Teaching in the open: How I published a free textbook
Matthew DeCarlo
Editor’s Note: Matthew DeCarlo is an assistant professor of social work in the School of Social Work at Radford University. In this blog post, he describes the concept of open teaching and how he adapted a research methods textbook for social work education.
What does it mean to teach in the open?
When I tell people I like to teach “in the open,” their first response is often “I already do that!” In way, they are right. To be an instructor is to be open and vulnerable by proclaiming yourself an expert (or at least a useful guide) and engaging students in the learning process. Students see through your eyes as you help them understand the social work knowledge base, and you are often faced with the limitations of your own knowledge.
In a different way, when I talk about teaching “in the open,” what I really mean is, “I want to share my educational resources with other educators and build on the resources that others have shared.” As a junior faculty member, I am constantly trying to figure out how best to teach new course content and improve my instruction. Faculty at both universities at which I have had the pleasure of teaching were open with me. Before beginning a new course preparation, at least two professors would happily meet with me so they can discuss their syllabi, review tips and tricks, and most importantly, share their materials. The message I received was, “take all of these materials, use whatever you want, don’t worry about giving me credit, and let me know if you have any questions.” Without these resources, junior faculty and adjuncts would be stuck reinventing the wheel—for instance, coming up with yet another prompt for an article presentation or slideshow on random sampling.
If you saw my previous post on open education, you know that open educational resources (OER) are conceptualized as a response to the exponential growth in costs for traditional textbooks and the ownership of social work knowledge by textbook publishers. The benefits for faculty, however, extend beyond your students having free access to a textbook that is up to date and never out of stock. OER provides the institutional framework needed for faculty to teach in the open—sharing resources, building off one another’s work, and in so doing, improving how social work is taught. For example, faculty can take an open textbook, create ancillary resources or adapt the textbook to suit their needs, and share their resources across campuses to inspire new ideas about how to teach social work concepts. This is what I mean by “teaching in the open.”
How I used open teaching for my Social Work Research course
For my undergraduate research methods class, I adapted an OER textbook, Scientific inquiry in social work, which was based on a research methods textbook for undergraduate sociology students. As many of you may know, publishing a textbook is a lot of work, and I am going to tell you how I did it with OER. I published the book through Pressbooks, which produced an HTML website, downloadable PDF and e-reader files, and a print copy available in my campus bookstore. Anyone can retain copies, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute these materials (the 5R’s of OER) provided they do not do so commercially (i.e., make money off of the content) and give me credit as an author—the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. Professors from at least five different schools have adopted my textbook in Fall 2018. They not only saved students over $14,000 versus the previously used textbook in their course (according to a faculty adoption survey), they can build off all of my instructional materials—not just the underlying textbook.
Over the past five years, I developed a set of scaffolded assignments to help students with each component of a research proposal based on assignments shared by a colleague, Dr. Nicki Lee, at Virginia Commonwealth University. Students who submitted outstanding exercises also gave me permission to share their submissions as exemplars. I shared my assignments and exemplars on OER Commons and Merlot, where faculty can read and review them as well as adapt the assignments based on how they prefer to teach. At the close of the semester, I will share my slideshows, class activities, course calendar, and test bank—a complete resource pack similar to what instructors receive alongside a traditional textbook. In this way, everything about my course will be open to everyone.
Research methods, in my experience, is often dreaded by students. The textbooks our university used (Engel & Schutt, Rubin & Babbie) were written, as one student in our evaluation focus groups put it, “for those who already understand research methods.” The language was dense, circuitous, and abstract. Students reported relying on my presentations to understand the concepts, rather than the textbook. They told the students leading our focus groups the only reason they bought the book and opened it was because I quizzed them at the beginning of each class. For these students, research methods were boring, hard, and unrelated to their future practice. Our existing textbooks weren’t working, and I suspect textbooks are an important factor in the commonly reported (e.g., Einbinder, 2014; Harder, 2010) difficulties with research methods instruction in social work.
I addressed this problem by adapting—OER terminology for revising and redistributing— an open textbook in the open textbook library developed for sociology students. I cut out the sociology-specific information and put in social work content, changing organization, wording, citations, and case examples. I also mixed in content from an open textbook on literature reviews in education and nursing to help students begin and conceptualize a research project.
I published the final product via Pressbooks for $99 and shared it with colleagues in August. While I am happy with the final product, it is still a first edition so I welcome student and instructor feedback. Using Hypothes.is, students and faculty can provide feedback through annotations that will inform the next edition of the book—a feature advertised on the home page of the book. Similarly, instructors can review the scaffolded assignments using the review tools on OER Commons and Merlot to indicate to others whether these assignments are useful.
Honestly, I doubt I have found the best way of teaching research methods, but I think the way I teach research methods is pretty good. More importantly, my textbook and ancillary materials are a jumping-off point for future collaborators. This collaborative spirit was key to the development of my materials, as only about half of the content in my textbook is original work. Because Drs. Frederiksen, Phelps, and Blackstone made the decision to work in the open, I could improve on their work and adapt their content for a new audience.
The way I now teach research methods would not have been possible without copying and building on the work of other authors. OER takes the customary and informal practice of resource sharing among faculty and brings it into the open—where resources can be reviewed, annotated, adapted, and redistributed freely. This creates a commons of social work knowledge and a network of professors finding new and inventive ways of teaching social work concepts and communicating them across the higher education system.
How can you teach in the open?
At the most basic level, instructors could adopt an open textbook in place of the traditional textbook. An open textbook will save students some money, make it easier to access the content in mobile, print, and PDF formats. As far as I know, mine is the only open textbook in social work education, though I am working with professors who are interested in creating open textbooks in other subjects as part of the Open Social Work Education project. Professors can also adopt my resources or browse OER Commons or Merlot for new educational resources. These professors may find new approaches to teaching social work content or just save themselves from reinventing the wheel so much. These use cases are no different than if I published my textbook and resources with Pearson, Cengage, or any other publisher.
Then what is unique about OER and open textbooks? Unlike traditional copyrighted materials, professors can revise my textbook, improve the content, and share their products non-commercially with others. It’s easy to adapt my textbook on Pressbooks, but you could just as easily use another software package like Overleaf. Moreover, professors who use my textbook and resources can share their adaptations freely. Together, we can build a resource library for professors who teach research methods and beyond. The result is a resource commons from which anyone can draw, provided they abide by the rules of the creative commons license attached to each instructional resource.
That all seems a bit abstract, so let’s bring it into the real world. Let’s say I’m trying to find a resource on teaching random sampling. Maybe I can find a resource that another faculty member shared via the outstanding Social Work Engagement in Research Learning (SWERL) Facebook group, and use it in my class. I could also use a resource I picked up from the Association of Baccalaureate Social Work Program Director’s conference or from a colleague. Many are scanned copies of a resource from a textbook or workbook. Others are original creations. However, because these are traditionally copyrighted resources, I cannot make changes to them and share my remixed resources freely with other people. Similarly, if I adapt a slideshow or exercise from a textbook publisher, I cannot publish those publicly, like on OER Commons or Merlot. In this way, the knowledge of social work is walled off behind paywalls and closed copyright, shutting out the opportunity for open collaboration among faculty.
So how would OER be different? I’m currently working with a group of collaborators on creating a research methods textbook for graduate students. The beauty of OER is that we don’t have to start from scratch. We can use my open textbook and resources as a jumping-off point. We’ll write down what new content is needed for a textbook for graduate students, note any problems or issues in the source text, and incorporate original resources from our respective teaching practices. Beginning in the summer, we will write and publish a graduate edition that builds on my open textbook and the open textbooks from which I adapted. Indeed, any person could adapt an open textbook or resource for a new audience, improve the content, or develop additional resources using the intellectual property in an OER resource. In this way, OER provides the structure for a commons (or community) to emerge, joining together a professoriate who—outside of academic conferences and informal sharing—labored in near isolation.
Building the commons of social work knowledge is the goal of my collaborative project, Open Social Work Education. I aim to inspire other authors to create and adapt open textbooks for social work education, share their existing resources in our repositories on OER Commons and Merlot, and raise awareness and advocate for OER on their campuses. Let’s join together to build a community of scholars dedicated to improving educating aspiring social workers. Give other faculty the benefit of your labor. Share your resources, adapt other people’s resources, and always leave a review!
How to cite this post:
DeCarlo, M. (2018, November 2). Teaching in the open: How I published a free textbook [Blog post]. Retrieved from: https://laureliversonhitchcock.org/2018/11/01/teaching-in-the-open-how-i-published-a-free-textbook/
