Question from a Listener: Open Textbooks

By Bonni Stachowiak | January 21, 2018 | Leave a Comment | X Facebook LinkedIn Email

I received a series of questions about open textbooks from a person who attended my keynote at the University of Georgia in October of 2017.

***

Greetings! I heard you speak at UGA about publishing open textbooks with your students and I decided that I had to do this too.

So here I am, teaching a class with 20 undergrads, and this crazy idea to have students research Confederate monuments in the state, and write up a resolution to a specific monument in Georgia that they researched over the course of the semester.

The goal of the book is to document each monuments' specific history as well as allow students to express their solutions as to how they believe the monuments should look in the future.

I know that I will get my students research and writing where it needs to be, but I am totally ignorant to this self publishing process. Looking through the different publication options, I wondered why did you choose Pressbooks over just uploading straight to Amazon?

I do not want to charge any money for the book as I am fearful that my students may think that I am profiting from their work–which I know will not be the case–but that still nagging feeling in the back of my mind. I would love any and all advice that you might have for me regarding the process. I am hoping to include photographs (taken by my students) in the book as well.

Also—I love your podcast in every way imaginable. It re-energizes me daily.

***

Thank you for the edifying words about the podcast. It is inspiring to learn that the keynote I gave at UGA has inspired you and that you have embarked on this journey.

At the end of 2017, I wrote up some details on My First Experience Co-Writing an Open Textbook, in case you haven’t seen that post yet.

You pose some questions that I didn’t address in that post, however. Here are some thoughts about what you asked.

Why Pressbooks?

My experience with Pressbooks has led me to the belief that it is probably the best option out there for creating open textbooks. That being said, I am very new to this process and haven’t done an exhaustive search or extensive comparisons. This open textbook about how to write an open textbook is a good guide and happens to be written using Pressbooks. Another similar and excellent resource is A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students.

Options like using Github or Gitbook to get started with open textbooks seem daunting for those who are less familiar with those tools, already. Since Pressbooks is based on WordPress, people who have done some blogging in the past are likely to feel quite comfortable in that environment.

For those who aren't ready to write their own open textbook, it is well worth exploring the many sites that offer open textbooks that you can adopt as is, or customize. To name a few such sites: Open Textbook Library, KPU's resources and links, and Harvard DART.

What you are describing seems like a perfect use case for Pressbooks. You could create a book on Pressbooks and have a digital version available at no charge to you (or your students).

Mike Caulfield’s Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers gives you a look at how this works. His book is available on any computer or device that has a web browser. His book is an example of what’s available with the free version of Pressbooks.

Why Amazon (CreateSpace)?

If you wanted to make a copy of your book available in print, the free version of Pressbooks would not be a good option. There are many options for print-on-demand services and I have also not done too much investigation in this area.

I went with the advice from a guy I met who works for Pressbooks. He said that if I didn’t have any ethical issues with using an Amazon-owned company, that CreateSpace had some good options.

Most of my “heavy lifting” happened in Pressbooks. I used their cover creator and one of their templates for all my design and formatting. Then, I used CreateSpace to distribute hard copies across various publishing platforms (most namely, Amazon).

Charging Students

I completely understand your concern about charging students for a textbook that you would potentially profit from. If I were teaching undergraduates and writing an open textbook with them, I would likely keep everything in digital form via Pressbooks.

My class was a group of doctoral students who were thrilled with the potential of having something they wrote in printed form. As of January 16, 2018, I have made half of what I paid for a Pressbooks paid book. I suspect that I won’t likely make all of it back, but don’t mind losing money on this kind of an endeavor.

I shared with the students that there was a potential for me to eventually make a small sum of money. I had them sign an online document indicating their understanding of that possibility.

What helped me with the potential ethical challenges in this process was that students were not bound to purchase a copy of the book. It was an option that they had if they wanted to buy one. Transparency was essential. Everyone understood my costs and how I was attempting to reduce them or eliminate them in this way.

Many Questions Remain

I know I still have so much to learn about open textbooks. As I was researching your questions, I came across Ingram Spark, a self-publishing platform that uses Pressbooks as its content editor, that looks like it could potentially save me money with having a print and ebook created of my doctoral students’ books in the future.

I wish I would have documented more of the steps that I had to go through in generating all the needed information for the printed and ebook editions. I suspect that come March (the next time I will be co-writing an open textbook with students), I will be scratching my head, trying to remember what I selected the last time I was in Pressbooks and Createspace.

Frictionless Systems

By Bonni Stachowiak | January 16, 2018 | 4 Comments | X Facebook LinkedIn Email

This past week, I began emerging from a bout with the flu. Even though I still have a bit of a cough and a runny nose, it has felt delightful just to be out of bed and returning to some sort of normalcy.

Frictionless Systems

One thing I was grateful for during this season was the productivity systems I have in place. I was able to determine what I had fallen behind on and how to make adaptations to priorities I had been unable to focus on.

Weekly Reviews

I have written and podcasted before about the importance of weekly reviews in the past.

Each time I complete a weekly review, I come out of it with less stress and more of a sense of the most important things to focus on during a given week.

TextExpander (Windows, Mac, iOS)

I officially recommended TextExpander on episode 114, but have mentioned it many times in past shows and blog posts. TextExpander lets us save time by “quickly inserting snippets – email addresses, signatures, code chunks, form letters images – as you type, using a simple keyboard shortcut, or custom abbreviations. Save time without typos and copy/paste.”

I recently learned how to have TextExpander type something into the subject line of an email and enter the rest of some text into the body of an email. TextExpander also has room for customization of each “snippet.”

When I have a podcast guest scheduled, I send them a couple of emails about being on the show. This process is made much simpler with TextExpander. Each episode’s show notes are also produced that much faster using TextExpander snippets.

Ulysses (Mac/iOS)

My blog posts and podcast show notes all start in this brilliant text editing application. From their website:

A pleasant, focused writing experience combined with effective document management, fast syncing and flexible export make Ulysses the first choice for writers of all kinds.”

Sanebox (Gmail/Google, Apple iCloud, Outlook.com, Office 365, Yahoo, and many more)

Their promotional text reads: “Today is the day you take back control of your inbox.” They aren’t kidding you. I can’t imagine going back to life without SaneBox.

We prioritize your Inbox and let you know if an email didn't receive a reply.

We can also sort your Inbox, keep track of reminders and snoozed emails, rescue real email from your spam folder, upload attachments to your cloud, and more…”

Airmail (Mac, iOS)

I have found Airmail to be a wonderful way to get through email quickly. My favorite feature is the keyboard shortcuts that are available. I hardly ever have to use my trackpad when I’m moving emails into folders and processing incoming mail.

Fantastical (Mac, iOS)

I use Fantastical primarily on my Mac, though they do have an iOS app, as well. The main feature that people love about Fantastical is the ability to “use natural language to quickly create events and reminders.”

I find that I make more use of the ability to have different collections of calendars to switch between. Sometimes, I might just want to see our family members’ respective calendars and not pay attention to my work calendar at all. In other instances, I may only want to see my work and personal calendars and leave Dave’s and the kids’ calendars out of the picture.

Here’s how they describe this feature (calendar sets) on their website:

Fantastical 2 lets you quickly toggle multiple calendars on or off with a single click, so you can focus on what's more important in that moment. The days of going back and forth, clicking multiple times, just to hide and show your calendars are over.

But we didn't stop there. You can even automatically switch Calendar Sets based on your location (i.e. Work and Home). How cool is that?”

Paprika (Windows, Android, Kindle, iOS, Mac)

As some of you might have heard me talk about, I recently joined the club of those who are obsessed with the Instant Pot. It has me cooking a lot more often and taking advantage of my recipe app regularly.

Paprika “is an app that helps you organize your recipes, make meal plans, and create grocery lists. Using Paprika's built-in browser, you can save recipes from anywhere on the web.

Want to access your recipes on your phone or tablet? Our free cloud sync service allows you to seamlessly sync your data across all of your devices.”

You can also more easily adjust the ingredients you will need, based on different desired serving sizes. You definitely can’t do that quick of a set of calculations with a cookbook, or a recipe you found on Pinterest.

When Paprika says “you can easily save recipes” on the web, it means it. You copy a link over to Paprika and it extracts the needed data from the website and adds it into all the various fields (cooking time, ingredients, instructions, etc.).

Your Turn

What apps and services are you finding are helping you create a more frictionless experience?

Thanks to everyone who replies to my calls for entertainment help on Twitter while I was sick. Let’s just say I have been watching more than my fair share of this one and this one in recent weeks.

I also am so appreciate of Nicholas Cifuentes-Goodbody who helped me on his new Research Hacking Slack channel to troubleshoot a TextExpander / Ulysses workflow issue I was having.

Question Regarding Organizational Systems for Courses

By Bonni Stachowiak | January 9, 2018 | 2 Comments | X Facebook LinkedIn Email

I received the following question from a listener and had more than a quick response…

I’m coming back to teaching after a semester off, and even though I’m teaching courses I’ve done before, just finding all the right documents is a challenge.

I have to check the LMS, supporting websites, my lesson plans, my post-class reflections, the syllabus, assignment documents, and potential readings in Evernote, just to figure out where I need to update dates and materials.

I inevitably make mistakes or have things out of sync. I’ve made life harder on myself by adopting different tools over the years. Are there models for managing everything, and for building courses in more modular ways, so I don’t feel like I’m always rebuilding them each semester.”

– Teaching in Higher Ed Listener

I have done this the hard way and I have done this the easy way.

The hard way, as you describe, winds up being a hodgepodge of information. I can sometimes navigate around my own “systems,” but if I ever want to share with another colleague, they often can’t make heads or tails of what I have done when teaching a class.

The easy way sometimes takes a bit more thought from the start, but pays off in spades over many years… Here is my advice on how to stay organized.

Think in Terms of Course Assets

In my 15 years of teaching in higher ed, I have gone through many-a-learning management system (LMS). That has made me tend to want to consider my computer’s data (or, in my case, the stuff I save on my preferred cloud service – Dropbox) as the primary assets for all my courses.

Then, I think of just linking to these assets from the LMS. Then, when things inevitably change, the LMS files don’t need to be updated. Since the LMS only links to the files, when the files change on my computer – anyone accessing them from the LMS from that point forward always has the latest version.

Having a mindset of course assets also helps when the duration of a course changes, as can sometimes happen at my institution. Colleagues who have to modify a 15-week course to an 8-week course have a lot easier time, if they are looking at it through a lens of re-arranging a series of course assets instead of completely reinventing the wheel.

Syllabus Example

A basic example of a course asset involves how I handle syllabi. Instead of uploading each semester’s syllabi on the LMS, I have links that go to a PDF file that is always the most current syllabus for a given course.

I explain this practice on a blog post and short video from 2013 – and am still using this approach today. This technique means that when a former student emails me to ask for a syllabus from the Spring of 2014, I can easily send the exact syllabus that I used on a specific semester, but when I copy a course shell over on our LMS into a new semester, I never have to spend time updating the syllabus file for that semester in the LMS.

PowerPoint Example

When a colleague was going to be teaching Consumer Behavior this semester and wanted to know if he could use my PowerPoint slides, I happily sent him a single link to my Dropbox folder that contains all the PPTs. To produce that link, I only had to right-click on that folder on my computer and choose copy-dropbox-link. I don’t have to go to the web or otherwise be logged into Dropbox. That option of right-clicking is always available for sharing.

I will often use the same approach for students. Depending on the class, I will either have all the PowerPoints linked to in one folder, as described in the last paragraph, or I will individually link to specific PowerPoints.

In our LMS (Canvas), I create calendar items for each of our class meeting times. There’s an option to create repeating calendar items in Canvas. Once I create all the repeating calendar items with our class meeting times, I can then go in and customize each class meeting time.

Here’s an example of a portion of the first night's schedule of this semester’s Business Ethics class in the Canvas calendar.

I can link to PPTs, or handouts, or other course assets, using this right-click Dropbox feature.

Other cloud-based services like Office 365 – OneDrive have the option to link to files and folders, but they don’t always make it as easy as Dropbox has for me.

Digital Notebook Example

Many of us also make use of some kind of a digital notebook in our teaching. Scott Self was on episode 48 and really got me thinking about how to use Evernote (but the same is true for Google Keep (which Robert Talbert is a fan of), OneNote, Bear (which Doug McKee recently raved about on Twitter), etc.) in my teaching.

Scott Self really turns Evernote into his LMS, using the actual LMS primarily for linking to Evernote and then for grading. I haven’t gone that far, but do sometimes wonder if it isn’t better than my structure.

I do use Evernote for assignment instructions often, however. Especially when I am teaching a class for the first time, or doing a significant rewrite to a class, I wind up having a lot to think about in terms of assignments. Having the instructions for an assignment in Evernote means I can keep tweaking them, without always having to login to the LMS and changing them there. Inside the assignment description on the LMS, I link over to the Evernote note that has the assignment instructions in it.

Keep Folder Structures Organized

The other approach I take that has really helped me is staying consistent with my folder structure and file name conventions. I share about this technique in the post: Keep Course Files Organized.

Simplify Your Tools

As you mentioned in your question, it is also good practice to minimize the number of educational technology tools that we have in our rotation. While that is better for students, it is also a way that we can somewhat minimize the number of possible places that our course content might reside.

I suspect this is somewhat of a relative thing, though. My idea of keeping it simple may prove to be way too many possibilities for others.

The services that I have been using quite often include:

Quizlet – Flashcards service that is a perfect way to do some retrieval practice
FlipGrid – Video service – the edtech world's answer to everything that's wrong with traditional discussion boards
Remind – For when I really need to quickly text everyone in my class, but don't necessarily want them replying to everyone, or having my cell number
Glisser – Mostly use for keynote talks, not as much in class. Wonderful polling service and then some.
PollEverywhere – Free account has a max of 40, so I only use in classes under 40. Terrific for peer instruction.
Kahoot – Mostly use for large faculty development events, not as much in class. Playful, game show format.

Avoid Mentioning Specific Dates

Whenever possible, avoid mentioning specific dates within the LMS. This may be obvious to most of you, but I encounter enough faculty who will create a quiz, for example, and have in the name or description of the quiz that it is due on November 1. The next time they go to teach the class, they have to rename their quizzes and wherever else they mentioned dates or times in the class.

The two LMS that I use with any regularity (Canvas and Blackboard) both have options for adjusting course dates to fit a new time period. When the new semester comes around, when importing the old course, you have the option to have all due dates adjusted, relatively. If something happened during week 2 of the class, it will adjust to week 2 of the new semester. It is well worth exploring this option with whoever helps you learn your LMS, as it really saves a bunch of time.

Your Turn

What advice do you have for keeping all the “stuff” for our courses more organized?

My First Experience Co-Writing an Open Textbook

By Bonni Stachowiak | December 31, 2017 | 5 Comments | X Facebook LinkedIn Email

We met together for the last time on December 16th.

The way the course is structured, we gather in person for a half day at the start and end of the term and then have three web conferences every other week throughout the eight-week class. The weeks in between the web meetings, we have asynchronous learning experiences and connect on Twitter. We were concluding the term, after having created something that would last well beyond our class’ end date.

This class is now the hardest one that I teach with any regularity. I struggle with trying to have us all unlearn some of the ways that we think about the role of technology in our teaching and more broadly in our lives. I also fail regularly at trying to redefine what it means to be a teacher of a course like this.

The individuals in the class have always fit the description of what is known as “teaching to the tails.” I wind up having many learners who are uncomfortable experimenting with technology and seeing how it might enhance their teaching or learning in some way. There are also always at least a few who have regularly embraced educational technology in their pedagogy.

For the Fall of 2017, I took the radical step (at least to me) of doing away with a textbook for the class. The ones we had used in the past had too great an emphasis on K-12 when not everyone in the program worked within that educational context. They also got out of date too quickly and were somewhat cost-prohibitive.

Open Textbooks

This first recollection I have of hearing the phrase “open textbook” was from Kris Shaffer, who spoke about his Open Music Theory Textbook project on episode 74 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast. I am embarrassed to admit that I don’t think I got it at the time.

I understood that he had written an online textbook with another guy. At the time, I suspect that I hadn’t yet realized (and probably still am lacking in understanding) how much textbook costs factor into college students’ financial difficulties. Since music is not my discipline, I didn’t really have an appreciation for how this text compared to others published in a more traditional way.

After speaking with Kris for the podcast, I discovered his post for Hybrid Pedagogy: The Critical Textbook. He writes:

“Textbooks as fixed expressions limit academic freedom and arbitrate student success/failure to a non-trivial degree.” – Kris Shaffer (@krisshaffer), April 2, 2014

Getting Started

By the time I decided to have our class write an open textbook together, I had many sources of inspiration, but still felt unsure on much of the process.

Orientation

During our class orientation, I spoke at length about the problem with what are often referred to as throw-away assignments. Contrasting writing a research paper for our class that would only be read by me with co-writing a book together generated quite a bit of excitement. Alan Levine’ story about his first experience competing a renewable assignment in 1984 is inspiring. I was excited to create something more meaningful for and with this group of individuals.

What I wish I would have done during the orientation was to have students read through some clarifying text and asked them to digitally fill in their understanding of some core ways we would approach this endeavor together:

Authorship. The book would be authored by them, but did not need to have their name listed as an author in the book. They could use a pen name, or be an anonymous author. While I stated this multiple times during the orientation and during our first online meeting together, there was at least one person who had enough of a concern about this to send a note to the person I report to as an adjunct at this institution.
Book sales. The book would be sold on Amazon, both as an ebook and as a printed book. While I would receive some portion of money on each sale, these monies would likely only help me get closer to breaking even on the expenses I had already incurred to purchase a license from Pressbooks to publish in these formats.
Roles. They would take on various roles throughout the writing process, some of which would involve coaching each other and more intense collaboration than they would have grown accustomed to in the program so far. I was fortunate in that I had a wonderful project lead for this eight-week adventure. There were many hard workers without whom the project would not have succeeded. In some cases, they were misaligned in the roles that they took, or there was some misunderstanding about the extent to which I would be able to individually coach each person on their writing, versus having a role of editor include peer coaching.

The Finished Open Textbook

By the time our final meeting rolled around, we had written an 80-page open textbook entitled:

Igniting Your Teaching with Educational Technology: A Resource for New Teachers

We also had the following assets to “show” for our work:

Digital version of the open textbook, free to anyone with internet access
Print version and an ebook that could be purchased through Amazon
Electronic versions of the book that could be “forked” (a fancy way of saying saved-as, to start a new version for someone else’s purposes) – ours is available by request, but here’s a look at what this can look like via the Research Methods in Psychology textbook by Paul C. Price, Rajiv S. Jhangiani, and I-Chant A. Chiang – I also like that they included a dedication, about this book, acknowledgements, and preface before diving into their first chapter
Book cover graphic that could be used on the various editions of the book
Supporting website where people could go for links and other resources

The process was ridiculously hard and exquisitely invigorating. What made it hard was partially because anytime you try to get a group of 16 people together to accomplish anything worthwhile, it is going to get messy. There were also a whole bunch of things that came up along the way that I did not anticipate. Most of these were small (wait times for the book, once it was uploaded to Create Space, for example), but made the need for flexibility in our planning that much more important. It was completely worth it, however, and I am grateful to each person who was involved in the journey.

Tools

Thank goodness that I was aware of most of the tools that were essential in us reaching our goals for this project. The Individuals working on the project had done some blogging on WordPress and worked on the Google platforms, which helped.

Google Team Drive – The doctoral cohort had already established a Google Team Drive that they had used to coordinate some of the logistics of their recent trip to Washington DC. I had only ever created shared folders on Google Drive in the past and now see the huge benefits of having a shared Team Drive for projects like this. That way, each time you create a new folder or add new information, you don’t have to worry about reinventing your group to the newly created content.
Google Docs – The bulk of the writing took place on Google Docs. We could make comments that people could then later address and mark as resolved. All edits took place in real-time, as we were typing. We could see a detailed revision history and even know who else was working on the book on a particular evening.
Pressbooks – The bulk of the book formatting and cover design took place on Pressbooks. If you have ever used WordPress, you will be comfortable using Pressbooks, as it is build off WordPress. Pressbooks is a freemium service, meaning that it is free to create a book using their tool, and have that book available online in a digital format for free. However, if you want to have an ebook that could be read on an ebook reader, such as a Kindle or the Kindle app, or you want it to be available to be printed on demand, you need to purchase a paid license for that one book title.
PowerPoint – I was originally going to use a graphics editor to design the background art for the book cover, but due to an uninteresting rabbit trail, I wound up just using PowerPoint (exported the individual slide as a .jpg graphic). Pressbooks has a cover generator that adds the title, authors, ISBN number, and other information onto the cover. However, if you want some kind of a background, as well, you need to upload a graphic.

Probably the two technical skills most essential in writing an open textbook would be having to do with text formatting. Word Processors can have formatting that shows up “behind the scenes” that make some of the beautiful template you select in Pressbooks not shine through. It is essential to copy and paste text into Pressbooks that doesn’t contain any unseen formatting that could potentially mess things up.

I recommend highlighting one chapter or section at a time and pressing command or control – c on your keyboard to copy the text. Then, find the standard text editor that is on your preferred operating system (notepad on Windows; textedit on Mac) and choose edit- paste to match destination formatting or paste unformatted text. The goal is to paste only the text and not any of the formatting from the word processor.

Then, copy and paste the text from the text editor into Pressbooks. Finally, apply the formatting from the predefined styles within the Pressbooks text editor. That way, you can leverage the way that the various themes within Pressbooks make headings and subheadings stand out and also have these items appear in your table of contents.

There is much more I could write about what I learned from this experience. However, it is new year’s eve and is time to get ready for our early celebration this afternoon. We will be celebrating with you New Yorkers, as the kids and adults attending our get together need our sleep.

Other Resources

Below are a few more resources to help you get started writing your own open text book, if you are interested.

I welcome any questions you have about the process, as I have a feeling I will be revisiting this topic, again, in the future. I would also love to hear about your experiences working with or writing open textbooks.

Top 17 Teaching in Higher Ed Blog Posts in 2017

By Bonni Stachowiak | December 23, 2017 | Leave a Comment | X Facebook LinkedIn Email

I recently shared the most downloaded Teaching in Higher Ed podcast episodes that were recorded in 2017. I decided to take a look at which blog posts had the most reads in 2017 and share those in my final post for the year. Some of these posts go back all the way to 2014 but keep showing up in the analytics.

2017 blog posts that did not make the list – but that I think are worth a look include:

There is much to look forward to in 2018: My first book (through Stylus Publishing), teaching experiences, rewarding partnerships (grateful for the collaboration opportunities with ACUE), and being in community with all of you. Have a wonderful holiday season and a happy new year.

Question from a Listener: Open Textbooks

Why Pressbooks?

Why Amazon (CreateSpace)?

Charging Students

Many Questions Remain

Frictionless Systems

Frictionless Systems

Weekly Reviews

TextExpander (Windows, Mac, iOS)

Ulysses (Mac/iOS)

Sanebox (Gmail/Google, Apple iCloud, Outlook.com, Office 365, Yahoo, and many more)

Airmail (Mac, iOS)

Fantastical (Mac, iOS)

Paprika (Windows, Android, Kindle, iOS, Mac)

Your Turn

Question Regarding Organizational Systems for Courses