By Jim Ross-nazzal

I teach history for Houston Community College. Among my various breads and butters is the US survey: US history from pre-contact to 1877 and 1877 to the present. We use a textbook, a reader (essays, articles, and primary source documents) and a monograph or two. In 2006 I was faced with using a $100 reader. I was concerned if the student population could be able to afford the book (in addition to the textbook and monographs). Especially knowing (fearing) that the entire book will not be used by my colleagues nor read by students. So, I was given the green light to create an e-reader, housed on the Department’s web page, to be a choice besides the $100 reader. Students were so thankful that I saved them $100, even more so because students told me then that the entire book was not used and so they always felt like they were wasting their money on expensive books that were not completely used. Students lodge that same complaint today about their chemistry, math,humanities and other expensive textbooks they are forced to buy but not completely used. 

The e-reader was such a success that a senior administrator asked if I was interested in joining a committee dedicated to producing Open Educational Resources (OER) for our students. I was the sole history professor representative. One thing the committee did was to attend the first OER conference at Rice University. At that conference, we were introduced to OER textbooks being written for the university’s program called Project Connexions (currently called OpenStax). And, they were looking for authors.

I immediately began authoring an OER textbook, housed on Project Connexions. Chapters were used by universities, colleges, and schools from California to Maryland and I heard from students from all over the world looking for additional resources or asking me to expand on themes. I was contacted by instructors and students asking for bibliographies, or had questions on research topics, and one student from Sweden, who earned her undergraduate degree in History, contacted me in 2018 to thank me for my OER textbook and how that helped her in her studies. I found out that my chapter on British colonial slavery was being used in a Western civilization class for an online course when I taught the class that used that chapter. 

In the meantime, I started the second edition of that textbook. The business model for OpenStax changed and although I am still a “legacy author,” I began looking around for a platform that would allow easier editing, adding images, citations, and URLs. At that same time my college launched a major OER program, in which the program coordinator told me that he was trying to get all the college’s OER content to be stored on PressBooks.

The edition housed on PressBooks is different from earlier versions. First, I decided to focus on aspects of US history that most interested my student population. I polled my then-current students and I reviewed some earlier semesters’ essays to try to get an idea of what most interested my students. I do add more traditional stuff than one would expect in a US history textbook. For the second part of US History I included more Texas and Houston history and lots of pop culture because those are what most interests my students who overwhelmingly come from Houston’s eastside -a predominately Hispanic and POC area of Houston. In fact, my campus is located within a historically Mexican American neighborhood and so many of my students are interested in the history of their neighborhood therefore one entire chapter of the textbook includes the history, culture, and people of the neighborhood, Magnolia Park and the larger Second Ward of Houston.

But the OER textbook on PressBooks is also different because my students write content for the textbook. Not everything makes it into the textbook due to various levels of research and writing as well as topics and interests. For example, I do not need another entry on Harriet Tubman’s actions during the Civil War but some students researched and wrote about Mexican-American peons who launched guerilla attacks against Confederate camps in Texas. Although some students are still interested in prohibition or Sacco and Vanzetti, other students discovered three mass murderers in the 1920s. The latter is in the textbook. I thought the creation of an OER with student content would (hopefully) better speak to other students, that students would be able to hear their own voices, that the textbook would in places sound like themselves. I thought that students might also be interested (which they are) in participating in a unique exercise. I use what I can, citing students within the text then offering a special thanks at the end of each chapter. Writing is easy. Editing is slow and so the editing process is not as advanced as the writing process. Not as many students are interested in editing what their peers have written and I am editing as I am writing my own sections. I need a dedicated editor in this project. One solution is that I take a semester off from providing new content and just edit my work and assign students to edit student content.  

However, doing so has necessarily changed what I do in the classroom. I spend less time lecturing and more time talking about research, identifying academic sources, context, generally “doing” History. I also spend class time going over drafts, overseeing peer reviews, and offering my own two cents when required. I assign several 500-750 word-essays. I give the topic (World war II at home for example) and turn students loose to discover what they discover. One student found an unknown (to me) manuscript written by a young Japanese American woman interred at the Manzanar camp in northern California.   

Students use our OER textbook to get the general narrative of US history and the context for their own research. I like choice. I support choice in all aspects of my life and so I give students the choice to either create potential content or to edit existing content. And so, some students choose to revise and polish both the content provided by their peers as well as my content. This is our history.

My classes are 100% OER, which is one reason why students take my classes. But students report that they are tired of having to buy books that they seldom use or at times never use. Students tell me they like the way our OER textbook because it reads as if it was written with them in mind. Students take pride in ownership when their work becomes part of the textbook and I use as much as I can from a single sentence to multiple-page essays. Student success has greatly increased. So too has my student retention. About two-thirds of students who take me for the second part of US history took me for the first part of US history. In fact, I have students from previous semesters (and years) still researching and writing for the textbook.

Students enjoy this type of OER, they tell me so because they get to read the words of their peers. They get to read their own words. One semester I compelled students to form groups, Only one group came away from the semester without a bloody nose. Those five students took my second part of the US survey the next semester at which time they told me that they became such good friends that they even commuted to campus together. Anyhow, they produced the highest level, the top-shelf content. I am investigating the possibility of a grant or other means to hire those five students to tutor historical research and writing to my US history survey students. One student recently wrote “ It’s written by you and in collaboration by other students which provides a different perspective of history compared to a normal ‘boring’ textbook.” 

But between being freely available, both in the sense of cost and location, being written with my student population in mind, and working with students to help them research and write content has resulted in a unique project that brings renewal to me with each assignment and happiness to my students because they use a book written with them in mind and at times with content from their classmates of previous semesters.

I am always looking for comments, questions, and content. If you are interested, point your browser to  https://ourstory.pressbooks.com/ and let me know what we can do to make our OER textbook better, more useful, and more relevant.

This post is by Jim Ross-nazzal and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, except where otherwise indicated. Please reference OER and Beyond and use this URL when attributing this work; for more information on licensing, see our Open Access Policy.