Like many professors, I often try to create classroom activities that are more authentic learning experiences and will artifacts that last beyond a traditional semester. I have long been inspired by the notion of Open Educational Resources (OERs) and the different forms of pedagogy that surround these initiatives. In light of this, I created a classroom project that I piloted on two occasions for students to collaboratively write an OER textbook on topics of relevance to the students and the broader educational technology community. Using principles from instructional design, I created a five-step process visualized in Figure 1 below for students to collaboratively author chapters for an OER book on a WordPress platform to provide different pedagogical and technological affordances, such as interactive quizzes, embedded assessments, learning outcomes, chapter reviews, and more.
I pilot tested this project on two occasions in my face-to-face EME 6606: Advanced Instructional Design course. Both of the OER textbooks are available on my website and have actually been adopted in different courses as supplementary resources in higher education programs in the field of educational technology. Here is an example of one of these resources created by my talented students:
I apologize in advance that I have not refreshed these materials in quite some time. However, the artifact is an example of how students engage in a collaborative process to create something of relevance and have a lasting impact in the practice in our field. In the remaining post, I will provide details surrounding each of the five steps and conclude with some considerations for educators seeking to adopt such an approach in their own classrooms.
Things to do Before the Start of the Semester
Before you launch a project like this, you will need to think about a few things. First off, you will probably want to select a topic for the OER book in advance. Obviously, you should select a topic aligned to the student learning outcomes in the course, but you have flexibility in choosing this topic for your students each semester. Secondly, you will need to think about the contents of the OER book in relation to the number of students enrolled in any given semester, and possibly how to chunk the materials into chapters for students. In both terms that I used this process, I randomly assigned students to chapters in Excel prior to the first class. I also assigned multiple students to each book chapter topic and created final rubrics for grading the final project.
Prior to the start of the class, I strongly encourage you to compile a list of resources for the students to read and use as the primary source materials for the topics. As I teach in a graduate program, I opted to select authoritative journal articles, books, and online resources that carry the notion of credibility for my students. At the start of the class, I encourage you to create a guidelines Google document to share with all students in the class. We would use this guidelines document to ensure consistency across chapters. For instance, do you reference them as “learners” or “students” in the chapter text? We would talk about, reference, and revise these guidelines throughout the semester. After addressing these things, you are ready to launch the activity in your course.
1. Develop Subject-Matter Expertise and Write Learning Outcomes
The students all come from different backgrounds and have different experiences, so it is important that the students have time to gain command of the subject matter using the resources you provide and the resources they find in their own independent inquiry. In the first step, we talk about the topics in class, issues they are struggling to understand, and discuss which topics and contents should be included in each of the chapters. I provided students a few weeks to get control of the topic of their chapter, and to write a concise set of student learning outcomes for each of their chapters. Of course, being an instructional design course that I piloted this in, we followed best practice using action verbs and measurable outcomes. While students were charged at writing the student learning outcomes for their own unique chapters, we would discuss topics that would appear across chapters and progressively elaborated the focus and language of each chapter in classroom discussions. I would review these outcomes for partial credit in the project and provide guidance on how to improve them.
2. Create Assessment Experiences Aligned to the Student Outcomes and Sequence the Content
Akin to backward design, students were next asked to create the assessment and practice experiences for the chapter and to create an outline of headings for each of the chapters to show what information was covered and how it would be sequenced in the narrative. This can vary depending on the types of technological or pedagogical affordances you want to include in the OER book. Since I chose to use the WordPress content management system, we created a range of assessment experiences using plugins available for free in WordPress. For instance, we included embedded assessment activities within the chapters, a glossary and tooltips for key vocabulary items, and end-of-chapter assessments and classroom discussion activities. Students were asked to create these activities offline in a word processor to make the revisions and evaluation easier before porting them to the system. We also created a running list of vocabulary terms in the guidelines document to ensure consistent use of language. The outline served as an indicator of how the students would chunk the materials and sequence them for the reader. Again, I provided another step for partial feedback and grading at this stage to scaffold the students.
3. Create First Draft of Instructional Materials Aligned to Student Learning Outcomes and Assessments
At this stage, the students are required to create a complete first draft of all of the instructional materials for the chapter as offline documents using a word processor. I chose not to have the students author the content directly into WordPress because of issues with revisions and managing the content. I actually recommend anyone authoring technology-enhanced materials, including those for a Learning Management System, work fully offline and only port the contents when ready to publish the final materials. While students were not complete at this point, I asked for most of the text materials to be written at this stage. In some cases, the students would provide placeholders for future content that still needed to be written. I asked the students to provide a table of contents and make use of styles in the process. Additionally, students would create a list of vocabulary words with the definitions attached, and all assessment activities were outlined clearly with feedback and response correctness clearly defined. Students were encouraged to create different types of graphics and figures or use open sources repositories of visuals when and where appropriate, but I did try to discourage the use of decorational imagery, which has actually been shown to have little effect or detrimental effects on student learning outcomes. Students were also encouraged to think about different organizational configurations for presenting complex materials, such as the use of tables or lists. Of course, I also required a complete references list and in-text citations following APA guidelines. All materials would be uploaded to a repository, and I would assign the other students in the class to review two or three of the chapters in the following step.
4. Students and Instructor Provide Peer-Review of Other Chapters in the Book Based on Guidelines and Rubric
At this stage, students were assigned to read two or three chapters written by the other groups and to use the comment feature to provide detailed feedback and suggestions for improving the instructional materials. This took a little time as you have to give the students enough time to review the other chapter resources and provide feedback. During class time, we would display the chapters using the projector to discuss possible concerns and address them collaboratively as well. Students also made general comments across the full chapters they reviewed referencing the final grading rubric and the guidelines document we had created together. This is a critical step in this process to ensure students learn to provide constructive criticism about materials and designs, and also served as a mechanism to improve the clarity and consistency across the chapters when problems were identified. I would also provide the students detailed feedback at this stage, which was probably the most time-consuming part of the semester. Be sure to provide yourself ample time to read all of these materials within your schedule. Also, provide yourself a little buffer space in case other issues come up.
5. Revise the Chapter Based on Feedback as Formative Evaluation and Finalize the Chapter
After step four is complete, I gave students a few more weeks to finalize the chapter materials using the feedback provided by their peers and myself. Again, students were required to submit this step as offline word processing documents following APA guidelines. At this stage, students are just making final touches to improve the writing and to ensure consistency and completeness across the OER book chapters. At the final stage, students uploaded the materials to the Learning Management System, and I would assign a final grade and provide feedback using the rubric I created at the start of the semester. As a final note, students were asked to provide a short biographical statement and to include a profile picture for when the materials were finally published on the WordPress site.
Publishing the OER Book on WordPress
I did not have enough time in the academic semester to get the students to upload all of the instructional materials to the WordPress site, so I took on the editor role and published the contents in WordPress shortly after the conclusion of the semester. This obviously took a little bit of time and expertise, but if you are comfortable using the WordPress ecosystem, it will not be that large of a task.
Loose Ends and Future Improvements
I would like to have my students create more interactive and rich multimedia resources in my future attempts at this, such as animations, videos, and interactive content. The H5P plugin for WordPress is a good starting place for this type of content and has rich affordances. I will elect to publish future implementations on the EdTechBooks.org platform, which is an awesome resource developed maintained by Royce Kimmons at BYU. He has created a great ecosystem for media-rich OER textbooks. There is no point in reinventing the wheel, so I will eventually move the contents to his platform for my previous iterations as well. As noted, I did not have the students port the content themselves into WordPress as we ran out of time in the traditional 16-week semester. In the future, I am going to have the students upload the final contents themselves on the EdTechBooks.org platform. Finally, I will try to run this classroom project using agile project management tools and approaches to better model real-world design studios. Anyway, I hope this turns out to be a useful post for other educators.