The hunt begins - Looking for American Government Resources

Today I am beginning to hunt for open educational resources (OER). I say "open educational resources" rather than "open textbooks" because "open textbooks" can be misleading. People want to Google "open American government textbook" and have the equivalent of their $150 textbook pop up, except for free.  It usually doesn't work that way.

Instead, you may end up cobbling together resources, a little here and a little there, until you have a comprehensive whole.  This is, as you can imagine, way more time consuming than simply finding a free textbook, already arranged in handy topic based chapters, etc.

The subject is important too. Some subjects are harder to find than others.  Fortunately, the subjects I teach have been kind to me.  When I converted my Intro to Law class to open resources, I actually did find a great textbook published by the Government Information Office.  Unfortunately, it only covered the first 5 weeks of the course, so I cobbled together materials for the last 5 weeks.

Wait - how cool is  this? When looking up my Intro to Law text, I found they have one for American Government too.  Woo hoo! They even have it translated into 8 languages.

A Google search also revealed a Flat World Knowledge text on American Government called American Government and Politics in the Information Age.  I was planning to emphasize media literacy in my course, so this might be a good fit. Plus, I am really impressed by the Flat World Knowledge model - students can read the book online for free or can pay varying amounts for different kinds of formats, including audio.  This puts cost control in the hands of the students.  Plus, they have an open license and are very customizable. Finally, unlike the text from the Government Information Office, the Flat World Knowledge Text has supplemental materials including an instructor manual, PowerPoint lectures and a text bank.  I've written a textbook and I know how incredibly long it takes to develop those supplemental materials. As a part time faculty, time needs to be an essential consideration.

I also had a look at the College Open Textbooks list, organized by topic.  They listed several resources I was familiar with plus a couple of others.  Also available from the Community College Consortia for Open Educational Resources is a list of free but not open materials.  Another great resource is the Textbook List at the OER Commons.  I've found that some of their textbooks are not textbooks in the traditional sense, but more like the resources I mentioned earlier.

So, in less than an hour, I have found what is likely all the materials I need for my course. However, I won't stop here. I've got to read though it all, comparing resources, evaluating the quality and what will work best for my students. I'll write about OER quality in a future post.

A couple of other things to think about:

• Keep track of your research. Write down where you looked and what you found.  When you get stuck and ask for help, this information will be really helpful to the folks assisting you. plus, nothing is more frustrating than knowing you saw something and not being able to find it again.  Ideally, whatever you choose will have a bookmarklet or some other way to integrate it into your favorite browser so that when you find something you like, the effort to save that info is incredibly easy.
• I'm using a Google Doc, to keep it organized with the other stuff for this blog, but otherwise I probably wouldn't recommend it because it takes an extra step of copying and pasting info.
• Have I mentioned my love of Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/)? This totally saved me during my doctoral studies and is pretty useful in this kind of research as well.  Here is a great Lifehacker article about it.
• Think about Delicious (https://delicious.com), a social bookmarking site. Someone mentioned this in one of the comments a few days ago. I love, love, love Delicious and it is a great tool for this kind of work. However, it was slated for death by its owner, Yahoo (or maybe former owner, I lose track). Anyway, Delicious has survived to live another day, but I keep my delicious bookmarks backed up just in case.
• Evernote (www.evernote.com) is, of course, a great option as well.
• Your librarian is your friend. Contact your subject matter librarian and enlist their help.  They are incredible resources. For my intro to law course, I used a lot of library database content for the class. It was free for students (though not open) and some of the databases had audio options for the students, which a lot of students really like.
• Call your bookstore NOW and find out any info you need to know about creating a course pack.  While some of the students will read the info online, many prefer a printed copy.  I work with the bookstore to get a copy of all of my course materials and my syllabus and other key documents bound and available for students. The lead time on that varies and you don't want to miss any deadlines.  I don't order enough for the whole class, but generally a little more than half.  So, for class of 35, I usually order 20 and that works out fine.

Resources:

• College Open Textbooks topical list
• Flat World Knowledge Catalog
• A list of free but not open resources from CCCOER, sorted by discipline
• OER Commons Textbook List