By Cynthia Jimes

On August 21-23, several open textbook project leaders, researchers, collaborators and open textbook publishers met at the University of California, Irvine (UC Irvine) to discuss how the development and use of open textbooks is best supported and sustained. At the meeting, which was hosted by the Hewlett Foundation and UC Irvine’s Distance Learning Center, there were presentations on open textbook projects, and on quality and technology issues within such projects. These included, for example, a demonstration of the textbook project Open Reference Mathematics, a presentation on balancing the needs of diverse open textbook communities, and a presentation of the Free High School Science Texts (FHSST) case study project.

The FHSST case study, presented by Lisa Petrides, discussed several topics of relevance to open textbook sustainability, including the role of teachers and learners as co-creators of open textbook content, and the potential importance of hybrid models of peer production that simultaneously draw on face-to-face group work and online content authoring platforms. The FHSST presentation served as a concrete example that meeting participants drew upon during the remaining days’ dialogue—which focused on, among other things, defining an “open textbook” in light of teacher and learner needs, and the necessity of developing online spaces where teachers, learners and other users can interact and collaborate around textbook use and reuse possibilities.

The FHSST presentation slides, titled “The Case of Free High School Science Texts: Leveraging Community and Technology to Meet Local Teaching and Learning Needs”, can be downloaded in the resources section of iCommons from here.

If you have questions about the FHSST presentation, please contact Cynthia Jimes at cynthia@iskme.org.

By Cynthia Jimes, ISKME

The OER Case Study project is progressing, both in terms of data collection and framework development, as well as in terms of engaging the OER community members around the project.

The pre-conference day to the 2007 iSummit in Dubrovnik provided an opportunity to share early learnings about the Case Study Project, and to push thinking around sustainability within and across OER initiatives. The pre-day participants brought to light the importance of recognizing variations in definitions and of incorporating that variation into our understanding of OER sustainability—as, e.g., what we mean by localization, peer production, and user engagement will likely differ across initiatives. The pre-day also underscored the importance of paying heed to sometimes less prevalent OER sustainability factors, including getting students involved in the creation of open content, and ensuring that open content is not created in isolated pockets within any given initiative.

As a result of the iSummit pre-day discussions, revisions and additions to the initial case study framework and its tools have been suggested and posted on the Case Study Wiki. These include an OER primer/lexicon, an OER storytelling template, and activities around internal assessment and facilitation of, e.g., content localization and community engagement. Next steps include refining, augmenting, and developing these and other tools with FHSST and additional OER projects to make them applicable for the wider OER community.

In terms of the FHSST case study, analysis of the project’s online volunteer forums, newsletters and other documents as well as over 6 hours of in-depth interviews have been conducted with the project leaders to understand work practices, success factors and current and future challenges. In late July, Sarah Blyth of the FHSST admin team administered a volunteer survey to ten core volunteers. The survey was written collaboratively by FHSST and the ISKME researchers and sought to understand volunteer perceptions around the recruitment process, the content authoring process, and the communication channels within FHSST. Six volunteers returned the survey, and two of them are expected to participate in a follow up phone interview to delve deeper into themes that arose through analysis of the survey responses. ISKME and FHSST will work collaboratively to analyze the final data sets, and to write the FHSST case study report, which will be distributed to stakeholders August 31, 2007. An important by-product of engaging FHSST’s leadership team as researchers of their own practices is the development of the case study framework and tools. For example, the volunteer survey and the means through which it was distributed, collected and analyzed by FHSST are all tools and insights that other OER projects can potentially use in the analysis of their own practices.

In continuing to inform and facilitate wider participant engagement in the case study project, we will continue to update the Case Study Wiki, and invite you to monitor and edit the project description, the case study framework/tools, and the suggested OER programs initially identified by each of you in phone interviews and discussions with the ISKME project director, Lisa Petrides. We also invite you to comment on this node and the blogs that will be created around it each month.

The contact person for the OER case study research is Cynthia Jimes at cynthia@iskme.org.