- St. Norbert College Magazine
- 2018spring
- Build Your Own Textbook Initiatives Help Students Succeed
Build Your Own Textbook Initiatives Help Students Succeed
You stop by a used bookstore and pick up a title of interest. Arriving home, excited to crack it open, you find scribbles from the past owner. Perhaps you examine their annotations, chuckle at their comments, or wonder why they underlined so heavily on Page 65 and nothing on Page 4. Who could they be?
What if you could find out.
Better yet, what if you could not only know who scribbled in those pages, but could also interact with them from afar: Puzzle together about the characters, crack jokes about the narrative, and even add your own perspective, your own writing and research to its pages.
Well, you can. In fact, it’s a phenomenon on the rise at innovative colleges and universities. Just ask Robin DeRosa, chair of interdisciplinary studies at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire. DeRosa is a leader in the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, also known as the open movement, which aims to make education more accessible to more people.
OER includes learning tools in various media that are in the public domain, are free to access, and can sometimes be added to or modified to create a collaborative resource. In place of the traditional three R’s of educational practice, OER has its own five R’s:
- Retain: Make and own a copy
- Reuse: Use in a wide range of ways
- Revise: Adapt, modify and improve
- Remix: Combine two or more
- Redistribute: Share with others
BYOT: Build your own textbook
DeRosa didn’t set out to be a champion of open education. Her Ph.D. is in early American literature, focusing on the 1400s to the 1800s. But there’s something notable about the writing in that time period: It is all freely available in the public domain.
DeRosa noticed she was assigning an expensive required anthology for her classes, but that most of the texts she assigned from the anthology had been published centuries ago and so were actually available for free in the public domain. So she decided to do something about that.
DeRosa sent out a call to students to create a new free textbook, together. When it came time for this summer project, DeRosa had 10 collaborators – some alums, some current students. They researched, and copied and pasted and, cooperatively, through a grant supplied by DeRosa herself, cobbled together a free textbook the class could use for the upcoming term.
Simple, right? Done, right? There’s more to the story.
Hitting a pay wall
Reducing textbook cost seems like a simple issue. Who doesn’t want to pay less for things? Cheaper books: people are happy; case closed. But the more DeRosa researched, the more she found that textbook costs actually correlate to a much bigger issue: student success and retention.
A massive 2016 survey involving 22,000 students found that textbook affordability could be a matter of success or failure for students, and correlated with rates of passing classes and ultimately graduating. And research shows that those with four-year degrees make 98 percent more per hour than those without a degree.
Ideally, this is how students would progress:
- Commit to attending college
- Take classes, earn credits
- Accumulate some debt in the process
- Graduate with a degree
- Earn higher wages to pay off debt
But students who do not complete their degrees are struck with a double-whammy: accumulated debt without the degree credentials to earn enough to pay it off.
DeRosa explains: “The problem with the wage bump is that you don’t get it if you don’t graduate. And the even bigger problem is that if you go to college and you get some credits, you’re likely accumulating debt as you get those credits. And then when you don’t graduate, and you don’t get the wage bump, you get this awful double-irony, which is that you accumulated debt and you didn’t ultimately get the payoff of having that degree.
“More than 31 million students in the last 20 years have failed to complete college. Those are students who started and didn’t finish. ... These are troubling statistics that do affect even elite private institutions.”
So, finding ways to help students successfully complete their degrees becomes an ethical, social justice issue that can change the course of student lives. In the 2016 Florida Virtual Campus Student Textbook & Course Materials Survey, 38 percent of students reported getting a poor grade because they couldn’t afford the textbook, and 20 percent reported failing for this reason. Importantly, 48 percent of the students surveyed reported taking fewer courses because of textbook cost, and research shows that the longer it takes for students to complete credits, the less likely they are to graduate. That’s costly both for students and for universities.
DeRosa says that, typically, students have some sort of plan for managing tuition costs, but the unexpected ancillary expenses like textbooks, transportation, lodging, food and childcare can often tip the scales toward pricing out of a college program. And that can mean a lifetime of debt with no degree to pay it off.
Clearly, it’s a multifaceted issue, but OER is one solution. “We won’t solve food insecurity in Wisconsin right now,” DeRosa says. “We can solve textbooks right this second through open educational resources.”
Just learning
DeRosa’s entrance into OER was a catalyst for other innovations that make learning more accessible for more students. Like Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, which argues that we must have fundamental needs like food and shelter met before we can focus on higher orders like belonging, accomplishment, or achieving our fullest potential, DeRosa recognized there were some basic student needs that had to be addressed to get them into the classroom, let alone to graduate, transform themselves and the world, and grow their earning power.
“How can my students come to know the content of my discipline if they can’t even get to the table in the first place,” DeRosa says, “if they are precluded from learning because it is too expensive?”
So, going back to basics, DeRosa paid attention to core needs. She piloted extended hours and a food pantry program at school offices, taking just three days to launch. She set up a shared network of community resources that helped students gain access to childcare, rides to class and even veteran assistance to manage the complexities of GI Bill funding. Because open educational resources are only free if students have a device on which to read them, DeRosa raised funds for laptops that could be checked out for student use, and set up peer tech-mentors to coach reluctant users through new apps and e-tools.
With these basic needs met, students were freed for higher thinking, for group work, for collaboration and building something new. For DeRosa, what happened next was beyond the book.
BYOT: Build your own transformation
DeRosa recalled her students’ reactions the first couple weeks of class using the new crowdsourced, OER textbook she had crafted with her team of 10 the previous summer. DeRosa found her students missed the annotations, introductions and sidebars that traditional textbooks provided alongside the texts they had anthologized. So she got creative. She assigned her own students to projects researching the historic and cultural context for their texts, plus supporting information. These elements they added to the online textbook and shared with the class.
“This is the work my students were going to do anyway,” she says. “ ‘Just do this work and instead of putting it on Moodle or Blackboard, we’ll put it in the textbook and we will build this thing together.’
“And then it started getting fun. ... It was this awesome group activity and we started getting fired up – infographics, maps, videos. There is no end to what we could do. Discussion questions. They loved it. We could drop in virtually anything that we wanted. We could drop in current events, if something happened in the world that had relevance.”
Then DeRosa layered the online textbook program with an early version of an app called Hypothesis, which allowed students to make comments on the text, create chats, and contribute content interactively and publically. The students were all in on a live, constantly updated interactive textbook.
Since Hypothesis was in its early stages, the app developers kept tabs on DeRosa’s class, monitoring their interactions. By the end of the semester, DeRosa’s class of 18 students had collaboratively created 10,000 textbook notations.
DeRosa has expanded her collaborative practices beyond the textbook. Now, when her students write papers, they can post them to the Creative Commons, a venue for open materials that provides multiple levels of licensing and sharing options. Her students learn how to select licenses for their own materials, and they craft a public e-portfolio of their work in the course on a platform called Domain of One’s Own. They then build “pathways” toward their work via social media so people can find it and exercise the five R's of open education: retain, reuse, revise, remix, redistribute.
DeRosa notes that the challenge with current learning platforms and course-management systems (CMS) like Moodle or Blackboard is that the content is locked away so no one outside the course can access it, learn from it, or become privy to what students are building and how they are reflecting. At the end of the semester, when new courses are added in preparation for a new year, the student work is often wiped clean from the CMS, their reflections and additions pushed into a digital burn bin. And that’s a missed opportunity, DeRosa says.
Instead, using OER technology, student work has staying power and is worthwhile, both contributing to the public conversation on the course content itself, but perhaps more potently serving as data to help educators understand the student experience to craft better learning opportunities. By the time students graduate, notes DeRosa, "They have shared their work into a community of practice for many years already."
DeRosa has taken open education resources and turned it into open pedagogy, with students as makers, crafting not only their learning experience but the very resources they and others can use in the future. Research shows that students using OER versus traditional textbooks have a higher rate of passing and a lower rate of dropping. “The world they enter after graduation is actually a world that they've helped to shape, not just a world they’ve inherited,” DeRosa says. This is a world where both faculty and students are the architects, building together.
Transformation at SNC
Robin DeRosa was the 2017 keynote for the fourth annual T3 (Transformative Teaching and Technology) Conference at St. Norbert, presenting “From A to T: Access and Transformation in Open Pedagogical Practice.” “We’ve wanted this to be a conference for faculty by faculty – an opportunity for faculty to showcase things that they have done. What’s worked well, what hasn’t,” says Krissy Lukens (ITS).
T3 features a series of workshops ranging from titles like “Contested History and the Production of Digital Story Maps” with Amy Lewis (Humanities & Liberal Studies) to “Smartphones as Student Response Systems” with Aida Michlowski of Marian University’s education faculty.
2017 conference attendees included faculty from St. Norbert and other colleges in the BLAISE Alliance (Beloit, Lawrence, Augustana, Illinois-Weslyan, St. Norbert, Elmhurst), faculty from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges & Universities schools, as well as educators from K-12 schools.
The 2018 T3 Conference will be held May 22. 2017 keynote DeRosa was “such a huge success that the DLI [SNC’s Digital Learning Initiative] leadership team agreed to make the 2017-18 year a focus on open education,” Lukens says. Members of the leadership team represent several areas across campus: Reid Riggle (Education), Laurie MacDiarmid (English, Faculty Development), Kristin Vogel (Library) and Lukens. DeRosa will be back next year for updates on this fast-developing field and to provide a follow-up keynote: “#OpenEducation – a Year in Review.”
A ‘T3 MVP’
Michael Olson (Physics) has attended SNC’s T3 Conference all four years.
“The T3 continually reminds me that teaching is an ever-evolving activity,” Olson says, “even if the actual material (e.g. Newtonian physics) has not changed for three centuries, and there are always more effective pedagogical methods being developed, as well as technologies to support those methods. In that sense, it challenges me to examine and improve my own methods and supporting technologies.
“I utilize open education resources in my PHYS 225 Electronics course to create an integrated, project-based course utilizing Arduino hardware and software in conjunction with online tutorials from SparkFun, our primary vendor. All of the software and tutorials are free open-source materials under the Creative Commons license, and provide an excellent starting point to build basic electronic design and coding skills. The students also use these materials as jumping off points, adapting and expanding them for their own projects.”
March 20, 2018
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