The planning cycle begins again

It's that time again - Summer quarter is right around the corner and fall quarter will be here before I know it. It's time to get serious about course planning. When I started this blog this time last year, we were just learning we had adopted Canvas. Now we are deep into the pleasures of this new Learning Management System (LMS). I am really a huge fan of Canvas and love how it is constantly adapting to our needs, getting better and better every few weeks.

One of my favorite parts of this time of the year is thinking about what my focus will be for the new quarter. For my Global Studies Environment class, which I teach every summer at Highline, I hate to say it but this class needs a complete overhaul.  I love what I have there, but several of my favorite readings are dated, environmental problems that were pressing, like the global food crisis, have passed into being everyday miseries instead of headline grabbing events.  Thinking around climate change has matured.

I don't use a textbook.  Instead, I've gathered together a huge selection of articles from our library databases and open educational resources (OER).  One of the challenges of teaching with OER is that I have to stay on top of the readings and make sure everything is current - I can't rely on the textbook publisher to do it for me. That means rewriting all of my quizzes, recrafting essay questions, creating new discussions.  This is a ton of work, but it is work that is worthwhile. Students regularly comment on how relevant this course is and a good portion of that is because I craft the content to what matters to my students. Plus, the students don't have to buy a book and save a lot of money. They like that too :-).

Additionally, I want to think about gamifying my class, which is the process of incorporating game like rewards into the course.  I also want to make the class more personal for my students, allowing the selection of a book or movie to report on and having a class journal.  Whenever I add work, of course, I need to think about what I'm going to take away. This is already a robust class and, in keeping my student workload in mind, I need to maintain balance.

I have to be realistic, though. I am a part time instructor and am teaching this quarter in the graduate school at Seattle U.  I only have so many hours to give to indulging in course planning (which I genuinely do enjoy).  So, with the genuinely pressing need to overhaul the summer class, trying new things might have to wait for fall and my American Government class.

What new pedagogies are you thinking of indulging in this summer? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Student feedback on OER

I am presenting on a panel on Thursday about Open Course Library adoption and OER in general.  I thought I would share with you an informal survey of my students from summer quarter. I was sort of surprised by the results.

I don't know if you can really see this. Here are the options. Students were asked to select as many as are true for them.

• I think it is great not to have to buy a textbook (25%)
• I think it is a hassle to have to print out all of the readings (5%)
• I often read the readings on my desktop or laptop computer instead of printing them out (25%)
• I often read the readings on my mobile device instead of printing them out (5%)
• I like that I can get the readings for free, but I wish there was an option to buy a printout of all the readings in the bookstore (15%)
• Saving money on textbooks is really important to me (10%)
• I wish more faculty had free alternatives to a paid textbook (0%)
• I wish we just had a regular textbook (5%)
• No answer (10%)

I think the answers in bold are rather startling.  Some students did not trouble filling out the multiple options, so that may have skewed the results. I'll look forward to trying this survey again this quarter.

Editing my Flat World Knowledge Book

I selected my textbook, American Government and Politics in the Information Age, published by Flat World Knowledge. They went through a process to confirm that I am really a faculty member.

One of the benefits of using a Flat World Knowledge book is that I can edit the book to my exact specifications, editing,  adding and deleting content as I wish. I got a hard copy of the book and am reading through it, striking stuff I don't want and making notes about the things I want to add/edit.  I also made a photocopy of the Contents page to have sort of an overarching view of where I was going.  Since everything I have is on paper, I decided to try getting this online so I can see how it works.

After logging in, I had a hard time figuring out how to edit the book. I finally went to the Catalog and clicked on the Plus sign next to my textbook title. There, a small link says "customize this book".  Then a pretty snazzy web based version of the book pops up making it theoretically pretty simple to edit the content. 

After a few minutes, though, I found I was having trouble moving things the way I wanted to. I wished there was a little video tutorial.  Voila! I looked in the Help section and including several short tutorials on using the editing tool MIYO.  I'll watch them and give you an update soon on how my adoption is going.

Resources

Flat World Knowledge - http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/

Tutorials Page - http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/Tutorial-Videos

Book selected for American Government

I selected a book for American Government. I will be using Flat World Knowledge's American Government and Politics in the Information Age. As I mentioned in a previous post, Flat World Knowledge texts are open source and free for students to read online. They are completely editable and students can select from many formats to have the content printed if they wish.  I need to move aggressively on customizing the book - I learned that I'm about 2 weeks late on my fall book order! Why order a book? I'd like to have a few in stock for folks who prefer the traditional page (which, to be honest, includes me when it comes to textbooks).


I also discovered a cool new tool that will make it way easier for me to do course mapping. I am using Workflowy.  I'm an outline kind of girl, so this tool just works for me. Here is my Workflowy Course Map for American Government. As with everything - this is a work in progress - I only discovered Workflowy this weekend and already I'm lovin' it.


Resources:
Workflowy - www.workflowy.com

More sources for Open Textbooks

I noted in my last text about open educational resources that it was hard to find actual textbooks. However, just today Tom Caswell from the Open Course Library sent out 3 new resources for Open Textbooks. Sweet!

Here are 3 new tools for your OER toolbox:

1.       Open Stax College (http://openstaxcollege.org/) – offers students free textbooks that meet scope and sequence requirements for most courses. These are peer-reviewed texts written by professional content developers. Adopt a book today for a turnkey classroom solution or modify it to suit your teaching approach. Free online and low-cost in print, OpenStax College books are built for today’s student budgets.

2.       Online Textbook Adoption Tool – Akademos recently launched a new textbook adoption tool at http://adoption.akademos.com/.  They want to add more Open Textbooks to their reviews, and I’m working with them to line up some promotional codes that will give faculty reviewers a $40 credit in TextbookX.com. They ask that those interested please leave reviews on two books (1-2 paragraphs for each book) and fill out the rating rubric. I’ll send the codes out when they come.

3.       Open Academics textbook catalog (http://open.umn.edu) – a great effort out of the University of Minnesota to create a peer reviewed catalog of open textbooks. U of M's press release is below.  There's also a great story on NPR: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2012/04/23/university-open-source-textbooks

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

Why Open Resources?

Today the real fun begins - hunting for content. As you know, I am not planning on using a traditional textbook. My rationale for this is important in understanding some of the decisions I may make as I go along.

1.  I am philosophically in favor of the idea of open educational resources.  "The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement encourages the creation and reuse of free, high-quality content and open source learning systems to replace expensive and proprietary systems. By promoting OER, community colleges can create sustainable academic resources for students and provide collaborative professional development opportunities for faculty. " (from the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources).  I have participated in both phases of the Open Course Library, an effort to put Washington's highest enrolled classes in an open format with materials costing students less than $30.

2. I think it is an obligation of faculty to consider the cost of textbooks. The cost of textbooks is a huge burden on students, particularly the students generally served by community colleges.  The Student PIRGs did a study on the adoption of courses from the Open Course Library.  "The study also found that on average, use of the Open Course Library materials would save students $102 per course, or $5,499 per course adoption.  These figures take into account that many students purchase traditional textbooks at a discount or go without them." 

3. My own students prefer it. I polled a couple of classes and asked them about how they were influenced by the cost of textbooks. They indicated that, as the PIRGs found, they just skip buying expensive textbooks and hope for the best. Not a single student indicated that they thought the materials I selected were inferior to a textbook or that clicking through the different materials each week was a burden compared to just opening up a book.

So, with my rationale in place, I will go forth and hunt for some open resources.