Book Review: A Guide to Making Open Textbooks With Students

During the spring term, I taught a class on multimedia design for the University of Wyoming. One of the things that I decided to do was to forego a textbook. I wanted the class to be an open experience. As part of that experience, I had the participants write an open-license textbook focusing on multimedia. This book is still being edited but I hope to have it out in the next couple of months. During that experience, I wanted to learn a little bit more about how students could write open textbooks. Fortunately, I found a book. I initially read it online but recently ordered a paper version of the book. The book is A Guide to Making Open Textbooks With Students edited by Elizabeth Mays.

I have to be honest, when I read the online version, I didn’t fully grasp how useful the book was. Now that I’ve had an opportunity to more thoroughly read it, I appreciate the great ideas shared in this book.

The book is a rather short book with only 122 pages. It is arranged in four major sections and 19 chapters. Those major sections include:

• Open pedagogy
• Project ideas and case studies
• Student rights and faculty responsibilities
• Sample assignments

Each section has its own merit. The open pedagogy section has prompted me to learn more about this movement, which is part of a larger ecosystem. The open ecosystem includes open education, open access, open science, open data, open source, open government, and much much more. It is a very powerful way of looking at teaching and learning. One of the things that I really enjoyed about the book was the emphasis on using students to help shape the curriculum. An instructor could use students to help create activities. I like the idea of students working on real-world problems. This is very much in line with John Dewey’s approach to learning.

The second section of the book focused on project ideas and case studies. These ideas included not only adopting a textbook but having the students rewrite it. This is what David Wiley did. He took a project management book and had his students rewrite it as a project management book for instructional designers. Another instructor had her students create short reviews of architectural features from Frank Lloyd Wright buildings. She pulled them together into a book. This digital book can keep growing term after term as students look at Frank Lloyd Wright’s works from different perspectives.

Another example that I really liked was creating an English anthology of early American literature. Students found different pieces, wrote the introductions, added commentary, etc.

In a section that focused on student rights and faculty responsibilities, the contributors to this book stressed that you need to have a mechanism for identifying what license is to be included in the final project. Students need to sign off on that license. There should be opportunities for privacy and an anonymity if students so desire. We have to respect their rights under FERPA.

The section on example assignments provided directions that instructors could adopt and adapt for their particular discipline.

At the end of the book, there was a list of other open textbooks that the Rebus community created.

I thought this book provided a lot of ideas that I could implement in my classroom. These are ideas I can encourage other faculty to use. Many of the different chapters ended with takeaway sections highlighting the key points of each chapter. They also had ample links to additional resources where one could go learn more.

This was another great find that helps to keep this idea of open education resources moving forward. Right now, Jamestown Community College is in the adoption phase. We are finding open textbooks and using those open textbooks or resources in the classroom. The next phase is the creation mode. This is where faculty take resources that they create, put an open license on them, and share them with the public. But I think one of the more powerful phases is going to be when students are contributing to the open education movement by creating resources that help the world. I believe A Guide to Making Open Textbooks With Students helps move faculty in that direction.