Contributed by Yang Wu, 2021 Contributing Editor, & Matthew Boyer

The design of post-secondary level textbooks is a complex process which involves finding a right balance between the pedagogical needs of instructors and the preferences and learning styles of students. With many studies showing a general decline in student use of textbooks, as well as a growing emphasis in the OER community to “decolonize” open education and develop learning resources that are inclusive and support diverse learners (Thomas et al, 2019), creating textbooks that can translate content knowledge into engaging experiences that provide opportunities for learning to students of many backgrounds has become an important topic in recent years. Creative approaches to open textbook design and development that actively seek out perspectives from students of many backgrounds, address issues of cultural representation and are responsive to individual learner needs are critical to developing effective textbooks and enhancing the value of OER in wider academia. 

Clemson University in South Carolina introduces collaborative open textbook writing, an innovative strategy that brings students of many backgrounds directly into the open textbook design and development process. Collaborative open textbook writing combines elements of many educational practices, including Communities of Practice (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002), Cognitive Apprenticeship (Collins, Brown & Holum, 1991; ​​Collins & Kapur, 2014.), and Collaborative Curriculum Design (Bovill, 2014; Leibowitz, et al., 2011). It also takes advantage of Creative Inquiry, a program at Clemson and other academic institutions that allow students to earn course credit while taking part in research projects under the guidance of faculty members. Collaborative textbook writing seeks to design textbooks based on inclusive diversity through ADA compliance and UDL integration within a distributed community of practice. This community involves an open textbook project researcher recruiting a small group of students in a subject that they want to create a textbook for, engaging them in frequent discussions on the design of a textbook and ancillary materials, and seeking their feedback on parts of the textbook as they are being written. The researcher initially treats the students as research subjects, using discussions to assess their learning behavior, but gradually trains them in instructional design so that they are more able to articulate their needs for a textbook and become advisors on textbook design who can also help carryout human subject research. Their feedback on the design and development of the textbooks are passed by the project researcher to the faculty who are in charge of writing the textbooks. 

Collaborative open textbook writing ensures continued student feedback on open textbook development. It seeks to not only produce textbooks that better suit the needs of students, but also to empower students to become active contributors to the design of open textbooks. This approach could be very useful in developing textbooks for more specialized subjects that have struggled to encourage students from diverse backgrounds from entering and retaining them, and is a good way to understand the specific needs of students in these subjects, which have not been explored in previous educational research. Collaborative textbook writing will be implemented in a project to develop three textbooks on robotics for the technical college, undergraduate and graduate levels by Clemson, a Research 1 institution, Claflin University, a historical black college in South Carolina and the Trident Technical College, the largest institution of its type in the state. Robotics is a rapidly growing scientific field, with many practical applications, and there is currently a high demand for engineers and technicians with understanding of its concepts in the manufacturing industry, particularly in the US (Giffi et al., 2018, 3-5)  Higher educational institutions of many types have been actively establishing and expanding specialized courses in the subject in recent years, and some are even offering degree specializations and certifications on robotics. However, textbooks on the subject are highly expensive, and instructors and students alike have often complained that these works do not meet their teaching and learning needs. Like many STEM subjects, the robotics field also seeks to increase the diversity of its student population. 

The three year project, titled “Collaborative Development of Robotics, mEchatronics, and Advanced Manufacturing Open Educational Resources” (CO-DREAM OER) has just received funding from the US Department of Education’s Open Textbook Pilot Grant. Aimed at developing textbooks for different types of institutions, with students from diverse socio-economic, as well as ethnic and racial backgrounds, it also provides a good test case for collaborative textbook writing. CO-DREAM OER is led by Clemson University Libraries and Clemson’s College of Engineering, Computing and Applied Sciences, along with Claflin’s School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics and Trident’s Division of Engineering & Construction, and will involve students from all three institutions as part of its collaborative textbook writing activities. It is set to begin in September 2021. 

Works Cited

Bovill, C. (2014) An investigation of co-created curricula within higher education in the UK, Ireland and the USA. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 51:1, 15-25, https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2013.770264

Collins, A., Brown, J. S., & Holum, A. (1991). Cognitive apprenticeship: Making thinking visible. American Educator, 15(3), 6–11, 38–46.

​​Collins, A., & Kapur, M. (2014). Cognitive Apprenticeship. In R. Sawyer (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology, pp. 109-127). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139519526.008 

Giffi, C.,  Wellener, P., Dollar, B., Manolian, H.A., Monck, L., & Moutray, C., (2018) Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute Skills Gap and Future of Work Study, Deloitte Insights and the Manufacturing Institute. https://www.themanufacturinginstitute.org/research/2018-deloitte-and-the-manufacturing-institute-skills-gap-and-future-of-work-study/

Leibowitz, B., Bozalek, V., Carolissen, R., Nicholls, L., Rohleder, P., Smolders, T., & Swartz, Le. (2011). Learning together: Lessons from a collaborative curriculum design project. Across the Disciplines, 8(3), 1-9. https://doi.org/10.37514/ATD-J.2011.8.3.11

Thomas et. al. (2019) Can we decolonize OER/Open? OER19. https://oer19.oerconf.org/news/blog-can-we-decolonize-oer-open-decolonizeopen/Wenger, E., McDermott, R. A., & Snyder, W. (2002). Cultivating communities of practice : a guide to managing knowledge. Harvard Business School Press.

Yang Wu is the Contributing Blog Editor of OER & Beyond and the Principal Investigator of the CO-DREAM OER project.

Dr. Matthew Boyer is a Research Associate Professor at Clemson University and the educational researcher for the CO-DREAM OER project. His scholarly interests involve how people learn with technology, with a focus on how they capture and model knowledge and experience using digital technologies.

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