My Journey to Open - USNH ATI 2015
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My Journey to Open - USNH ATI 2015
- 1. My Journey To Open David Lippman Pierce College Ft Steilacoom Lakewood, Washington
- 5. “Open” Open Educational Resources (OER) Open Textbooks Open Learning
- 6. Open Source Software Free as in “free beer” Free as in “free speech” Collaboration
- 7. The Promise of Open
- 11. Textbook Costs $600 / year Online access codes Time-bombed eBooks
- 12. “this past spring quarter for math 60 I didn't have a book the entire quarter and I barely scraped by with a 2.0. I used the book and help of tutors in the tutoring center everyday and still did not fully understand the material as much as I wanted. If I continue this way I will surely fail math 98”
- 13. “I am afraid that if I can't/don't get this book before the college quarter starts that I will fall behind and possibly even fail the class”
- 14. The Direct Relationship Between Textbook Costs and Student Success 60%+ do not purchase textbooks at some point due to cost 35% take fewer courses due to textbook cost 31% choose not to register for a course due to textbook cost 23% regularly go without textbooks due to cost 14% have dropped a course due to textbook cost 10% have withdrawn from a course due to textbook cost Source: 2012 student survey by Florida Virtual Campus
- 15. “70% of respondents had decided against buying at least one assigned textbook due to cost. While some of these students reported sharing or borrowing instead, 78% still believed they would generally do worse in class without their own copy of the required text.” http://www.studentpirgs.org/news/ap/high-prices-prevent-college-students-buying-assigned-textbooks
- 16. Access Inequity
- 17. This is a simple way that we as faculty can address access inequity
- 18. Open ≠ Digital Open ≠ Free OPEN DIGITAL FREE
- 19. Open is a legal framework for sharing
- 20. © All Rights Reserved Some rights reserved
- 22. OER: The 5R Permissions Sharing and creativity are inherent in OER:
- 23. At the Most Basic Level No broken links No surprise changes No forced new editions
- 24. Open = freedom to Add Remove Modify Supplement Ignore the book
- 25. Customize and Localize Searching through dozens of books for the perfect one vs Mixing contents from multiple texts to create a perfect match for your outcomes
- 26. In Education Free of cost Improved access Customization Quality improvement Collaboration
- 27. Examples of OER Open textbooks Workbooks Handouts Worksheets Activities Videos etc.
- 28. Open Courseware Syllabus Reading assignments Sometimes videos / notes Homework assignments Assessments
- 29. My experience
- 31. IMathAS (aka WAMAP, aka MyOpenMath) Open source online homework Algorithmically generated questions Automated grading of algebraic answers
- 35. Community of users Creating for themselves Sharing with everyone Making it better for all
- 36. Open Textbooks Math for Liberal Arts Homework was online $150 book? Wrote my own
- 44. Open Textbook
- 52. Day by Day guide showing suggested lecture pace, and how handouts, activities, and assessments fit in the course structure
- 53. Lecture outlines, with examples
- 56. Collaboration
- 58. But is it “high quality?”
- 59. There’s no reason to use a proxy for quality when we can measure student success
- 60. Student Success Data - Precalc 4850 students at Pierce, Green River, and Shoreline had used our text (2011-2013), vs. 5000 past students saw no significant difference in success, while saving $300,000+
- 62. “The student feedback I've received (to the texts I and others have used, as well as the associated WAMAP material and James Sousa videos) has been virtually 100% positive. And it's not just the low-to-nonexistent price: we've received many comments about how these books are much easier for them to read than traditional textbooks, how WAMAP is far superior to Webassign, and how helpful they find the videos.” - Jeff Eldridge, Edmonds CC
- 63. MAA Review by Mike Kenyon, Green River Community College, 10/15/2012 We considered about two dozen texts in our adoption process […] Once the finalists were selected, it became clear that the Lippman/Rasmussen text was equal or superior to the others in quality and far outpaced them in cost. The vote of our full-time faculty was, in fact, unanimous.
- 64. MAA Review by Mike Kenyon, Green River Community College, 10/15/2012 The text had a positive effect on the classroom instructional atmosphere from the very beginning. Many students came to class on the first day with a positive attitude borne of having been to the bookstore and found that their textbook would cost $20 rather than over $100, and even spending that much was optional. Moreover, the vast majority of students had the textbook in one form or another from the outset and so didn’t face the prospect of falling behind because they couldn’t get it until a financial aid check came in.
- 66. Format? For us, 75% chose to buy the printed copy Others have found 80% are fine with online books
- 68. Arithmetic Prealgebra Beg Algebra Inter Algebra College Algebra Trig Applied Calculus Calculus Math for Lib Arts Statistics
- 69. Mercy College - (Wallace Algebra) Percentage passing with C or better Fall 2011 No OER Fall 2012 OER Spring 2011 No OER Spring 2013 OER Total No OER Total OER n=2,842 including pilot
- 70. A few adoption experiences
- 71. A few adoption experiences
- 72. A few adoption experiences
- 73. A few adoption experiences
- 74. What’s Coming?
- 80. Getting involved Just do it
- 81. One of the few ways we as faculty can directly address access inequity
- 82. Make it yours
- 84. Teach Openly
- 85. Look at an Open Course
- 87. Contribute
- 88. Contribute Proofread Create activities Create test banks Create videos Join a collaboration
- 89. the Learning Machine is being built Join in
Editor's Notes
- Hello, and thank you so much for having me here. It is always really exciting for me to talk with other faculty about what they’re doing, and to hear about great new ideas. Like was mentioned, I teach math at
- Pierce College, not the one in Los Angeles, but a two year community college in Lakewood, Washington, South of seattle, in a southern suburb of Tacoma.
- That’s the building I teach in, and
- This is the view out the back on a clear day. Today, I’d like to talk about * open:
- * open educational resources, * open textbooks, and * open learning. So, I’ve been teaching for 15 years now, both on-campus and online. My interest in open began with * open source software …
- open source software - the idea is fascinating. For the end user, free is often the main driver, but for the techie, the bigger driver is the ability to study and modify the code. And for the big projects, there was a community of developers, contributing to the creation of this product, often not because it was their job, but because they cared about the end product being better. By pooling their skills, they could create a better product faster than any one person working alone. To me, this is * the promise of open.
- To me, this is the promise of open. The cost side of it was a huge motivator for me. Cable Green, from creative commons, likes to give this analogy: imagine we could build * a food machine,
- that could produce food with a marginal cost near 0. Should we invest the money to build that food machine? Of course. We have at our hands the ability to build learning materials that can be distributed with a marginal cost near zero – the question is whether we invest the money and time to turn on that * learning machine.
- learning machine. We all know how expensive our textbooks are. *
- Textbook prices have been increasing much faster than inflation. *
- Students spend * an average of $600 per year on textbooks. New books would cost around $1200, but a lot of students are renting now. Additionally, at least in my discipline, * online homework access codes force students to buy new books or pay additional costs on top of the used book, usually making it cheaper to buy the new book. * Even time-bombed eBooks often sell for $75-$100. For me, I really became aware of the cost impact on students while reading scholarship applications for a math textbook program we have. I would regularly read statements from students like these: *
- These anecdotes are supported by research done around the country. A Florida study found * that
- 31% choose not to register for a course due to textbook cost, and 14% have dropped a course due to cost. A similar study by Student PIRGS of students at 13 campus found *
- 70% skipping buying at least one book due to cost, even though they believed it could result in them doing worse. What this is causing is an * access inequity.
- access inequity, in a system, at least at my community college, that prides itself on open access to all. Textbooks are *
- a simple way that we as faculty can address access inequity, and help ensure our students have their course materials and are ready to learn on day 1. I know there are those that think we shouldn’t have to do this; that the state should put more towards education and lower tuition. And of course I’d love to see that. But all I can do about that is call my legislator – I have no direct control. With textbooks, I have direct control, and can individually make a difference in my students’ access to education. So before I talk about the other reasons open is so important to me, let’s do a quick refresher on what you learned yesterday. *
- Open does * not equal digital, and * open does not equal free. Perhaps * a Venn diagram would help There are free materials online that are not open, and there are open materials that are not online. Open is really *
- A legal framework for sharing. It’s a way of changing
- “all rights reserved”, the default of copyright, where you can’t do anything without asking permission, and changes it to “some rights reserved”, Where the author has said “you can do these things without asking”, but they still retain their copyright. The most common set of open licenses are the *
- Creative commons licenses, which allows the creators to explicitly state the permissions they were allowing, These licenses allowed the author to easily indicate what they are OK with others doing with their materials without needing to ask permission. These licenses generally grant 5 main permissions *
- And the real essence of “open” are these 5R’s…. These permissions are what make open materials so powerful, and provides benefits over materials that are just free online.
- At the most basic level, this is about avoiding frustration. For online materials, this means No broken links, because I can retain a copy of the material. Likewise, No surprise changes, with ads or a paywall suddenly appearing on a free site And compared to commercial texts, this means * no forced new editions every 3 years. OER gives * freedom
- OER gives freedom to make changes: * add content, * remove sections you don’t need, * modify a definition you don’t like. OER gives freedom to innovate with the curriculum... For example, I taught elementary algebra a couple years ago. I used an open textbook for reference and for connected videos and homework, but since it’s not a commercial book, I felt more free to leave material out and * supplement the book and to some extent * ignore the book, something I wouldn’t feel right doing if my students are paying $200 for it. OER Provides the ability to * customize and localize
- customize and localize the content. Instead of * searching through dozens of books for the perfect TOC, We can * mix contents from multiple sources to exactly align with our outcomes. In practice, all this means
- Means:- * free of cost - saves students money - * improved access to materials (since they’re usually online)- * flexiblity for the instructor to customize/modify the content, - * enabling continuous quality improvement – something that is really hard to do with a commercial text- * ideally, can prompt conversation and collaboration around curriculum in a much richer way than is currently existing, and I’ll give you a few examples of that later OER are educational resources that are openly licensed. While we focus on open textbooks most of the time, OER is more than that.
- OER can be as fine grained as individual worksheets and handouts, activities, and videos. Beyond individual OER, there’s even the world of
- Open Courseware are efforts to put entire course designs online under open licenses. They typically include syllabus, reading assignments, homework, and assessments. So with that long groundwork for what motivated me, let me share some of * my experiences.
- My experience. Now, I don’t want to scare you off here. I go to a lot of talks where I think to myself “well that’s all fine and dandy that YOU did that, but I’m not going to do that, so * why am I sitting here listening to you?”
- So why am I sitting here listening to you?” My main hope is to inspire you to explore the world of open; there are a wide range of ways to take advantage of existing open resources, and a variety of ways to get involved if you want to contribute to content creation. No one is expecting you to follow the same crazy path I’ve taken. My first real open project was *
- Was imathas, known to most people as MyOpenMath, an open source online homework system. So this wasn’t even open content – this was * open assessment.
- Like WebAssign and MML, it does algorithmically generated questions and automated grading of algebraic answers. For those not in math, that means that each student gets a slightly different question, so one student might see * this,
- And another might see
- This. And it means students can have virtually unlimited practice with immediate feedback. I created it because I was frustrated with students having to pay for access to the online system when they bought used books. I was able to find some other interested people, and with some grant funding we got the content off the ground. But it really wasn’t the grant money that got people involved – it was because they wanted better resources for their courses. The money was just a token thank you. What’s most exciting, though, is that *
- A Community of users formed. Even after that money was gone, people in WA, and now around the country, keep * creating content because it is useful to them, and * share it freely so we * can build off each other’s work. Through those efforts MyOpenMath and WAMAP has 10s of thousands of algorithmic questions, dozens of course templates, and serves over 30K students a term.
- Since 2001, I had been teaching * Math for Liberal arts course online. Around 2008 I decided to move my * online homework for the course into WAMAP, and it felt really ridiculous that my students were paying * $150 for a book, where we only covered half of it and we weren’t even using the exercises. Over a few weeks, * I sat down and wrote narrative to replace the textbook. And * that was my first text
- It started at 9 chapters, about 80 pages, with no exercises. But it met my needs. And naturally, from my experiences in the open source software world, I felt it only made sense to openly license the book. Around that time, the “OER movement” really kicked off. This was the year the “Cape Town Open Education Declaration” was released, urging governments and publishers to make publically funded educational materials freely available.
- Around that time, the CCC OER started holding workshops, I remember going to one in Seattle, trying to encourage people to use OER. But at the time, OER was hard to find, and not a lot of open textbooks existed yet, and it was frustrating. Luckily, things would quickly change. There were a number of big projects, like CK12 and Saylor, that worked on producing open content, and a lot of smaller projects funded by Gates, Hewlett, and other big grantees. Then in 2010, Washington state launched the
- Open Course Library project. The goal was this: build complete, open courses for the 81 highest enrolled courses in the state. The theory was brilliant – it recognized that the hardest parts of adopting open materials are finding them, vetting them, and building assessments and other support materials. Now, this wasn’t the first stab at open courseware – you’re probably familiar with MIT open courseware, which many other schools have since joined in on. But most of those courses still were using commercial texts, and were focused more on providing resources to students, rather than materials instructors could use. Unfortunately for the Open Course Library project, the reality didn’t match the vision. They allowed faculty to use <$30 commercial texts, so many of the “open courses” ended up not much more useful than those MIT OCW courses, though I will say there are some nice components in there, like chemistry labs. Luckily, the math team didn’t go the commercial text route. The math team ended up creating complete open courses, including an open text, homework in WAMAP, and in some cases additional sample tests, worksheets, instructor guides, and other resources. In the first round,
- Tyler Wallace created a Beginning and Intermediate algebra course, designed with video lessons to support hybrid, online, or emporium instruction. For precalc and trig, Melonie Rasmussen and I wrote a text, taking an contextually motivated approach to the story of functions. For calculus, Dale Hoffman took a book he had been working on for a long time and polished it up.
- In round 2, I had a chance to expand my liberal arts book with a number of new chapters, 16 total now, and created a new set of videos to incorporate into the online course shell I already had started. For Business Calculus, Shana (Shawna) Calaway did something really cool – she started with Dale’s book, and was able to trim it, tweak it, and add to it to create an applied calculus course. But the really exciting thing was that these weren’t just books – they were courses. Let me show you a bit from our precalculus course.
- There’s a course package containing resources for each chapter and section of the open text.
- Students can access the readings for a section,
- In addition to the book there are video lessons, and then of course the online homework
- Where students can answer with Algebraic expressions and equations
- There’s an equation editor tool for entering algebraic and numeric expression answers
- And drawing tools for entering graphs
- And you may have noticed some of those questions had a Video button on them. Clicking that pops open a video
- In the course package there’s also a pacing guide,
- Some teacher lecture outlines, with examples different than those in the book.
- some additional class assignments and handouts.
- And sample assessments. Having this whole assembled course has been especially invaluable for our adjunct instructors. In the past, when a part time instructor was teaching a course for the first time, we’d basically just hand them a book and the list of sections to cover and say “have fun”. Now, we can hand them this course shell, and they have such a better starting point. One of the most exciting things to come out of this project was
- Collaboration, more specifically the collaborations having an open text exposed. The first was Jeff Eldridge, and instructor in Washington, who decided to start using the book. He is a huge perfectionist, and always hated it when commercial books had errors, since even if you found them, they wouldn’t get fixed for 3 years. So he reviewed the book with a fine tooth comb, and sent us over 1000 edits. A huge bunch were missing periods after equations, but still, it was a huge help. And others over the years keep sending us the occasional typo or edit. Another great collaboration was that Shoreline college decided it’d be good to have a solutions manual. So the director of the tutoring center had her tutors work on one, and they now maintain a solutions manual for the book. But the collaboration with the biggest impact was connecting with
- James Sousa, the guy behind mathispowerforu. James is a madman, having created over 4300 videos for arithmetic through differential equations. He started tying his videos to questions in algebra classes they developed. He mentioned to me that he was going to do College Algebra next, and I said “hey, why not start with our course?” And that’s exactly what he did, identifying or creating overview videos and per-question examples for every section and about 75% of the homework exercises. And in another great collaboration, instructors at Santa Ana were able to find local grant money to get a large number of James’s videos captioned. Now, all this talk about OER would be pretty pointless if we ended up giving our students a second-rate education in the process. And certainly the question of *is it “high quality”
- is a concern I often hear raised (it came up yesterday), especially around instructor-created content that hasn’t been put through the “formal” publishing model. I think we all assume that books that have had a million dollars put into them, and are in glossy 4 color printing, must be better quality. We have been trained by the publishers to believe that the traditional publishing process is the only one that could produce “high quality” materials. But notice how efficacy of materials is rarely discussed - does your book rep show you data about the increase learning outcomes their materials their book achieves? As David Wiley likes to say,
- There’s no reason to use a proxy for quality when we can measure student success and learning. And, spoiler alert, all the research data has shown that OER, even materials produced in non-traditional processes, at least do no harm, producing learning outcomes at least as good as traditional commercial materials. For our own materials,
- Our data showed no difference in success, while saving students $300,000. We also looked at success in the next course, and saw no difference. We asked students their opinions, and
- We got generally positive input on materials. And, substituting for formal peer review, we’ve gotten some informal, including
- Input from instructors, who say that the feedback from students is positive. Even
- Even a formal review for the MAA. This one was nice, because he noted
- That students HAD the materials on the first day, and were coming in with a more positive attitudes. In our case, while our book didn’t go through the traditional peer review process, it certainly was peer reviewed, and that did influence adoption. It was largely because Green River did a department adoption and was happy with the results that Shoreline was then comfortable doing the same. One of my favorite bits of feedback we got was from an instructor in Sacramento, who had his class write
- A thank you card signed by his students. Lots of warm fuzzies :)
- As a side note on format preference, * we found about 75% of students buying the printed version of the book. However, * others have found that 80% of students are fine with online versions. So after over a year working on the precalculus course, I spent the same revising and expanding the liberal arts math book during the second round of the Open Course Library. The next big thing that crossed my path was the
- Kaleidoscope project, a Next Generation Learning Challenge funded project. While lots of grant money had been going towards creation of open resources, there hadn’t been much adoption. Kaleidoscope was trying to address this. It pulled together faculty from multiple institutions, who collectively developed a course using existing OER. In the first round, they did beginning and intermediate algebra, and discovered Tyler’s materials on MOM. They did some small modifications and quickly adopted those materials. Through that, I ended up getting connected up with Lumen Learning, the company managing Kaleidoscope, and have took a year of leave from my college to work with them on the second round of Kaleidoscope, completing the rest of the freshman and lower math sequence.
- Over a summer, we brought together over a dozen faculty to collaborate on developing more courses. Starting from existing open textbooks, we built the remaining courses. Most were based on the OCL courses or courses I or James Sousa had already started. For calculus, Dale, Jeff Eldridge, and James Sousa collaborated with me to build more complete homework sets and video lists, and James added videos to many exercises. In applied calc, we were able to pull more material from Dale’s book to fill in some topics and build out the exercises. Some of the courses now have more than one text option. The only one that I still don’t quite consider “done” is the statistics course. Through Kaleidoscope and Lumen, there have been huge adoptions of OER. Once example is Mercy College in New York, that did a big departmental adoption of Tyler Wallace’s algebra course.
- And so far they’ve seen good success.
- While mostly I’ve talked about my content creation experience, I have also been a consumer of OER, and should mention those experiences. The first was Tyler Wallace’s algebra materials, which I used for our two-quarter intro and intermediate algebra courses. The first quarter, I followed the text order pretty closely, but took advantage of the openness to supplement the materials with the approach I prefer (the book is very traditional, so I was able to supplement it to be more context focused). But after that first quarter, I surveyed my students, and only 3 had even looked at the text once the whole term. So the second quarter, I felt more free to deviate further from the text.
- The second one I’ll mention was a Linear Algebra book I adopted this fall. This was a book that met many of the traditional proxies for quality: it was well formatted, in a traditional textbook writing style, with a respectable author. I heard good things about it at a conference, and from a colleague. But it ended up working pretty badly for me. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with the book, per-se, just the approach didn’t work well for me or my students. It was a good reminder that just because there is “high quality” OER for a topic, doesn’t mean it’s always going to work for your course.
- I adopted OER for applied calculus course I taught last quarter, but that was based on some materials I had helped tweak during the Kaleidoscope project, so that was a quick and easy adoption. The last I’ll mention is
- A new developmental course we created last year. This one was unique in that a team of faculty was given release time to develop this course. It is a very non-traditional course, and the first commercial texts for this style of course were only released in the last couple years. But after reviewing the commercial options and some open materials from the Carnegie Foundation and Dana Center, the faculty team decided to use the open materials. And the openness has been great – the faculty team has taken great advantage of the openness by adding new lessons, changing ones that needed work, and greatly extending the modifying the exercises to incorporate more skill development and review. And now, after a year, we’re planning a major reordering of the material, which is enabled by the openness.
- So where are things headed? The biggest initial boost, across all disciplines, is going to be the continued release of new open textbooks.
- OpenStax is pouring stupid amounts of money into developing publisher-level textbooks, complete with focus groups, peer reviews, and mainstream approaches. Many of their books come with instructor supplemental materials, and they’re partnering with commercial companies like WebAssign to provide online homework. In addition to increased content development, there a lot of adoption initiatives.
- In Arizona, the Maricopa district is doing a district-wide all-discipline OER adoption campaign, working to save students $5mill over 5 years
- Virginia’s CC system provided grants for producing openly-licensed courses, built by multi-college teams, and recently announced a second round of grants. It is somewhat similar to the OCL project, except they’re requiring only the use of OER. Tidewater community college started offering a no-textbook-cost degree path. They’ve seen increased retention, decreased withdrawal rates, and improved student success, and that’s led now to
- A scaling across all their colleges. My own college has recently started working on a similar degree. I find it really exciting to see
- Colleges, Departments, and faculty take ownership of their content, and I encourage you to the same
- Now, if you want to get involved, there are a wide spectrum of ways to jump into the world of open....To start, * just jump in. * Start looking around, and see what’s out there.
- One of the few wayswe as faculty can directly addressaccess inequity, and ensure that ALL students have access to the course materials day 1. But so much more than that, the real reason to go open is to
- Make it yours. Think about how you teach your course – what role does that textbook play. Do you even need it? Do you have a hard time finding a book that covers a topic the way you like to teach it? Make it yours. Find an open textbook to start with. Use it as-is, take out a section, or edit the wording of the definitions – you can do that. Pull in review material from another text – you can do that. That’s what open enables. It doesn’t have to be perfect the first time. Education is about learning, and Educating is about *iterative improvement
- Iterative improvement – trying something out, learning from what works and doesn’t, and make changes to make it better. I have found it much easier to make those improvements when I have control over all parts of the classroom materials. And maybe your openness will reach into your classroom
- – what has been dubbed open pedagogy. Have students create a solutions manual for the open text. Have them create test questions which get added to a department test bank. Have them create videos explaining problems to show to students the next quarter. Heck, have them rewrite part of the textbook to explain a concept better, or create a new section altogether. So I have just one simple request for you:
- Look at an open course or open textbook. Be critical - evaluate it. I just ask that you use the same critical eye on your commercial text when you compare it. And remember that an open book is not an all-or-nothing proposition like a commercial text. You can take what you like, ditch the stuff you don’t like, and revise and remix with other material if needed.
- You can decide what level you’d like to work at: Replacing your existing text with an open text Realigning your course, by reviewing your learning outcomes and identifying OER that directly targets those learning outcomes, or Rethinking your instruction, utilizing OER to inspire changes to your pedagogy If you’re feeling ambitious, I encourage you to * contribute .
- Contribute to OER creation, especially if you are an expert in a field not already well represented in OER. And that doesn’t have to mean writing a book. There are lots of ways to contribute:
- And that doesn’t have to mean writing a book. There are lots of ways to contribute: You can * proofread, * create new activities, * create test banks, * create videos, or * Join a collaboration of colleagues working on a new course. But share early, and share often. I often hear people who don’t want to share until their work is “perfect” – don’t do that. It is through sharing your work with your colleagues, both here and around the country, that collaboration can form, and that we can build off each other’s work. There should be no need for every instructor to individually built all the course materials for Psych 100 or English 101.
- The learning machine is being built, and I encourage you * to join in.
- Thank you