about OER and OEP and a lack of clarity around related rewards. Flexible policies that shift the default setting to open can raise awareness and nudge behavior without invoking concerns about academic freedom.

6 Where is it going?

As more open education policies are adopted, a growing number of foundations, governments, and institutions are developing and implementing their own open policies. As OER and OEP continue to scale, governments, funders, educational institutions, and others will continue to refine and test new and more nuanced open education policies. Developers and users of such policies will continue to assess the assumptions that inform them and the scope. As the understanding and prevalence of OER and OEP continue to grow, broader adoption of open education policies will likely become more commonplace.

7 What are the implications for teaching and learning?

Open education policies are an essential lever for clarifying what can be gained by the use of OER and what constitutes effective OEP. As such, these policies are invaluable in efforts for OER and OEP to be better understood, sustainably funded, and more widely adopted in teaching and learning. Well-crafted policies that reflect institutional priorities while providing support for faculty will increase the acceptance and use of OER and will help scale OEP. The development of open education policies will help move OER and OEP from the periphery to the center of education practice. Once that goal is realized, learners worldwide will benefit from greater access to open, high-quality, highly flexible learning content and practices.

© 2018 EDUCAUSE. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY 4.0 International License. EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit membership association created to support those who lead, manage, and use information technology to benefit higher education. The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative is an EDUCAUSE community committed to the advancement of learning through the innovative application of technology. For more information about ELI, please contact us at info@educause.edu.

Quiz: Open Pedagogy — Educause

Case Studies — Projects

This section offers a selection of Open Pedagogy case studies presented in the OER book, A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students, edited by Elizabeth Mays. These case studies provide examples of projects instructors have used to engage learners in creating, adapting, and editing OER textbooks and materials. 

Case Studies:

Are you considering embarking on an Open Pedagogy project in your classroom? These projects will inspire you!

• Case Study: Frank Lloyd Wright and His Madison Buildings
• Case study: Antología Abierta de Literatura Hispánica
• Case Study: Principles of Microeconomics
• Case Study: Expanding the Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature

Case Study: Frank Lloyd Wright and His Madison Buildings

Anna Andrzejewski, an art history professor and director of graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was looking for a hands-on learning project for her Frank Lloyd Wright art history course.

The class was an upper-division, research course designed for art history majors or grad students, but also open to other disciplines. Andrzejewski had arranged access to seven historic local Frank Lloyd Wright houses for the course.

Known for hands-on learning projects that used student research to get ideas out into the broader community, she had had her students create walking tour booklets and websites documenting architectural landmarks in previous courses, but for this class she wanted to do something different.

Steel Wagstaff, an instructional technology consultant at the university, approached her with the idea of having the students create a book using Pressbooks, an online book-formatting software often used for open textbook projects.

Because Frank Lloyd Wright was not her primary area of scholarship, Andrzejewski said, the project became an opportunity for her to learn along with the students.

“Part of the appeal of working on this textbook idea was to create something that the students would participate in and feel invested in but that I could also use later on as a tool in future classes.”

Wagstaff said the project was designed to be a “renewable assignment,” one whose life extended beyond the term of the class.

“What I saw the students really engage with was the idea that they’re writing this for Anna but also for a public audience,” Wagstaff said.

Knowing that the next time Andrzejewski taught the course, her students would read the previous students’ writing and could add to it or could improve it deepened student engagement with the project, Wagstaff said.

In addition, students might not have access to the same private homes featured in the book in future semesters.

“We hope that this book will provide surrogate access to many of these places for future classes, since they likely won’t be able to visit all of them when the course is taught in future semesters,” Wagstaff said.

Before embarking on the major assignment, Andrzejewski gave the students a lower-stakes, small-scale assignment that helped them learn how to use Pressbooks. Each student had to write several paragraphs of architectural context for the building they would visit and upload images into the platform for an overview section framing the progression of Frank Lloyd Wright’s career.

From the low-stakes assignment, Andrzejewski said, “They saw what they had to do. It involved them and also scared them such that they were invested for the rest of the time.”

Next, the small class of cross-disciplinary students, which included journalism, art, history, geography, urban planning, and other majors, made field visits to seven local Frank Lloyd Wright homes that Andrzejewski had arranged access to.

Making a real book, noted Wagstaff, involves knowledge from lots of different disciplines, and the students in Andrzejewski’s class were able to have cross-functional conversations as they built it.

“It was different than ‘everyone’s writing their own research paper and they never talk to each other,’” Wagstaff said.

At each home they visited, students all had the same shared experience, but two or three took ownership to document that home for a chapter of the book. Those students asked the others for feedback during and after the site visit on what they found most interesting and what they should write about. Students got to pick a theme for each chapter.

“There’s nothing wrong with having an assignment that’s based on what you do in class, but it’s how to make it more than just a report and how to take it in a new direction,” Andrzejewski said.

From an instructional design perspective, Wagstaff said that before students do a site visit, they need to have a sense for what the product is going to be so they can develop research questions in preparation.

Andrzejewski gave her students flexibility within constraints for the group textbook assignment.

First and foremost, the assignment specified that each chapter must include a theme appropriate to the home featured. For instance: preservation, a period of Wright’s career, modular design, or a style of architecture.

In addition, the assignment specified that each chapter should include three different sections:

• An introduction, a one- to two-paragraph overview of the house, and a thesis statement of the chapter to follow;
• An architectural description of the building, to include three to five paragraphs of description and complementary images; and
• An interpretive thematic section, which was a minimum-three-paragraph, “abundantly illustrated” narrative that was to demonstrate evidence that they listened to their classmates at the class discussions at the site and that they had done additional research outside of class. (Sources for this research could include anything from oral histories to archival research, book research or interviews.)

Students did all the writing, image collection and uploading, editing, book styling and footnotes as they built the book.

The chapters ended up being very different, rather than uniform as in a typical textbook, which could be considered a strength or a weakness.

“[The chapters] follow a basic research model. They all have footnotes and they all have pictures. But the approaches they take to these buildings are pretty disparate,” Wagstaff said.

As of this writing, Andrzejewski and Wagstaff still have work to do over the summer to clean up the book, which is not yet public, in order to make it ready for public view. It will need editing and they’ll have to remove images that were not openly licensed, which are fair use for educational purposes, but not fair game for publication.

The next time, Andrzejewski said, she’ll make using open images a requirement, and build in a week of collaborative editing in the last week of class.

Wagstaff said they will also build in more interactivity in the editing and on the images themselves.

In terms of the content, Wagstaff said he noticed two differences between this and similar Open Pedagogy projects.

First, students used lots of footnotes, and many of them cited not just websites or books but personal interviews with experts and working professionals.

“These weren’t just surface-level quotes. These were substantive conversations they had with real people,” Wagstaff said, remarking on “the depth of engagement they had with actual knowledgeable working professionals.”

Andrzejewski attributes this to the interview training she incorporated with an oral historian before students embarked on the project.

Second, they did a lot of high-quality documentation in the form of photographs rather than just using photos they could find online.

Andrzejewski said the students got inspired by the possibilities for including media after doing the preliminary assignment in Pressbooks.

“They really wanted to be creators of evidence not just regurgitating it,” Andrzejewski said.

She said she felt the project was successful and is now thinking about a similar project for a different class.

“I was so pleased with it I want to do something like it again,” Andrzejewski said.

Wagstaff added: “What all instructors want is higher buyin–higher engagement from their learners. A project like this almost by its very nature produces that.”

Case study: Antología Abierta de Literatura Hispánica

Antología Abierta de Literatura Hispánica (The Introduction to Hispanic Literature) is the brainchild of Dr. Julie Ward, an assistant professor of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American literature at University of Oklahoma.

Ward said the anthology was inspired by The Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature project Robin DeRosa spearheaded in her classroom. When she saw that text, she thought, “That’s exactly what I wanted to do.”

In the fall 2016 semester, she embarked on a project in her Spanish-language literature course, Introduction to Hispanic Literature and Culture, in which groups of four to five students selected ten texts from the fifteenth century to the twentieth century to include in a critical edition.

The included texts span different genres of literature, with authors ranging from Christopher Columbus to Horacio Quiroga. Ward and a graduate student “research guide” had pre-established lists of texts students could review and choose from.

For each work, the student groups compiled context in the form of an introduction, at least ten annotations on the text about style, references and colloquialisms, an image and a biography about the author–their style, milieux and how the work relates to the rest of their works, and a bibliography. The texts, introductions and all other contextual elements of the book are all in Spanish.

The content of the critical edition was developed in the class, but the work on the text didn’t end there. In the subsequent semester, two students were paid to take the critical edition, verify the facts and public domain licenses, and format it using Pressbooks. Alice Barrett, who is being paid by the OU Office of Undergraduate Research, is one of these students. The other student, Karlee Bradberry, is an honors research assistant, funded through the OU Honors College Research Assistant Program.

”I had a great experience with the group work aspect of the project,” said Barrett, who said Ward emphasized group dynamics and started class with an article about a study Google had done about creating groups of people that work efficiently and creatively.

“For me what was most helpful was Dr. Ward’s organizational skills. It was very clear what we were expected to do.”

Barrett said she learned a lot from the project, including how to do research to find information, how to leverage library resources, and how to split the workload in a group. (She noted you have to let people do the work that’s assigned to them.)

Projects like this “will be successful if the group dynamic is successful and everyone knows what they’re going to be working on,” she said.

She recommends that future instructors considering similar projects make sure their students find sources in the public domain and cite their sources thoroughly and correctly.

After working on the project Barrett said she feels more confident about taking on big projects as well as writing in Spanish. In her work after the class, she edited and verified sources for “Hombres necios que acusáis” by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, one of the first feminist writers in Spanish literature. That experience really influenced her perspective.

“I have a perspective on Spanish literature I didn’t have before. It changes you.”

When released, the book will be appropriate for university Spanish and Latin American literature courses as well as AP Spanish students in high school.

Currently the book is receiving support from the Rebus Community to create a replicable assignment that will allow Ward’s peers at other universities to do similar projects in their classes to expand the text (view the assignment); to find Spanish speakers to edit and proofread the book; and to enlist faculty to beta-test the book in their courses and provide feedback to Ward on improvements and revisions.

To join the project, go to http://bit.ly/openAALH.

Case Study: Principles of Microeconomics

Maxwell Nicholson’s interest in open textbooks started as a student leader at the University of Victoria Students’ Society.

He ran on a platform of open textbooks, and won (when we spoke with him he was just ending his post as director of campaigns and community relations). His involvement in an open textbook was one way of fulfilling a campaign promise to bring free textbooks into use at the university.

After the campaign, Nicholson met with about ten professors in exploratory meetings to find out about the barriers to adoption for open textbooks. These included Dr. Emma Hutchinson, who taught the ECON 103 course that Nicholson (and three of the other candidates) had been longtime lab instructors for.

“It’s not going to go anywhere if the professor’s not onboard, so we were fortunate enough for Dr. Hutchinson to be really excited about it too,” Nicholson says.

Post-election, Nicholson’s first step to operationalize the project was to apply for a $4,800 grant for the project from BC Campus, which served as a granting agency for open textbook projects that could prove a demand. Despite a few bumps along the way, the funds came through for the project.

This open textbook project was different in that rather than being primarily the work of an instructor with funding to write it or a class-assigned project for students, the grant funded lab instructors to do the heavy lifting of compiling the textbook. The professor reviewed it and made the changes they thought necessary from there. This was doable since Nicholson had direct experience with how the instructor taught the class.

Nicholson had assisted the microeconomics class three times and the macroeconomics course once. “I’ve been fortunate to be on the pedagogy side to some extent, obviously nothing compared to professors, but when writing the textbook, that was really really crucial for me to have that lens when I was contributing.”

The textbook started as an adaptation of Timothy Taylor’s open textbook, Principles of Microeconomics, from OpenStax. But in the process of adapting the text, they found there were a lot of components that had to be written.

Ultimately, the textbook comprised around 30 percent material that came from Timothy Taylor’s book and 70 percent new content the lab instructors developed from their notes and the professor’s slide decks.

“The reason this project was most appealing is because she had her slides over here which taught what she wanted [students] to know, and then the publisher’s textbook was completely different,” NIcholson says. “So from the start our goal was really to align those two things.”

Nicholson says the lab instructors thought a lot about how students were going to consume the material, and what components of the course the instructor really wanted to stress.

They hoped to save students the cost of buying a textbook they didn’t really use.

The book was structured into eight topics, then the lab instructors divided them and did the heavy lifting to compile the chapters. Dr. Hutchinson edited each of the chapters to make sure everything was accurate, thorough and clear.

The process, Nicholson says, helped “remove the biggest barrier for professors–the magnitude of work that goes into redesigning a textbook.”

Nicholson says he thinks large first-year courses such as ECON 103 (which has 800 students per year) make the best candidates for OER–and are also the most likely courses to have lab instructors that can be leveraged to compile the content. (He recognizes that most professors probably don’t want to spend their nights and weekends becoming book publishers.)

“What [professors] can do if they know that they’re going to do this project, is take one of their most christened lab instructors, get access to grant funding and pay the lab instructor to work on the textbook,” Nicholson says. “Then they can be confident that it’s someone who not only knows the course, but knows the course as the professor teaches it.”

For his part, Nicholson says he learned a lot from the project, including understanding the work that goes into designing a course, and gaining a greater appreciation for good textbooks and discernment of those that aren’t well-matched for the subject. Creating OER offers great opportunities to customize a textbook to a course, he says, observing that it must be challenging for traditional publishers to create one-size-fits-all content for teachers, who may teach subjects very differently.

“I would hope they’re doing a lot of getting students to read this book and connect on it,” he says. “A lot of times it feels like they don’t.”

Nicholson, who is studying business and economics, says, “If you’re trying to create a product, you’re always supposed to ask your end user ‘what do you think?’”

So even if you don’t want to have students write a textbook for your class, he says, you should have some of your top students read it and provide feedback.

Otherwise, he says, students will either buy the textbook and not use it, or tell future students not to buy it.

“With a publisher’s resource, if it’s not useful, the students are going to stop buying it,” Nicholson says.

Of course, some might object to students having as much involvement in a textbook’s writing as Nicholson and his fellow lab instructors experienced, but Nicholson says that after the instructors create the chapters, the professor is going to change and edit things, and ensure the quality meets their standard.

“If you’re a respected faculty and you have the experience teaching and you’ve put that stamp of approval, I’m really confident that the resource is going to be [Dr. Hutchinson’s] resource. It’s not just some resource that was written by students.”

For students involved in such projects, he encourages them to appreciate the potential impact they might have through their involvement.

“If you’re involved in this kind of project, you’re going to be on the back end of the course design, and you’re able to take all the components that you thought were really bad about other textbooks and avoid those and leave all the really good elements,” Nicholson says.

Students working on an open textbook for a class should realize the impact they’ll have on future students who take that class–whether it’s the only survey course they ever take on the subject, or the foundation of many in their majors. Plus, they’re participating in an innovative movement in education.

Even for those who may not participate on an open textbook project, Nicholson says they can play a role in the movement as advocates, speaking with professors and outlining the benefits of OER, telling them when their book is expensive and there’s an alternative open textbook in use by a peer institution.

“Creating the buzz about [open textbooks]–students can do that.”

Case Study: Expanding the Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature

OER, Open Pedagogy, and the Early American Literature Survey

At the start of each semester, I write a simple maxim on the board for discussion: “All people are equally intelligent.” The underlying claim, in a paraphrased line from radical philosopher Jacques Rancière, is that any measurable differences in “intelligence” have more to do with access than with intellect. So, before course themes, content, objectives, or outcomes, I insist upon equality as a first principle and a constant practice. Then, as a group, we deliberate: what does “equal” mean in this context? How about “intelligent”? Is the claim true? How does it call upon us to relate to one another? Before the hour is up, we find ourselves in a thick of pedagogical inquiry, from which students tend to reach a fragile but thoughtful consensus: There really exists no one-size-fits-all measure for intelligence. Furthermore, the acquisition of knowledge assumed to be the epitome of individual intelligence–the “Jeopardy contestant” theory of smarts, as one student called it–is a tragic misconception. Learning, instead, is a collaborative enterprise: it’s dialogic, responsive and revisable according to new information, and applicable to our everyday experience. So, yes, all people are in fact equally intelligent once we define “intelligence” more aptly as lived experimentation, rather than the highest grades and test scores.

I’m very clear with my students from the start: I wholeheartedly believe and affirm this principle. It’s that very faith which prompted me to take up the ambitious Open Anthology project described below. And now I hope to build on that text and the pedagogical practices it demands for the rest of my scholarly career.

Teaching a survey of “Early American Literature”

Two years ago, I was fortunate to be hired out right of graduate school and onto the tenure track as an “Early Americanist.” All that means, effectively, is that, every year for the foreseeable future, I’ll be teaching the English Department survey course titled “American Literature to 1900.” That covers the period ranging from colonial contact with the “New World” (the world “new” to Europeans, that is) to the United States’ industrial era, i.e., the beginnings of America’s ascension to a global power.

I’ll go on the record and say it’s impossible to adequately cover any four centuries of literary history. But the truth is, I—newbie I was—made the task all the more impossible. For here I was, freshly trained in literary studies, newly recovering from the discipline’s foundational urge to “cover” everything. My students, of course, would read deeply within and widely across the tradition’s most celebrated authors. At the same time, it was my sacred duty to introduce the significant works of literature recovered since the explosion of “canon” in the last four to five decades. That includes the ever-growing roster of prose, poetry, and drama written by women, indigenous peoples, Africans and African-Americans, South American and Latinx authors, and ethnic immigrants.

So I went to work composing a reading list that could combine (or in the very least mediate) these opposing impulses. As a student of social movements, I like to adopt social history as a methodology, and so I saw “American Literature to 1900” as an opportunity to chart the various and contentious stories of the culture’s movements towards emancipation and equality. As “America” was made into European colonies and eventually a liberal (white, patriarchal, landowner) democracy, from a country of farms and frontiers into an industrialized economic and military power, its literature played an important role in expanding the reading public and creating the definition of a nation. The course tracked roughly chronologically and featured the representative authors and texts. Indigenous creation stories confronted European colonial documents; the early texts of New England’s Puritan pulpits were met and challenged by the voices and pens of native peoples, African slaves, and women writers. The American Revolution gave way to an explosion of social movements and an expansion of the canon stretching from Thomas Paine’s republican propaganda to the birth of African-American letters in Phillis Wheatley. The selections from the early nineteenth century included the familiar names of the “American Renaissance” — Emerson, Poe, Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville — in tandem with the literature of women’s rights and abolitionism. The final post-Civil War push balanced the social writings of the Gilded Age and Reconstruction with the co-emergence of realist fiction.

This literary historical narrative will seem familiar to Early American scholars, as will the course structure and the palpable tension it produced between content covered and time allowed. What was never at issue, for me, was locating a textbook. See, the literature survey course sports its own special media, the anthology; nearly exhaustive, this master text’s pedagogical significance is matched only by its physical mass. The leading Early American anthologies on the academic market, — Wiley’s The Literatures of Colonial America — are the size of small encyclopedias, coming in at 602 and 1845 pages, respectively. These truly impressive scholarly books, which introduced me and the current crop of Early American scholars to the field, have done a great deal in shaping our syllabuses and lesson plans, and, as a consequence, our conception of the era’s literary output. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Again, these anthologies are excellent, compiled and edited by leading scholars in the field–all acquainted and attentive to the concerns of teaching the literature survey course.

That first fall semester, I decided to assign the Norton edition, chiefly because it contains Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in its entirety. I figured a classic piece of fiction, one that allowed us to approach the fault lines between race, slavery, Reconstruction, and national identity, would make for a brilliant capstone. Yet for all of its helpful background material, framed by the anthology’s wonderfully generative thematic groupings, our class never truly used the book. Admittedly, that’s due in part to the sizable number of students who never even laid hands on it. The latest edition of the Norton American literature anthology retails at $81.25 to purchase and between $16 to $25 for a six-month rental. For many working-class, first-generation students, the costs of the text–or, the means to access it, a credit card, for example–are simply prohibitive. As a result, just two or three students bought the latest edition outright—though, they were all generous enough to share with friends. Some purchased older, used versions from online booksellers; still more relied on the web versions of assigned readings that I’d linked to on the course site.

The ensuing scramble and unevenness of our discussions proved a semester-long irritant. The medium was always the message. The few students who purchased the text had access to all the introductory material and paratextual supplements Norton offered. The rest had different editions with different page numbers, or online texts without page numbers; all seemed to be missing crucial excerpts at some point in the term. While a handful of students read along in physical texts during class discussion, others multitasked on laptops or squinted through smartphone screen readings; still others, lacking any portable device, simply stared at the front of the room. It was a logistical nightmare of my own doing because, let’s face it, the college anthology has one real utility and aim: to centralize all course content in an edited and professional manner ready to be taught. That is its appeal. The problem here was that, at the same time, the anthology was making some assumptions about our students, not just in its hefty price tag, but in its very centralizing and authoritative structure.

All the anthology had done for us at this point, where half the class hadn’t adopted it, was allow me to dictate the content of “American Literature to 1900,” raising “coverage” of authors and texts to supreme importance. To “learn” the period’s literature, then, was to consume a whole bunch of texts, be they found in a fresh, glossy, weighty anthology or retrieved as HTML code on one’s screen of choice.

Open Educational Resources and the Literature Anthology

Right away, I decided I would scrap the paperback anthology the following fall, but I wavered on an alternative outside of simply posting a syllabus of hyperlinks on the site and providing introductory context through mini-lectures. Wasn’t that just “banking education” for the digital age?

In the waning months of graduate school, — when I should have been writing — I began reading up on the burgeoning discussion around Open Educational Resources (OER), materials made free and available on the web to be accessed, downloaded, revised, and recirculated. The conversations of OER had already evolved beyond advocacy for their adoption as learning content, moving instead to sketch the larger contours of Open Education as a pedagogical principle. Recent studies–like the Florida Virtual Campus’s annual surveys –underscore that the integration of free and open textbooks cut costs, increase access, and improve student learning. Still, over and above replacing expensive industry textbooks, OER proponents contemplate how the virtues inherent to open materials necessitate new kinds of teaching and learning, methods that embrace the open ethos to reuse, remix, revise, and redistribute in content and practice. David Wiley, for example, has challenged instructors to discard the “disposable” individual assignment in favor of collaborative and “renewable” open projects. Gardner Campbell recently called for an Open Pedagogy centered on producing insight, where educators turn design over to students, encouraging them to take responsibility for their own learning. The discourse spoke to me.

In line with its disciplinary history, literary studies found itself at the forefront of open initiatives. Thus, after just a few weeks spent revisiting conversations around #openped, I discovered Robin DeRosa’s rather heroic “open anthology,” a text she created together with her Early American Literature students at Plymouth State. The project entailed that students read widely through the Early American syllabus and decide collectively which authors to excerpt and provide contextual materials for, before polishing and collecting their works in an online anthology to be read and revised by the following crop of students. Drawing on the legacy of Paulo Freire, DeRosa described the project in more detail:

The open textbook allowed for student contribution to the “master text” of the course, which seemed to change the whole dynamic of the course from a banking model (I download info from the textbook into their brains) to an inquiry-based model (they converse with me and with the text, altering both my thinking and the text itself with their contributions).

The more I learned of the project, the more I liked it; and so, in true Open Pedagogy fashion, I stole it to redesign my own course.

Adopting the user-friendly Pressbooks software, DeRosa and her students had managed to put together a promising framework for the “master text” in just a semester’s time, what became the Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature. As I reimagined the survey, following their lead and content, I saw that my inclination towards social history would be easy enough to retain. So, in the first half of our most recent iteration of “American Literature to 1900,” we read through the texts published in the extant Pressbooks anthology–which included a potpourri of canonical and “minor” writers–interspersed with selections from some of the more conspicuously absent names, including Roger Williams, James Fenimore Cooper, William Apess, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Margaret Fuller. Throughout the term, students agreed to complete short reading engagement worksheets, designed to both guide our in-class discussion and provide “training” in the editing skills needed to build out the anthology. In the latter half, we shifted focus to the hands-on project of remaking the anthology. We dedicated the final months to reading and discussing Open Education and Creative Commons licensing, learning the software, and practicing plenty on putting together materials for the various elements of the anthology—editing texts, locating and annotating biographical and secondary research, writing introductions, developing supplementary materials, and deliberating on how to make the texts “teachable.” Teams of three built entries for authors and texts not yet represented, and, in the final weeks of the term, led a classroom lesson based on their newly designed anthology chapter.

Truth be told, the analytical skills on display above are the same honed in any upper-level literature course, and they’re assessed through similar assignments: regular reading and discussion, oral presentations, secondary research, critical source annotation, literature reviews, etc. The core difference came in the final product, and here there is, I think, a significant distinction. The traditional boss-level challenge in an English course is the literary critical essay, i.e., it is the peer-reviewed journal article in miniature—only in a version read and peer-reviewed by just one expert, the professor. Don’t get me wrong, I still assign essays and I believe there’s much to be gained from the craft, especially in terms of sharpening argumentation. But I think most literature instructors will confess to the assignment’s utter “disposability,” which is to say, while the skills developed and assessed in essay writing should endure over the course of a student’s college career–and hopefully throughout their life–the actual assignment almost certainly will not. For her, the essay dies mercifully at the professor’s desk, resurrected momentarily only as a final grade is uploaded to the registrar’s website. That abrupt conclusion couldn’t be more at odds with the intellectual afterlife of the professional essay, where publication at least aspires to respond and further instigate critical dialogue.

At its best, then, an “open” project like the student-designed anthology should simulate those aspects of intellectual collaboration and growth. Nowhere is that connection more apparent than in the project’s demand for assessment. In our course, each group met with me to negotiate a grading contract that addressed the entire scope of their chapter, complete with an outline of group members’ roles and workload and criteria for evaluation and grading. The practice forced students to take a kind of critical ownership of the project by thinking both proactively and reflectively on their own learning and engagement.

Some Practical Advice

Dear reader, if by now you count yourself among the Open Anthology-converted, perhaps you’re curious still about the finer details that go into re-organizing a survey course around an OER project. I leave you with a few tidbits of wisdom from my experience–including a sample syllabus and assignments, all of which you are welcome to steal (I mean, retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute) for your own course.

“Syllabus Day”

• Because I have a flair for the dramatic, on day one I lugged the six or seven literature anthologies I own–all adorned with big, bright retail price tags–into class; I then heaved them onto a desk in the front of the room before launching into some ice breakers and then general introductions.
• Once the energy in the room felt upbeat and conducive to dialogue, I passed the tomes around and asked students to flip through the pages and mark down any familiar names and discernible thematic patterns across the texts. This is to provide a sense of the way scholars have conceptualized “Early American Literature.”
• I then explained that we wouldn’t, in fact, be using any of these books, but creating our own instead! That’s when I introduced the existing Pressbooks anthology, the final project, and the concept of OER.
• I handed out a schedule with abbreviated course and assignment descriptions to be read for the next session.

Technology

Unless you can ensure that each student has personal access to a device–smartphones alone won’t cut it, unfortunately–you will need to get into a computer lab at multiple points in the term.

• Pro tip: Reserve lab space early in the semester, preferably before it even begins. I went ahead and blocked out a room for the final month to help “train” students in Pressbooks (the software they would use to expand the anthology).
• Securing this space right away is especially important if your institution, like mine, is small and has limited tech resources on campus.

I am a great believer in the power of persistent and collaborative note taking.

• A class-wide or group-specific Google Doc will still get the job done in this regard. In last year’s class, I posted sparsely outlined “Keywords” and “Timeline” Google Docs to the course site and had students develop them via in-class and homework assignments throughout the term.
• For in-text highlighting and notes, I use the annotation tool Hypothesis.is, a web overlay that is not only easy to use in the classroom, but is tailor-made for groupwork tasks and for use in Pressbooks.
• The most important aspect of these tools–and, I would argue, of any you choose to introduce in the course–is that students can be given the option to publish privately among peers or anonymously with a private nod to the instructor.
• Last, I think it is important to give students the option of adopting “lo-tech” methods, too–i.e., note taking with machine-made pen and paper–as a substitute to the above mentioned.

As far as expanding, revising, and publishing a scholarly anthology via Pressbooks, Julie Ward has written a fabulous primer for chapter fifteen of this very handbook.

Assignments

If you’re looking to reproduce this project to expand Robin DeRosa’s American Literature anthology, but you need broad ideas on the course schedule and structure, and/or specific tasks to accompany the readings, and/or a general set of guidelines for the final project, I give to you my initial crack at a syllabus (Attachment A), sample “reading guides” (Attachments B, C, D, and E), and a final project assignment sheet (Attachment F).

Note: The “reading guides” (Attachments B-E) are effectively daily homework assignments that are to be peer-reviewed in class. Intended as scaffolding tasks to introduce students to Early American authors and texts, reading guides should also progressively build on the concepts and skills needed to curate anthology chapters in the latter part of the course while also helping students connect (what’s more than likely to be) foreign material–colonial documents, oral tales, Puritan sermons, etc.–to contemporary issues that seem more relevant to their everyday experiences.

Timothy Robbins is an assistant professor of English at Graceland University. His research interests include literature of the “Long Nineteenth Century” in the United States, especially the poetry and prose of Walt Whitman, as well as protest literature and reception theory.

Quiz: Open Pedagogy — Case Studies

Interviews, Faculty User Stories & Case Studies

This section offers interviews with Open Educators David Squires and Gabriel Higginbotham, who have worked with students to create OER textbooks and materials.

• Interviews — Elizabeth Mays, David Squires, and Gabriel Higginbotham
• Faculty User Stories & Case Studies — California OER Council

Interviews

This section offers interviews with Open Educators David Squires and Gabriel Higginbotham, who have worked with students to create OER textbooks and materials.

• Interview with David Squires: Social Media Texts
• Interview with Gabriel Higginbotham, Open Oregon State

Interview with David Squires: Social Media Texts

David Squires was a visiting assistant professor teaching in Washington State University’s Digital Technology & Culture program and works at the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation. In fall 2016, he had students in his Intro to Digital Technology & Culture course create two OER texts on social media, The Social Construction of Media: Social Media, Culture and Everyday Life and Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Social Media (but Were Too Afraid to Ask). We interviewed David about his experience. 

Tell us about the project:

The end product is meant to be a prototype of a OER textbook on social media. There are lots of marketing textbooks on social media, but nothing quite like a cultural studies textbook, so that was the goal: a model for what a social media textbook could look like.

How did the project unfold?

We dedicated about six weeks to the whole thing. First we read, wrote, and discussed copyright, Creative Commons, and open access publishing. Then the students started researching topics and writing. Finally, they put the pieces together as a Scalar book.

What role did students play in the project?

My students did most everything, start to finish. I played the role of project manager but tried to let them do as much of the work as possible. They rose to the occasion, tackling research, writing, layout and design—they even conceptualized the subject areas and structure of the project. At the end, they presented their work in public, for the beginning of Open Access Week. That gave them a sense of a hard deadline that wasn’t just me saying due date! It really was a moment in time that required a certain level of achievement. I’m glad to report that each chapter-group met the challenge, although a few individual students were not able to present.

How did you leverage the project to achieve the learning objectives for the class?

Over the past year, The DTC program at WSU has worked to clarify course objectives for “Intro to Digital Technology & Culture.” Here’s the outcome:

1.     Perform humanistic inquiry in combination with computational methods.
2.     Assess information and sources.
3.     Engage in collaborative and project-based learning.
4.     Practice creative design and analysis of digital media.

This project furthers each of these objectives:

1. Students learn digital research tools and a new web publishing platform, Scalar.
2. Students learn to assess sources as they research their specific chapters, especially as they pull web materials to feature in their book. A big part of this project was identifying valid primary and secondary sources, and knowing which were which.
3. They created this project as a class, and each chapter had a group of three students contributing.
4. The primary sources required critical analysis, while the Scalar platform allowed students to practice design and layout as part of the writing process.

What advice would you have for faculty planning similar projects in which they and students create open textbooks?

While I was writing the syllabus, six weeks seemed like a long time to work on a single project. During the semester, however, I wished we’d had more time. If I did it again, I think I would organize the copyright and open access material into one project. Then let the social media textbook follow as the second project. Which is a way of saying, I’d dedicate more time to the research and writing on social media. Research and writing can’t be rushed, especially when students are learning a new platform.

The other note I would add is that Scalar worked very well for this assignment in all regards except one—multiple users working on the same page at the same time caused havoc. We made it work, but knowing that in advance would have helped me prepare students. In general, knowing the platform in advance is essential to guiding students through the process.

If you did this again, what would you change? What are some pitfalls faculty can watch out for?

In addition to the above advice, I’d suggest reading Anne Cong-Huyen’s blog post, “Whittier Workshop: Scalar in the Classroom.” I wish I’d found it before teaching this assignment. She lays out the pros and cons of using Scalar very clearly, reminding readers early on that Scalar is a publishing platform, not a learning management system. I think it’s important to emphasize the publishing, editing, and document design aspects of using Scalar. That should be part of the assignment goals when asking students to produce open textbooks.

I’m not seeing individual credits for the students on each chapter, but I do see them at the end credited with the work overall. How did this decision come about?

The students who worked on those Scalar projects had varying degrees of interest in having their names attached. Some wanted to a byline on their writing; others wanted to remain anonymous. In the end, the class decided to create a contributors page for two reasons. First, because it prevented inconsistencies that would arise with some portions having bylines while others not. Second, after workshops, revisions, and collaborative writing they realized that a byline might not make a lot of sense. In the end, most students decided not to add their names to the contributors page and, if I recall, at least one decided to add her byline to a page she felt her own.

Did you have any conversations about which license to use with the students, and what was the outcome?

We did talk about licensing. We spent the first two weeks of the project discussing Creative Commons and selections of Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture. We were lucky enough to have WSU’s scholarly communications librarian Talea Anderson join us for one class period. She showed the students about twenty different open textbooks that she had on hand and asked them to look at the different licenses they used. Most used some version of a CC license but a couple had GNU licenses. That exercise was especially helpful for thinking about why some restrictions—like the non-commercial option—do not work for OER despite aligning with the spirit of creating affordable textbook options. In the end, the students decided they did not need a CC license. I was a little disappointed. However, they reasoned that using Scalar made it unnecessary because public Scalar books are easy to reproduce within Scalar but difficult to reproduce in any other form. They saw their prototypes as open (in the OER sense) to a only small community of Scalar users.

Did you discover anything unexpected in this process?

I learned a lot about social media in the process of this assignment. My students had a lot of knowledge to share that didn’t fully emerge during class discussion. Reading their chapters taught me that class discussion is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what students have to share about a topic related to an important part of their everyday experience. Seeing students struggle with Scalar also taught me that frustration isn’t necessarily bad. The students who experienced the most frustration were the same students who used the platform to its fullest capacities. Their chapters featured more interesting layouts, richer media, and better organization than the students who treated Scalar like just another blogging platform. The trick is to convince students to embrace the frustration!

Interview with Gabriel Higginbotham, Open Oregon State

Gabe Higginbotham worked as a student project assistant on open textbooks for two years at Open Oregon State. He received his B.S. in Business Information Systems at Oregon State in early 2017. Currently, he works as an IT consultant for OOS. In fall 2018, he will go to grad school abroad to study Human Computer Interaction Design. In his career, he plans to continue contributing to the Open Education field.

Tell us about the role you played in open textbook creation at Open Oregon State.

I have been involved with the creation of roughly 10 textbooks at Open Oregon State, including A Primer for Computational Biology (set to go to print soon!), Introduction to Permaculture and Introduction to Microbiology.

I worked on converting professors’ texts (either Word or LaTeX) to HTML.

Some of our books were created from materials used in online courses; others were LaTeX books that became online books to increase their availability.

I also designed the books (using CSS) to cater to either the needs of the professor or the purposes of the book. I learned HTML, CSS, and LaTeX on the job, and was one of the first student workers in the department.

Books at Open Oregon State are created using PressBooks, a WordPress plugin. We use some other multimedia tools including video and, more recently, H5P. We also use a number of WordPress plugins such as a glossary, code highlighter, and broken link checker.

When I was first hired, I was tasked with making a list of open textbooks available online. I also found replacement materials that professors could use in courses. Over the course of a few months I made an Excel spreadsheet of 4,500 open textbooks available on the web, and this list is continually growing!

What did you learn and what skills did you acquire in the process?

As a student in information systems, learning HTML and CSS in my position were particularly useful as an introduction to programming before entering my actual programming courses. The tasks of my position allowed me to navigate the process of problem solving in a relatively risk-free environment. Conversely, my courses often introduced me to techniques and tools I could use in my position with open textbooks. For example, learning PHP in my programming course allowed me to edit a WordPress plugin to meet the unique needs of a particular programming textbook.

Troubleshooting design issues in my position introduced me to platforms such as Stack Overflow and GitHub, where I could interact with other contributors and find solutions to problems I came across. I was able to apply the solutions in one problem to a similar context in another problem, often with a creative and unique approach. These proved vital in my courses later on, where I would encounter more complex problems such as querying databases and creating UIs.

My position was also beneficial in the realm of project management. Working on a number of distinct textbooks with different needs, stakeholders, contributors, and deadlines improved my ability to estimate task times and switch back-and-forth between various tasks and requests. This was useful and applicable in my courses, where I had very different projects that demanded varying levels of attention. I needed to allocate my resources to succeed in my courses as efficiently as possible.

Researching open materials for my position in turn made me more adept at finding free learning resources to augment my own course materials. Where other students may have paid for supplementary course materials, I could find suitable free resources, saving me hundreds of dollars on my undergrad degree. Most students I encountered had no idea such materials existed.

What do you see as processes or practices that lend themselves to best success when faculty and students work on these projects?

Communication is key when creating open textbooks. It’s imperative that students (or any other contributors) understand the purpose and needs of the finished book. Everyone must be on the same page or there will be a lot of duplicate or superfluous work. Checking in with professors, faculty, and other student workers can ensure that nothing falls between the cracks. A task management system such as Basecamp or Asana may be useful to create project milestones and allocate work. This is more important as a team increases in size. Open Oregon State did not take full advantage of a task management system, but there were only about five student workers at any given time.

A cohesive “vision” for the department may help limit the scope of certain books that may require special attention (in my experience, these include math-based or programming books). This “vision” may need to develop over time and can include strategic intentions for both content and style. Since open textbook programs (and the open textbook industry in general) are relatively new for most universities, I believe this process is still in its infancy. A few standouts have emerged including BCcampus and the University of Minnesota. These are definitely models to follow for the establishment of new open textbook departments. I believe that OSU is emerging as an exemplary model.

It is imperative that the knowledge gained from student workers not be lost when they leave or graduate. There is a substantial learning curve that comes along with being hired in any position. Using previous student workers’ perspectives and experiences to train new hires can not only speed up book production, but create a more cohesive body of work and culture within the department. I cannot stress enough how important I believe this legacy knowledge is.

Fostering a collaborative and open environment is vital for student workers to thrive and find creative solutions to complex problems. Create a space where students can work together and share input; this keeps them motivated and engaged when design work gets tedious. I was lucky to have a patient and open boss at Open Oregon State who listened to my ideas and considered my advice when making decisions. I would suggest that other open textbook department heads do the same: consider the opinions of your students workers. They have the perspective of both a student and a faculty member.

What are some key challenges and considerations you would like to see addressed in such projects?

For professors generously contributing content to open textbooks, they must be made aware of the limitations that certain platforms may have. For example, an HTML environment will not have the same cross-referencing or indexing capabilities as a LaTeX environment will. Illuminating these limitations from the start will prevent unnecessary work and avoid disappointment as the book progresses. However, the advantages and rewards of an open book must be emphasized over any potential shortcomings that may present themselves.

The interactivity and availability of supplementary materials must increase as more textbooks are developed. I believe this is one of the main hesitancies of professors in adopting an open textbook for their course. As the trust in open materials gains momentum over time, ability to replace existing materials in courses with minimal effort and exceeded expectations will prove to be essential.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Students’ input is most essential, but can often be overlooked! I would like to see more projects emerge that aim to share the best practices of student workers, both within and across universities.

I would like to thank the Director of Open Oregon State Dianna Fisher for giving me the opportunity to learn and grow in this position. Her guidance, support, and willingness to allow me to take on new challenges provided a fulfilling environment for my first job.

Faculty User Stories & Case Studies — California OER Council

“A multi-institutional study of the impact of open textbook adoption on the learning outcomes of post-secondary students”

“The Tidewater Z-Degree and the INTRO Model for Sustaining OER Adoption”

Babson Survey Report – Findings regarding OER

“Fixing the Broken Textbook Market” (study)

“OER Evidence Report 2013-2014”

“2012 Florida Student Textbook Survey”

Summary of Student Survey Responses, created by CA-OERC 2014

Other references on OER adoption (compiled by CA-OERC 2014-2015)

Quiz — Interviews & California OER Council

Student Rights & Faculty Responsibilities

When making open textbooks with students, faculty have a responsibility to keep student rights front of mind. Privacy, licensing, and digital literacy are among the main issues to consider. Also included in this section is a sample memorandum of understanding for student authorship of OER textbooks and materials. 

• Privacy
• Licensing
• Digital Literacy
• Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for student OER authorship participation

Privacy & Anonymity

Privacy is also a concern, both ethically and legally, when embarking on Open Pedagogy projects.

Robin says she handles this by offering her students the option to use a pseudonym.

“You might have people who want to be in the open but they don’t want to develop their own digital identity attached to their real identity,” Robin said. “But if you’re going to allow that as an option you just have to understand enough about how privacy works on the web and data so that you’re not offering them some false sense of privacy that isn’t actually authentic.”

Steel said he is conscious of the students’ right to privacy under FERPA when building materials in the course of their education. He suggested several options to protect this federally mandated right of students.

1. Get FERPA waivers from the students.
2. Make the open resource and credit the students who contributed, but without identifying that they were part of a specific course.
3. Allow students to use pseudonyms when building the open resource.
4. All of the above.

He noted that not all students will feel personally passionate or attached to the things they build under their name in a course, and especially when projects are public, digital and archived in perpetuity on the web, they should not be forced to be affiliated with something they’ve done as classwork indefinitely.

David Squires, a visiting assistant professor teaching in Washington State University, who worked with his students to develop an OER textbook on social media, solved this attribution dilemma by crediting the students who built the open resource at the front of the book, rather than attaching individual students’ names to the chapters they specifically worked on.

Licensing & CC Licensing Guide

Practitioners of Open Pedagogy generally recommend that students have agency in their choice of license for a class project. This means they should be educated on the nuances of the license and what that means for how their work can be used in the future. In addition, they should have a choice in the matter of which license is selected. And that choice should not impact their ability to complete the assignment for class credit.

In a recent event at Rebus Community, we spoke with Robin DeRosa, chair of interdisciplinary studies at Plymouth State University, Steel Wagstaff, instructional technology consultant at UW-Madison, and Amanda Coolidge, senior manager of Open Education at BCcampus, about their experiences working with students to create open textbooks

The three talked about pedagogy, faculty responsibilities, student rights, and agreements when students work on open textbooks and OER projects.

One of the key threads that emerged was the need for students to have agency over their choice of license–meaning they’re not forced into an open license without understanding what it is, and the alternatives.

Robin said she handles this by giving her students choices: They can choose whether to openly license their work or not, and if they do choose an open license, they can choose which license to use. (But if their chosen license is not compatible with the other licenses, their contributions may not get into the finished book, she said, citing the more restrictive CC ND license as one example.)

Robin said over the three courses in which she has focused on open, she has only had one student keep their coursework fully private inside the LMS.

“I don’t think there’s any problem giving them all of that choice. It only works to reinforce the Open Pedagogy, which is that you are in the driver’s seat and you have control over what you do,” she said.

Steel also mentioned the students’ intellectual property rights (i.e. copyright) to what they create.

“In part I think Open Pedagogy is empowering them to say, ‘hey this is your content. What do you want to do with it?’” Steel said.

When publishing an openly licensed book, he said, “our strategy was that we wanted to obtain consensus on the license.”

He also talked with students about the attribution component of the license and encouraged students to think about how they wanted their work to be cited and attributed.

Steel noted that students should be able to choose not to use the open license and still get credit for the course and meet its educational goals.

Amanda said Open Pedagogy provides a great opportunity to teach digital literacy to students around the concept of openness.

“What does it mean to contribute back to the public good, and is that something you want to do or is that something you feel restricted by?”

CC Licensing Guide

What is a copyright license?

Copyright restricts the use of creative works (written text, photos, graphics, music, film etc.) to the creator unless they give explicit permission to another person or company to use their work in a particular way — think of an author allowing their book to be made into a film, or an artist allowing their artwork to be printed on a t shirt.

These permissions are called licenses, and the resulting products are called derivative works.

Traditionally, these licenses have been granted on a case-by-case basis, and require every person seeking a license to contact the creator every time, for every use.

What are the Creative Commons licenses?

Creative Commons (CC) licenses give people “a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work” (Creative Commons). Instead of requiring each person wanting to use, share or adapt the creative work to ask permission, a CC license allows the creator to indicate upfront what they will and won’t allow others to do with their work.

There are several CC licenses, each of which grants different levels of permission to the public. Each of these licenses provides conditions for appropriate use, and can be differently suited to both specific kinds of creative content and the preferences of a work’s creator(s).

CC-BY: Attribution
Anyone is free to share & adapt the work, as long as they give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license and indicate if changes were made to the original material.

CC-BY-SA: Attribution-Share Alike
Anyone is free to share & adapt the work, as long as they give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made to the original material. Any derivative works must share the same license as the original material. This means that if someone remixes your work, or makes a new project that uses your work, they must also license that work under a CC-BY-SA license.

CC-BY-NC: Attribution-Non Commercial
Anyone is free to share & adapt the work for any non-commercial use, as long as they give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license and indicate if changes were made to the original material.

CC-BY-ND: Attribution-No Derivatives
Anyone is free to share the work, as long as they give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license and indicate if changes were made to the original material. Any derivative works may not be distributed. This means that you can make a remix or new project that makes use of the original work for private use, but cannot share or publish your derivative work.

CC-BY-NC-SA: Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike
Anyone is free to share & adapt the work for any non-commercial use, as long as they give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made to the original material. Any derivative works must share the same license as the original material.

CC-BY-NC-ND: Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives
Anyone is free to share the work for any non commercial use, as long as they give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made to the original material. Any derivative works may not be distributed.

These are also referred to as “open” licenses, a category that includes other kinds of licenses used for things like open source software.

Why are CC licenses important to Open Textbooks?

Open licenses are critical to open textbooks because they grant the public, including students and faculty, the right to retain, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute educational content without charge. These rights are referred to as the 5 Rs, and are the foundation for defining what counts as Open Educational Resources (OERs) (Open Content).

First of all, an open license guarantees free (unpaid) access to content for students. With the rising costs of textbooks, student loans, and costs of living, creating and supporting free educational materials is one way faculty and institutions can make a difference for their students.

While reducing the cost of education is already a big deal, the most permissive CC licenses also allow faculty and students the freedom to adapt content to make it work for them. With the exception of “No Derivatives” licensed work (which is generally not recognized as “open” for educational uses), CC-licensed works can be pulled apart, put back together, changed, updated, localized, translated, re-ordered, re-worked, annotated, expanded, simplified, customized, combined* and turned blue at will.

Without a CC license, any of these uses could be a violation of copyright law.

What this means in practical terms is that textbooks can be adapted to suit the needs of any given course, rather than a course being adapted to a textbook (or only using a handful of chapters out of a $200 textbook). And faculty and universities don’t have to worry about the grey areas of copyright law, or the risk of a lawsuit.

*Note: different CC licenses may or may not be compatible for combining/remixing. See CC’s license compatibility chart for more details.

Why use CC-BY specifically?

The CC-BY license is considered the gold standard for open textbooks because it allows the most freedom, and it is the only license that enables all of the 5 Rs without restriction.

CC-BY lets everyone working with openly licensed educational materials to get the most value, benefit, and use possible from the work we all put in.

What are my rights when I use the CC-BY license?

If you license your work under a CC-BY license for an open textbook project (or anywhere else!), you retain the copyright, meaning the work is still yours. The license can be thought of as “some rights reserved” rather than “all rights reserved.”

1. You have the right to be attributed correctly on all versions of your work, as well as any derivative works, and any changes made to your work are required to be identified.
2. You also have the right to not be attributed on your work or any derivative version of it, if at any stage you decide you don’t want to be associated with it.
3. Last, you have the right to change the license applied to your work at any time, BUT this will only apply to future users — anyone already using your work will retain the rights given to them in the original license.

All of these rights come with the caveat that once content is online it can circulate widely and be nearly impossible to trace. This means that practically speaking, while it is easy to remove your name or change the license on the original copy of your work, it is very difficult to do so on any other copies or derivative works. Keep this in mind at the start of your project when selecting a license.

Digital Literacy

This section offers an overview on Digital Literacy by educator David Squires.

Between Making and Integrating Digital Technology

Advocacy for digital literacy often falls along a spectrum from making to integrating computing technologies. We can see this tendency in the excitement over maker spaces and technology integration. Pedagogically, both have their value, as articulated in the representative statements from Educause and Edutopia:

“Makerspaces allow students to take control of their own learning as they take ownership of projects they have not just designed but defined.”
“Technology, when integrated into the curriculum, revolutionizes the learning process. More and more studies show that technology integration in the curriculum improves students’ learning processes and outcomes.”

If maker spaces let students become better producers, technology integration lets them become savvier consumers. While maker spaces emphasize student agency and technical creativity, technology integration emphasizes student awareness and technical proficiency. Both, however, come with a high price tag, making them unfeasible options for many instructors. Creating Open Educational Resources (OERs) with students offers one possible synthesis for making and integrating at a scale that Paul Fyfe calls “mid-sized digital pedagogy.” Working with students on an open textbook promotes collaboration with affordable tools while also letting students stay focused on course content.

When students begin to produce open textbooks, they necessarily delve into the subject area of the course. The task demands at the outset a level of systematic thinking that course materials assume in advance. Textbook authors and college professors usually take responsibility for course design and so set the parameters for student learning. By contrast, creating open textbooks as a class project invites professors and students to enter into a collaborative process for deciding what content to feature and how to organize it. One of the most challenging—but also energizing—aspects of creating OERs in my experience came at the beginning of the project when students divided the chapter topics for a textbook on social media. They had to ask critical questions about what counts as comprehensive knowledge and how best to sequence learning from the fundamental to the more specialized. Before ever worrying about software for layout and publishing, students immersed themselves in the secondary literature and research materials. Importantly, they drew on previously published open textbooks where possible, which pushed the collaborative experience beyond the walls of our classroom to a wider academic community. Students realized quickly that they had a responsibility to both the authors who went before them and the readers who might use their textbook.

Because I teach digital cultural studies my courses can unify digital literacy instruction with course content, perhaps more than other subjects. For my purposes, having students create an open textbook on social media encouraged them to explore aspects of everyday culture that they often overlook. For instance, as a class they decided that the textbook should include a chapter on the terms of service for using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other popular social media platforms. That decision required them to study seemingly arcane details about computer fraud as well as details about their own (often eroded) rights as content creators. The section on copyright limitations echoed the discussions we had in advance about Creative Commons licensing and the various motivations underlying the move toward OERs. The exploration of terms of service left students with a new awareness for their own labor as content producers on platforms designed, in large part, for mass consumption. At the same time, writing textbook material let them reimagine their role in class as not simply knowledge consumers but also as knowledge producers. The goal of turning college students into knowledge producers is not unique to digital literacy curricula, of course, but digital literacy can help achieve that goal with a critical eye toward the broader context of content creation under commercially oriented copyright regimes.

Concerns over copyright and proprietary content extend to choosing a desktop publisher and distribution platform. Many of my students need to learn Adobe tools such as InDesign for professional reasons. Given the cultural studies focus on my courses, however, we picked a free, open source web application called Scalar. Scalar was designed to feature academic writing with media rich content. It lent itself to our textbook prototype because it works on the book model. As a digital tool, however, it also takes advantage of all that interactive media affords, including the ability to feature and annotate images, video, sound, maps, and almost any web-based material with a stable URL. That gives Scalar an advantage over PDF publications, which my students exploited to incorporate primary examples from around the web, especially YouTube, in their original form. Admittedly, Scalar creates a learning curve that some students find frustrating. For instance, the platform lets users add media by linking it to specific parts of the text, rather than just dropping it between paragraphs. Although more complex, the benefit of creating media links is that the written analysis has a direct relationship to the object of study, making critical reading skills manifest in the organization of digital content. The added complexity encourages students to work outside their comfort zone as they think about the relationship between digital media and their own writing.

As a platform, Scalar exemplifies the synthesis of making and integrating digital media. Students become publishers in the process of writing their Scalar book even as they practice integrating digital media from various web sources. The assignment works to develop comprehensive mastery over the course material while students also ask critical questions about which materials get selected for study and which get excluded. Similarly, they can ask which tools become the defaults for learning and which get marginalized. One of my students wondered aloud during in-class discussion why textbooks have become a dominant tool from primary to higher education. It’s a good question, although not one we were able to answer in that class. Having asked, however, the student offered us an expanded sense of literacy that includes working with a wealth of media technologies in addition to reading books and writing papers.

That broad view of literacy needs full consideration in an age when we’re faced with choosing among an endless number of applications to solve any given problem, especially when many of those applications will threaten our rights as content creators and our privacy as consumers.

Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for student OER authorship participation

Agreement to Contribute to Open Textbook – Prototype

The agreement below is provided as a template which can be copied, pasted, and modified as needed for OER textbook projects.

Agreement to Contribute to Open Textbook

I, _______________________________, agree to participate in the creation of _______________________________, an open textbook, in collaboration with my professor, _______________________________. This work will comprise [part of] my coursework for _______________________________ [class/course name].

I understand that inclusion of my work in the final text is conditional upon my willingness to license my contributions under a CC-BY license.

I have read the Guide to Creative Commons Licenses and understand that a CC-BY license allows others to share, use and adapt my work so long as they attribute me as the original author.

I understand that I have the right to request that my name and/or work be removed from the original text, or change the license on my contributions at any stage prior to publication.

Signed: _______________________________ Date: ____________________

I, _______________________________, agree to work with my student _______________________________ on the creation of _______________________________, an open textbook in [partial] completion of _______________________________ [class/course name].

I commit to supporting ____________________ throughout this project, and ensuring they have the knowledge and resources they need to be an informed contributor.

I agree that the student may request that their name and/or work be removed from the original text or change the license on their contributions to this work at any stage prior to publication of the work.

I confirm that the student’s decision to change the license they place on their work or to not participate in the project will not impact on their course assessment.

Signed: _______________________________ Date: ____________________

Quiz: Student Rights & Faculty Responsibilities