During the Fall 2019 semester, the Scholarly Communication Team within University Libraries at Butler University in Indianapolis, IN, held a year-long Faculty Staff Learning Community during the 2019-2020 academic year to promote and engage more faculty in OER and open pedagogy. Meeting once a month to discuss OER driven topics, an English professor decided to replace a teaching assignment with creating an open textbook. The class was a multidisciplinary, “core” curriculum course covering Revolutionary Europe and North Africa. The textbook for this class retails $120 new, and $108 used. We used this opportunity to have the students create an open textbook for the two sections of the class, to be used in future sections.
Through multiple library instruction sessions, students were taught the basics of building a textbook. First, understanding copyright, Creative Commons, the public domain, and how to include media with different types of CC licenses. The students are divided into 11 groups, writing 11 chapters. The students wrote chapters, and learned how to use Scalar, an online publishing platform from the University of Southern California. Students wrote their chapters, which included sections, discussion questions, key terms, and media such as photos, videos, and maps.
Our main concerns included the quality of the student content, correct media attribution, and time sensitivity. The professor and I made some decisions early on regarding these possible pitfalls: we would require changes in the face of incorrect information or incorrect attributions, but would allow the work to be an ongoing creation, modified and improved by future courses. Because of COVID-19 and the distribution of the Spring Semester, some activities, such as peer review and other modifications will be part of the Fall 2020 semester and a new set of students.
Learning Outcomes: 1) How to start using Scalar in an undergraduates in a multidisciplinary class to develop an open, e-textbook, to be used in future classes 2) How to scaffolding the assignment, 3) How I taught the students the platform, the basics of open pedagogy, copyright, and peer review.
