Original html web version
Does it look like a textbook?

In earlier posts, I have discussed how to measure the success of an open, online textbook, Teaching in a Digital Age, and also discussed the costs of developing and writing the book. In this post I will look at what I learned from this activity, and will discuss whether it was worth it.

Why did I want to write an open textbook?

1. The need for change in teaching and learning

My main reason is that there is a major paradigm shift happening in education, driven partly by a changing economy and the need for a highly skilled and knowledgeable work-force, greater diversity of students as access has increased, and of course new technologies that not only have great capacity to change the way we teach, but which are also in common use by our students.

Although there are lots of articles and discussion about online, blended, hybrid, open learning and MOOCs, and too many books that exhort faculty and instructors to change, I felt (this muzzy, subjective word expresses well the intuitive rather than empirical basis for my view) that there wasn’t any other book ‘out there’ that really provided evidence-based, strong guidelines for faculty and instructors about how to teach in this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment. At least writing the book and throwing it out there would test that idea.

If I was going to do that, though, I needed to practice what I preach, so it was important to design the book to embed some of the key principles and guidelines that I was extolling. An open textbook, easily accessible, technological, interactive, collaborative and dynamic, seemed a good way of doing this.

2. The BCcampus Open Textbook Project

A second reason is that right at my back door was this exciting, government-supported project for open textbooks. This provided me with the technology support and encouragement that I needed, as I had never written an open textbook before.

3. Giving back

This is the most difficult motivation for me to write about, so let me be frank. I’ve had a wonderful 40 year career in open and distance learning, earned good money by any standards, and I really believe in what I do as an open and distance educator. I don’t need the money from book royalties, I’ve already got 12 commercially published books behind me, and I’m at the end of my career, so I can afford the risk of it not working. So now is a good time to give something back.

Most important of all, there’s vanity (or is it narcissism?). Writing this book is a way to encapsulate all that I’ve learned in my career, and leave it, if I’m successful, in an easily accessible form for anyone who wants to make use of this experience – a sort of legacy project.

Perhaps most importantly, I believe knowledge – or at least academic knowledge – should be free and open to all. Why not the knowledge that I’ve acquired, for what it’s worth?

4. Testing the concept of open publishing

A big challenge is to get (other) authors to write an open textbook. There is no direct financial reward, and perhaps even more importantly, there is a much higher level of risk than going through commercial publishers. Who will read it? Will it be accepted in the academic community? Will it have as much influence? And a very practical question: how to do this? What do you need to know? Who can help you? How do you preserve the integrity of the book if people can just copy or alter what you’ve written? What will it cost?

I’m a researcher and evaluator by desire and training, so writing this book seemed to me to be a good way to examine and maybe stretch not only the technology of open textbooks, but the larger concepts and questions about open publishing. Hence this blog post, which is an interim report on the experiment. These motivations provide a framework for assessing the experience.

What did I learn?

I’ll start with the easiest question

1. The technology worked – mainly

I used the BCcampus version of Pressbooks, which is an open source, ‘simple book’ production software, built around WordPress. Thus anyone who has experience in blogging, particularly if they have used WordPress before, will find it very easy to use Pressbooks. I was literally writing within 10 minutes of opening the editing page.

BCcampus added a few extra features, such as edit boxes for learning outcomes, activities, and key takeaways from each chapter, that I was easily able to embed into the main text. BCcampus gave me a url for the editing and publishing and hosted the book on their server. There is a function, controlled by the author, that enables each part of the book to be private, or published on the open web site.

Figure 1: The Pressbooks editing page
Figure 1: The Pressbooks editing page

I also wanted my book to be multi-media so it could easily demonstrate the value and appropriateness of different media for teaching. Importing graphics and podcasts is simple in Pressbooks, through the Add Media function. For video (as with most of the graphics) I use entirely copyright cleared material (i.e. OERs). I just provided a url to the site hosting the videos, with a graphic from the video where appropriate as the hot link. I created my own podcasts, using Apple’s Garage Band and a few graphics myself using Powerpoint. However, next time I would use a graphics designer from the beginning (see an earlier post on this) and get original graphics designed properly.

Second, it is easy to edit and re-structure the book, which I needed to do when I finished the first draft. I had to merge materials from different sections, split lengthy chapters into two or three separate chapters, move some parts earlier or later in the book, and make sure I had a consistent set of references throughput the book. This was all very easy to do, using the ‘Text/organise’ function, which allows you to drag and drop each section of the book.

Figure 2: Text/organise page
Figure 2: Text/organise page

The most important feature of all though, which I did not get to appreciate until I had finished the book, is that as well as the html version that can be read online, Pressbooks exports the html version into a variety of formats for downloading, including pdf, epub, mobi, xhtml, and wxr, so it can be read on tablets and mobile phones as well as laptops. Creating these different versions is also extremely easy for an author to do, using the ‘export’ function in the text/organize page.

However, there were of course some unexpected technical problems that I ran into. Pressbooks confusingly uses the terms ‘parts’ and ‘chapters’ in a way that may suit novel writing, for which it was originally developed, but is not intuitive for a text book. The ‘parts’ function is really a header (like ‘Part One’ in a novel). I found that I could use the ‘Part’ function as a chapter heading and an advanced organizer, with learning outcomes, a brief list of chapter contents, and key takeaways/summary points, and the ‘Chapter’ function as ‘Sections’ of the chapter. This was critical, as research indicates most people spend a maximum of one hour on any particular chunk of academic reading, so I wanted to ensure that each section of a chapter was relatively short and could be covered within one hour. However, I was a third of the way through the book before I realised that I needed to reverse ‘chapter’ and ‘part’, so that ‘part’ was the header, and each ‘chapter’ was in fact a section of the chapter. (I should have followed my own advice, and read the Pressbook instructions before starting, but it is still not intuitive.)

The other, more serious, problem was exporting graphics into the different versions (pdf, epub, etc.), which I have discussed elsewhere. This is a problem on which I am still working.

Lastly I ran into a problem that most bloggers face at some time or another, persistent hacking attacks on the site, which required a lot of help from BCcampus technical support to manage. However, the public version of the book was never compromised.

Overall, though, the technology worked wonderfully well and should not stop any technology neophyte from writing an open textbook, although as always, good technical support is a necessary back-up when problems do occur.

2. Textbook or course?

One conceptual issue I kept running into was whether I was writing a textbook or a course. It’s important to realise that Pressbooks is NOT a learning management system, and does not come with all the functions of an LMS. For instance, although there is a comment function available at the end of each section of a chapter (as in blogs), this is not an adequate tool for discussion, compared with a threaded discussion forum in an LMS.

I wanted to incorporate a threaded discussion tool into the book, but there were two problems, one minor, one major. The minor problem was my inability to find a suitable open source, secure, password protected online discussion forum that I could integrate into Pressbooks. It’s a minor problem, because there are probably such tools available, and if not, it wouldn’t be difficult to build one.

However, the major problem is conceptual. An open textbook, if successful, will be used in many ways, by many people. Thus you need a way of separating out discussion between different groups, so that Instructor A using the book has his or her own group of students and discussions separate from Instructor B using the book. The same issue arises with embedding tests or even activities.

I therefore had to step back then and design the book as an open resource, parts of which could be incorporated or linked to easily from within an existing learning management system or even some other range of tools, such as social media.

The nice thing about a Creative Commons-licensed text book is that instructors – or students – can go the other way, and embed parts of the book within their LMS or e-portfolios or other platforms for their learning. So the looser the technological and conceptual structure for the book, the easier it is for end users. Nevertheless, the book is not as interactive as I would like, although if I had more time, I could probably incorporate more tests, open-ended questions and maybe even some games or simulations to reinforce the writing.

3. Accessibility

This leads to another point, which comes back to my goals for the book. My main target group for the book are mainstream, subject discipline faculty and instructors who are very busy doing research and have relatively little time to become experts in teaching. I wanted therefore a book that was easily accessible, organized in such a way that faculty could find what they were looking for with one or two clicks of a mouse. Each section can be read in less than an hour, but the whole book hangs together as a coherent whole. If instructors wanted to go further or deeper, I added activities and further reading within the section.

The contents page on the first screen/page of the book enables this – just click on the topic and you’re in.

Figure 3: Pressbooks table of contents: one click to the topic
Figure 3: Pressbooks table of contents: one click to the topic

4. Independent peer reviews are still necessary

I used my blog to float drafts of each chapter to a wide community of practitioners in online course design and research, and had an instructional designer and a group of digital learning specialists at Ryerson University giving me detailed feedback as the book progressed.

I also published each chapter when it was ready, seeking comments from general readers, as the book progressed. I also have 12 other peer reviewed, commercial publications behind me.

Nevertheless, I still had graduate students writing to me saying that their supervisors did not want them using my book as a reference in their theses as the book was not peer reviewed. My initial reaction was to tell the supervisors to go to hell, but that wouldn’t help the students, who were all anxious to quote my work, so I have requested three independent peer reviews that will be published as an appendix to the book. These will be ready by the end of June.

Was it worth it?

Emphatically, yes, from my perspective:

  • the book has been downloaded roughly 10,000 times within two months, and more importantly, the qualitative responses to the book through e-mails and comments indicate that I am reaching my main target audience (see Measuring the success of an open textbook for more details);
  • although all the reviews are not yet in, the response to the contents of the book have been generally highly favourable;
  • I have been able to practice what I preached; I was able to write the book mainly in the way I wanted as someone with an instructional design background;
  • there does seem to have been a gap in the market which the book is filling;
  • the technology does work, and even technologically-challenged authors will be able to use the technology easily;
  • I was able to go from initial idea to final publication of the book in 15 months. I have had a publisher take that long from handover of the final draft to publishing. For a book of this kind, quick publishing is important otherwise it starts to look out of date, even if the main foundations do not change;
  • open publishing offer many possible routes for getting the book known, and with a little effort by the author, open textbook marketing works far better than the usual pathetic marketing efforts of commercial publishers;
  • the book is dynamic; I can continue to edit, change and update the book on an ongoing basis.

So I feel really good about it. However, this kind of publishing may not work for others. It may be too risky for someone early in their career to go the open publishing route, in terms of credibility or academic acceptance. Those not experienced in writing books probably need the support of a commercial publisher. If you are looking to make money from writing, this is definitely not the way to go, unless you have a very creative business model. The support of BCcampus was essential for me, and others may not have such support.

But if you have something important to write and want to get out to as many people as possible, then I strongly recommend open publishing. But I’m not doing another one for a while!

Audio recording

A 41 minute audio of the full presentation on ‘Why write an open textbook?’, given at the ETUG workshop at Simon Fraser University on June 4, 2015, can be downloaded from here.

Robert Martelacci also recorded a podcast interview with me about the book, which is available here

10 COMMENTS

  1. __Wow, Tony, Thank you for being so articulate in sharing your experiences and perspectives – What a great accomplishment, Congratulations! _ I’ve been following your blogs with deep interest since early days of book development and, through this online journal, you’ve taught us all along the way.

  2. Thanks for this!
    Transparent, useful, thoughtful, and inspiring. Those interested in Open Publishing can draw a lot of insight from your experiment.
    Read it with interest, in part because your conclusion wasn’t as foregone as it may have sounded. Similar to your points about who benefits from online courses, you make it very clear that Open Publishing isn’t the ideal solution for every author, even if the broader community stands to benefit from the process.

    To be honest, your point about giving back was rather touching. Partly because of the self-awareness involved, and partly because there’s a special quality to work done in a late career. Though you don’t mention them directly, Open Publishing can be very rewarding an endeavour for teachers near the end of their careers. Especially if there can be some form of collaboration with people at other points in their professional development. The same way traditional textbook publishers would do well in building bridges among their audiences, organisations providing support for Open Textbooks could accomplish a lot by linking pedagogues and field experts at different stages in the game.

    Have only been following your project indirectly, being too busy to read much of the book itself. It does sound like a valuable resource in which one can dip, on occasion. Will probably advise instructors to read specific sections or chapters, when relevant. In this sense, your book might serve as a single-authored collection of Open Educational Resources. It might also become a key resource for new instructors and faculty, the way some books have become classics. Legacy project indeed.

    The main point, though, is that you were able to “put your money where your mouth is” and experiment with a fascinating model.

    Kudos and thanks!

  3. This is an incredibly helpful post. Thank you. The California Open Educational Resources Council has been working with faculty from California Community Colleges, University of California, and California State University to encourage adoption of OER textbooks. We also created a rigorous peer review system to review textbooks for 50 highly-enrolled courses that transfer through the 3 segments. (We’re about to complete all of the reviews at the conclusion of the summer and publish them: http://www.coolfored.org/reviews.html). We encourage any and all faculty to use the peer review rubric we’ve established. It seems to work well to identify an OER textbook’s efficacy for a particular course.

    In 2016, we are moving towards a program to encourage writing OER textbooks and will use your blog post as a demonstration about the process of writing OER textbooks.

  4. Hi Tony,

    Do you still think it’s a good idea to put a reading material as an ebook, in order to track the student activity (progress, highlights, timing)?

    • Hi, Ella.
      Not a simple question to answer. It depends on the software used to house the book and whoever is hosting the site where the e-book resides. In my case, BCcampus and Contact North are hosting sites for the book because it’s an open textbook. BCcampus uses a web analytics package called Piwick to track usage. More likely, though, an e-book will be hosted by a publisher’s web site so it will depend what services the publisher offers for tracking.
      However, I’m not an expert on the software side of this. I’m wondering if anyone else has had the experience of tracking students’ usage of an e-book?

  5. Hi Tony,

    My institution is considering ebooks as a means to offer a different medium for directed readings as part of summer courses. Your insight and experience with your own ebook are extremely valuable. The bigger challenge is not the technology per say but the mindset and the culture shift that needs to happen for the ebook format to be embraced.

    Thank you for being “open” about your journey!

  6. Thank you for the very informative post. I was really moved by the accessibility bit of it where by the ebooks can be easily accessed due to this technology error. The culture of reading can be enhanced now that one can easily access the ebook anywhere.

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