67. Iterative OER Development

Imagine course materials that are always up to date and evolve continually to become better at supporting student learning. In this, Dr. Steven Greenlaw joins us to discuss how some publishers of open educational resources are trying to set up sustainable practices to achieve these goals. Steve is a Professor of Economics at the University of Mary Washington and the author of the OpenStax Economics textbooks. He has also developed the materials for Lumen Learning’s Waymaker Introductory Economics texts.

Show Notes

Additional Resources

Transcript

John: Imagine course materials that are always up to date and evolve continually to become better at supporting student learning. In this episode, we discuss how some publishers of open educational resources are trying to set up sustainable practices to achieve these goals.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

[MUSIC]

John: Today our guest is Steven Greenlaw, a Professor of Economics at the University of Mary Washington and the author of the OpenStax OER Economics textbooks. He has also developed the materials for Lumen Learning’s Waymaker Introductory Economics texts. Welcome, Steve.

Steve: Thank you.

Rebecca: Today teas are:

Steve: I’m drinking coffee. Thank you.

John: …and I have Enchanted Forest Fruits black tea from Epcot which I picked up while I was out there for the OLC conference where I last saw you, Steve.

Rebecca: You’ll never guess what I’m drinking.

John: English afternoon?

Rebecca: Yeah, it’s my favorite.

Steve: Well, honestly, I switched to tea in the afternoon.

Rebecca: See…

Steve: But in the mornings, I tend to drink coffee.

Rebecca: Yeah, you and many other people.

John: What prompted your interest in using and developing OER materials?

Steve: I have to say the developing came first. For a long time, I’ve experimented with textbooks going back into the 1980s, which at least John can remember. And I came to the conclusion that that it didn’t really seem to matter what principles book you used. Students needed a book, particularly for the analytical parts of the course: the models and things like that. But whichever book I used, they seem to learn just as well. And more recently, I’ve come to the conclusion that intro textbooks are commodities, that where companies are going to make their money is in the aftermarket products. But we’re not there yet. At least, the majority of the textbook industry is not there yet. So I had that and I didn’t really pay much attention in the 2000s about what textbook I was using, because I didn’t really think it mattered. But I did notice how high textbook prices were going and it was around that point that I became aware of and interested in OER. Again, this is dating myself, but when I was in college during the mid-1970s, I remember a teacher in my intermediate macro class—John, that’s for you—saying he would never assign texts for a course that collectively cost more than $10. [LAUGHTER] And so that’s sort of my base year. So, I sort of had this in the back of my head, I basically tried to choose around the least expensive textbook that I thought would work. And then out of the blue, OpenStax contacted me and said they had funding to create a principles of micro-macro text, and would I be interested in helping them out. I actually jumped at the opportunity, it sounded like a lot of fun. At that point I had already published one textbook commercially for an upper level course and I knew something about the commercial publishing process. I knew that I didn’t really want to go through that again, but I did want to get my ideas out there. One of the things about commercial publishing is they ask you, “What are all the innovative things you want to do?” and then once they have you on contract, they say, “Oh, but you have to do it like everybody else’s.” So that was the start. A year after the OpenStax book got published, I got contacted by Lumen Learning who said essentially the same thing. They said, “We’re building this digital platform, and we wondered if you would like to be the principals subject matter expert.” That’s the term of art that I become a SME.

John: So could you tell us a little bit about Lumen Learning’s project and the Waymaker version of this?

Steve: Sure.

John: What does it add?

Steve: It adds a lot. So, just to be clear, I wrote the OpenStax principles book. And we can talk about that process later if you want to, especially about peer review and things like that. And then I wrote the Lumen Learning Waymaker version, which was essentially an improved version. When we did the OpenStax principles book, we did it in an incredibly short period of time, I think it was nine months. So, when I did Waymaker for the first time, it allowed me to flesh out some of the things that weren’t ideal in the OpenStax book. And then OpenStax came back to me maybe three years ago and said, “We have funding for a new edition. Would you like to do that?” so I wrote a second formal edition for the OpenStax principles book. And then right after that, I did the same thing for Lumen. So, in my mind, I’ve gone through four versions of this now. And it’s not done and that’s part of the beauty of OER… at least the OER business. So to get back to your question, the OpenStax principles book is a textbook, it’s available in print and a variety of online options. My particular favorite is the phone app. So if I’m in class and a student asked me a question about something, I could literally look it up on my phone. Waymaker is a very different animal. It’s digital courseware so it’s a more immersive, interactive experience for students. And it’s not available in print. For example, how would you show a video or do a simulation in a print textbook? You can’t. The most you could do was provide a URL or something and have the student go out to that. In Waymaker, it’s all in one. So Waymaker, aside from text, it includes video, it includes animations, it includes simulations. Just to give you a specific example, instead of students looking at a graph of supply and demand, they actually get to climb in and take it for a test drive. Students really liked that. Many students seem to get it in a way that’s just looking at a two-dimensional graph, or reading text it is much harder for them.

John: I saw you present on this at the OLC conference…

Steve: Yep.

John: …And you demonstrate this. What software did you use to create those interactive graphs?

Steve: Those little interactives are H5C… maybe… it’s called? [It is H5P]

John: Okay.

Steve: It’s a European company, and it’s open source, and it’s really easy to do. I can say that even though I didn’t create the interactives. That’s the joy of working with a company… they actually have people to do the stuff that you don’t know how to do… unlike my earlier career, when I was the programmer, I was the graphic designer and all of those other things. Talking a little more about Waymaker, it’s more than a source of course content. It’s designed to teach students to study more deeply and more effectively. I don’t know about your students, but my students don’t seem to have learned how to study well. They’re very good at the game of school, but they’re not so good at learning. And I don’t mean that as a criticism. It’s just sort of a fact. They think study means read, highlight, read again, highlight again. When we know a lot from cognitive science now, that learning comes from working with the material. As I like to say, “the best way for students to learn economics is to do economics.” So Waymaker emphasizes mastery learning and personalized tutoring. The tutoring comes both from the software and also from the instructor. It’s designed to give students actionable feedback so that they can make their own decisions about how to allocate their study time. This is a really different way of learning, so I’m going to say it again a little bit differently. Assessment is integral to the learning process, it’s not just or even primarily about the grades. Rather, the assessment is designed to make students interact more deeply with the content and interact in a more intelligent meta-cognitive way. I can go into more detail about what it looks like from the students perspective, if you want.

John: Sure. Could you talk a little bit more about that? It’s a great approach. I tried to do that myself, but it’s always an add-on. Having it integrated is a nice feature, and one of the reasons why I’m planning to adopt your package in the fall.

Steve: This is really different for students, but also for the instructor. I’ve been working on this product for three years. When it finally came out in beta, I thought I knew what was going on, and I was really surprised at how little I knew about how it actually worked. Waymaker is organized into modules, which are analogous to chapters in the text. Students begin each module with the “show what you know,” which is basically a formative assessment. The purpose of that is to identify what content they already know. So, it gives them feedback on how they can efficiently use their study time. So, if there’s stuff that they absolutely already know, they don’t need to read about it again, they can just go into the stuff that they don’t know.

John: And even if they don’t, it activates prior knowledge. And it helps them make connections so that they can learn more effectively…

Steve: …Yes.

John: So there’s a lot of benefits, even for the areas they don’t know.

Steve: Yes. And I’m actually adding a little exercise for my first day of class next week, where I put my students in small groups. Some of whom who’ve had the first semester, and some of them who have not. And I’m going to give them a basically a problem to work with, knowing that some of them won’t really know what to do with it. But I want the groups to start working together. But anyway, I digress. So, as students progress through the content, there are a series of learning activities. The original one is called a “self-check.” It’s basically a short formative quiz. The purpose of the quizzes is not summative assessment. But as I said before, it’s to help students think more about their learning. Think about the idea of a Socratic tutor. The tutor doesn’t ask questions to assess the students’ knowledge, but rather to help them work through the content, help them really understand it. So what happens in Waymaker is: the student reads a page a text, or watches a video, or plays a simulation. And then they’re posed a very short quiz, like one or two questions. If they pass the quiz, the “gate” opens and they move to the next section. If they don’t pass the quiz—and on a one-question quiz, either you get it or you don’t—Waymaker suggests that they review the content before attempting the quiz again. They can take those quizzes as many times as they want to. So they can really build some expertise. There are other sorts of learning activities, but I want to focus on the quizzes today. At the end of the modules, students take a module quiz—essentially a chapter test—which is summative. Again, if they fail to achieve mastery—and the default mastery level is 80%, so it’s pretty high level. As an instructor, you can change that to whatever you want. But I like 80%. So if they don’t achieve 80%, they’re encouraged to study again and they’re given information about what areas to study. And then they can take the module quiz one more time. They’re only allowed to take the module quizzes twice. Now, here’s where it starts to get really interesting from the teacher’s point-of-view. The instructor receives reports from the module quizzes whenever a student fails. So for me, the first really good thing about Waymaker was that I don’t have to go to some website and look at some spreadsheet and see which students are struggling. Rather, anytime a student fails, I get pinged from the software. So it says, “so and so…” Well it’s a little boilerplate language… but basically it says they worked through the module, and they scored a 46 on the module quiz. You might want to reach out to them at that point. So the software is flexible. So you can get these things in real time, you can get them once a day, you can get them once a week, if you want to. I get them once a day. That seems reasonably quick for me. If the students taken the quiz at three in the morning, I’m not up anyway, so it hardly matters. It’s not like I’m going to give them that fast feedback. But what happens is I get that information, and then I get to decide, “What am I going to do about it?” If someone gets a 76 on their first attempt, I generally figure, “Okay, they’re gonna figure this out.” And so I don’t worry about it. If someone gets a 46, then I immediately want to reach out to them and say, “Hey, I see that you’re struggling with this. You know you can take it again. Go back and review the material. And if you’re not sure that you understand it, let me know and I will work with you on this. Because the goal here is mastery. It’s not anything else. Anyway, Waymaker helps me, the instructor, make better, more efficient use of my time. In any given week, Waymaker allows me to know two important things. It allows me to reach out only to those students that need my help. And it lets me know what topics the class is struggling with, so that I can tailor my in-class time to the material where the students need help and not spend it on material where they already know this stuff. Basically, it gives me a better feel for the effectiveness of my teaching and student learning. And that’s really, really important I think as a teacher. I’m embarrassed to think of my early years and teaching, when if I got all the way through the 50 minutes, I counted that as a successful day.

[LAUGHTER]

John: I think many of us started like that.

Rebecca: It ties really nicely to your blog post series that you’ve just recently published. The first one being the critical importance of instructional design…

Steve:Yup…

Rebecca: …where you talk a lot about the instructor’s role is designing the experiences, rather than delivering content. Can you talk a little bit more about how Waymaker helps you do that as an instructor?

Steve: There’s a “just-in-time teaching” element to this. I have a course outline, I know what I’m supposed to be doing on a week-to-week basis. But what happens on any given day depends on the stuff that came before it. I’m absolutely not wedded to the calendar. If the students haven’t figured out what we did on Monday, I’m going to start by spending a little more time on that. But also because of the feedback that I’m getting from Waymaker, there are times when I spend 90% of the class on 10% of the material. Because that’s what I know students are having trouble with. I know that if it’s something analytical, probably what I’m going to want to do is instead of talking to them about it—I mean, certainly I’m going to talk to them about it—I put together some group activities. I do a lot of group activities, small groups, generally two to three people. And then I essentially turn the classroom into a lab experience for that day. They seem to enjoy it more, they seem to get more out of it than me just lecturing over the content. After all the content is in the book. I don’t need to just repeat that stuff. So I guess that’s my short answer to your question.

Rebecca: Can you give an example of the kinds of activities that you’re doing with your students?

Steve: Oh, sure. Supply and demand is the first real model that the students work with. And so one of my learning goals is that they ought to be able to take a scenario… something happens… use supply and demand to analyze the effect on the market for x, gasoline or something like that. Typically what happens is, hopefully they will have read the material in Waymaker. Typically, I spend a day talking about “here’s how you would do it” and then generally what’s going to happen is, I spend a day where I have a couple of problems, like three is all that we’re going to have time to do. And I say, “Get in groups of two or three.” Basically, I count the number of students that showed up that day, because my classes are pretty small. And if it’s divisible by three, I put them in groups of three, if it’s divisible by two, I put them in groups of two. And then I say, “Okay, here’s a problem,” I show them the problem. And I say, “Take 10-minutes to work through this, draw the graphs.” And then they know that I’m going to call some of the groups up to present the results to everyone else. So there’s a little bit of competition. It’s not very stressful. It’s a little stressful for people that don’t like to speak in class, but you’re not there by yourself. You’re there with your group, so it works better that way. So I do a couple of those problems until I’m convinced that most people know what they’re doing. So that would be an example.

John: You also mentioned—when I saw you present at the Online Learning Consortium—how you use some of that feedback to improve the text in your current edition. Could you talk a little bit about that process of revision and creation of the text?

Steve: Sure. While I can’t take all the credit. From the beginning of Waymaker, at least from when I began to get involved… once I realized how integral the assessment process was to Waymaker, I pressed Lumen to make sure that the assessment questions were good. One of the things that I’ve noticed over the years is, test banks seem to be the lowest priority of textbook publishers. Because after all, they’re selling the text but they’re giving away the test bank. So what I want, I guess what we all want, is that the questions in the test bank that Waymaker uses, are discriminating correctly. And that’s harder than you might imagine. To their credit, Lumens put a tremendous amount of effort into this. And more generally, into the design the courseware. This has resulted in a process of continuous improvement. Now, continuous improvement is not a term that excites most faculty. I think that’s a fair statement John? [LAUGHTER]

John: Yes.

Steve: But what it really means is that, Lumen has an ongoing process for improving OER, making it more effective every single semester. And they’ve done this, and we’re now in your five and a half. So how does it work? I have a short answer and a long answer. The short answer is, after every semester Lumen downloads the data from every student who’s given them permission at every school using Waymaker across the country. And then they analyze the data. The analysis identifies where the students are having problems. At that point, we go in and either revise the content to make it clearer, or add some learning activities. Or else we revise the assessments to better capture student learning. We do this a little bit in a panicky way over the winter break, because we only have a month. But we do it intensely every summer. Here’s the longer answer. Over time, we’ve gotten better at doing this more efficiently. Lumen has developed something called “RISE Analysis.” RISE is an acronym. I don’t remember what the letters mean. [LAUGHTER] But basically it asked the question, “Which course materials would benefit the most from improvement?” Or to put it differently, “Which changes would have the greatest impact on learning?” So what we’ve done—and this is all programmed now. So Lumen has dozens of Waymaker courses, not just an economics. Though, I like to think that some of the most interesting stuff is started in the econ Waymaker platform. I’m not just making that up, it’s actually true. [LAUGHTER] So, instead of just doing the aggregate sweep on the data, we particularly look at student learning outcomes. And everything in Waymaker is driven by the student learning outcomes. This is out of order, but let me just throw this in for a minute. The way that Waymaker started is they brought together—I want to say 50 principles instructors from everything from community colleges up to R1s. And we spent four days together. And we asked the question, “What do you have to have in your principles courses?’ And so from that we created a list of primary learning outcomes. And then we drilled down and we now have secondary and tertiary outcomes. So the assessment questions in the test banks are coded down to the third level. So everything is really granular, if you want to think about it in those terms. What we look at is not just which student learning outcomes are students struggling with. But rather, which student learning outcomes where students are doing relatively poorly, are they putting a lot of time and effort into. Because that’s where we’re going to get the biggest bang for the buck in terms of fixing things. So what we do is we look at three things. We look at, “Are the questions badly worded?” We’re mostly done with that at this point. “Are the questions testing what they’re supposed to be testing?” There are some psychometric tests that allow you to do that. And then finally, what we do is—after we’ve exhausted all those—we look at the content and we create new content, or different types of learning activities, and we integrate those into the course. So, the interactives that you saw at OLC John, they were the big new innovation from last summer. So we do this, and then we teach the courses again, and then we start the cycle all over again. So, the process just goes on. It’s not continuous, as in every day, but it’s continuous, as in regular. I’ve used the courseware since the first year, and the courseware has gotten noticeably better. Fewer students are failing to achieve mastery on the module quizzes. And fewer of them are crashing and burning. More of them are in the 60 to 70% range when they fail. But what’s really cool is Lumen has shown no sign that they’re ready to quit, that they’re done with this. As long as they’re willing to do this, I think I’m willing to do this.

Rebecca: I like the iterative process.

Steve: Yeah.

Rebecca: That’s something that, as a designer, I’m very comfortable with… that I do all the time, especially designing online. But one of the things that’s really interesting about this model is that, as the author of the textbook, you don’t just have this finished thing. It’s an ongoing…

Steve: …It is.

Rebecca: … thing. So that’s a really different model of authorship.

Steve: Yes, it is. I think it’s fair to say that we make small changes all the time. And then every summer, we make larger changes. And that’s pretty interesting. Because as a user—as you pointed out—I can see that this is helping.

Rebecca: Yeah, that’s really exciting.

Steve: Right now, the hardest part is getting students to trust the process. Because it’s a very different model of learning. And so one of the things that I’m going to do this semester is, build in opportunities for me to remind them that this is a different process, and that they need to trust the process. One of the things that I did last year, which seemed to help with that was I started using exam wrappers after the midterm exams. And ask them to think about how they were studying, and what they would do differently, and what I could do to help them. It’s real easy to see in 30 seconds, I can tell if they’re taking it seriously or not. And if they’re taking it seriously, I learn a whole lot from what they say. So, anyway, just another little wrinkle.

Rebecca: So we’ve talked a lot about the students and the different learning process for students. You talked a little bit about the different processes being the expert, or the writer of the book. And you also mentioned earlier about the peer-review process for an OER being a bit different. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Steve: Sure, and that’s really important. First of all, people have a wrong idea about how OER is produced. The OER that I have experience with is working with OER publishers. It’s not the loan faculty member working in their spare time in their basement, or something like that. Both the OpenStax and the Lumen experience for me, have been very much a team effort. There have been a lot of people involved. So this is really important because one of the concerns about OER textbooks is their presumed lack of quality. There was an article in The Chronicle about that, today in fact. I have to tell you that the peer-review process that I went through with OpenStax was extensive. The way we did this is, OpenStax purchased a manuscript from Tim Taylor—a prominent economist—as the basis for the first edition. They sent copies of the manuscript out to about two-dozen reviewers all over the country, asking them to identify strengths and weaknesses. Based on those review comments, I rewrote each chapter. Each chapter was then sent out to half a dozen new reviewers. And again, the reviewers were from a range of schools, from community colleges through research universities. I took that feedback and I revised each chapter again before it went through the editorial review and production process. I have to say, this was much more detailed and extensive then when I worked with a commercial publisher. The review process for Lumen was similar, there was a lot of peer review involved. And as I said before, I’ve now written two formal editions of both texts. We’ve gotten lots of feedback from users. I’m pretty happy with that.

Rebecca: Do you find that the difference between OER and a commercial publisher is that you keep getting this feedback from users? And that you’re able to revise based on the use of other faculty, rather than working in a silo?

Steve: If I’d written the principles book for a commercial publisher, I would be better able to answer that. I got no formal feedback on my commercial book. I got a lot of comments from people at conferences and things like that. But we have gotten tons of feedback on the OER books, and that is interesting. You can’t satisfy everybody. Somebody says, “This chapter is too long.” Somebody says the same chapter is too short. But, in general, the feedback has been really, really helpful. And we’ve tried to incorporate it as soon as possible. And with these digital text, it’s really easy to do. I can literally go in and edit if I have five-minutes on the fly. And then it’s out there.

John: While with regular publishers, there’s usually a three-year cycle on intro textbooks.

Steve: Yes. And that’s the other thing that—now I’m not a typical user, but I know that if I want to make a change, it’s going to be done by the next semester. The same thing is generally true of other people who give us feedback. Though, they don’t necessarily know that. W e take that feedback very seriously. And there is no three-year review process. So that’s wonderful.

Rebecca: I love the user-centered design process, like that’s clearly what’s being used.

Steve: Yep, we try.

John: And that iterative process is what we should all be doing with our courses, all the time…

Steve: …Yes.

John: …But the fact that you’re doing it makes it easier for instructors who perhaps, don’t have to do as much of that.

Steve: Yeah. But again, let me just say one thing; Waymaker is not my course, Waymaker is my text. So there’s whole levels to my course that go beyond Waymaker. That’s just one element of it. Not that I’m disagreeing with what you said.

John: I’ve seen you present at conferences on teaching principles, for decades now. And I know you’re constantly changing how you’re teaching your courses and trying new things there. And you’ve been doing a lot of great work for quite a while.

Steve: Thank you.

John: Going back a little bit though, to the question of mastery quizzing. When students take the quizzes at the end of a block, you said there’s one or two questions. When they do it a second time, do they get the same question or different questions?

Steve: No. We are adding questions fairly regularly, and so the test banks are getting larger. From the beginning, I think we started with 2000 questions. But again, that’s across the whole book. The questions are randomly chosen, so the odds are that students would get different questions at the self-check level, at the section level. There’s a different test bank for the self checks than there is for the module quizzes. But there are similar questions. In fact, we wrote two at a time basically when we did that.

John: This is a question more generally about Waymaker. Does it do any type of interleaved practice, where later in the course, does it call back earlier sections? Or is it just based on the current module?

Steve: No, it’s just based on the current module. But my more nuanced response to that is, economics is sort of cumulative. But I have thought about that, we just haven’t thought of a way to build it in yet.

John: In my classes, I’ve been adding that the last couple years where I just randomly pull in questions and the module quizzes from earlier modules. Maybe 10 to 15%, building up to about 20% at the end, just to help do a little bit more spaced practice as well.

Steve: I think I know how you could do that pretty easily. Because instructors have access to the test bank that their students are using, so that you can edit your own questions. But what that also means is that you could move questions from earlier into the course to later in the course. So I think there’s a way to do that.

John: Excellent.

Steve: So John, we learned all this in our graduate training, right?

John: [LAUGHTER] You know, it’s getting a little bit better. Some people are learning these things. We have someone in my department who actually came out of Kentucky where he had a lot of training and teaching and learning. But it’s still pretty uncommon.

Steve: Yep.

John: You mentioned two ways in which, OER materials are developed. Some by primary developers, such as the OpenStax and Lumen. And others, with people working in their basements…

Steve: …Yes.

John: …or working in a dark room somewhere. Which is how I often do a lot of my work. Is that process sustainable? And what role do for-profit publishers such as Lumen play in providing these services, or in continuing the development of OER materials?

Steve: There are a couple questions here. One is, is the development process for published OER materials, or OER materials created by publishers. Is that sustainable? And then the second one is, is the individual scholar model sustainable? And those are very different questions. The individual scholar model, I don’t know if sustainable is the right word. I have a colleague who did this, she did it all on her own. I’m so impressed. She didn’t have any support from the school other than a small summer grant. And she did it without any sort of extrinsic motivators. I think that over time, at least at schools like yours and mine, faculty are going to get credit in tenure and promotion, for creating OER, especially open textbooks. I think that’s really important. I think that people will eventually be able to get sabbatical leaves to create these materials. And I think that’s really important to keep that side of the OER creation process going. As far as revision, I don’t know enough about that to really answer that. But I’m curious. I may have to go talk to my colleague Katie now. As far as the publishers go, and I don’t mean the traditional publishers, every publisher has a plan for how they’re going to do this. Some work better than others. I know something about OpenStax and I know a lot about Lumen, about what their sustainability plan is. OpenStax have develop partnerships with a variety of ancillary publishers like Sapling Learning or Knewton. These people provide aftermarket functionality for the OpenStax books, and in return, they get kickbacks from these ancillary publishers. And by kickbacks, I don’t mean anything pejorative about that. I just mean that they contribute financially. I don’t know any more about how sustainable that model is. I know that that’s what OpenStax has been using. Lumen from the beginning, has been a commercial publisher. It took me two years to figure out how a commercial publisher could make money giving their content away. Maybe others haven’t thought about that, but I sure did. So, the short answer is, Lumen gives the content away, but charges a very modest amount, $25, for the intelligent backend. All the feedback that goes both to the students, and the instructors. Today, you personally, either of you, could go and get a copy of the Lumen Principles and Micro book, or the Principles of Macro book, and it’s yours forever, you can do with it what you want. But if you want to take the full Waymaker course, they charge $25. The idea is, that amount of money is both affordable to students, but also enough to maintain revisions and corrections, and keep the servers running and all of those things. So that’s the answer to that question. And I will say that every semester, I try to be completely transparent, and say, “If you don’t want to pay the $25, you can get all the content for free. But here’s what you lose.” In five years, I’ve never had a student who didn’t pay the $25, because they thought it was like beer money for the weekend, or something. Compared to spending 300 bucks on a traditional text that was nothing to them.

John: What are some of the barriers that you see to faculty adopting OER? You mentioned that people may have this perception of lower quality…

Steve: …Yes .

John: …but there’s quite a bit of evidence that the quality is not weaker in any way. And I think you had done some studies on that a while back, didn’t you?

STEVE. Yes. The number one problem I think is misinformation. The majority of faculty today don’t know what’s available in their discipline. Many of my colleagues have told me, “Yeah, OER sounds like a great idea, but there’s nothing available in my field.” Now, that’s flat out wrong. For your listeners, there is OER available for nearly every Gen-Ed course taught today. So that’s number one, is lack of knowledge of what’s available. Number two is, as you mentioned before, the belief that OER is inferior, that there’s no peer review. And that’s just not true. There’s a couple things here. One is that OER publishers don’t have a sales force, and so it’s going to take longer to get the word out. There’s been a lot of progress over the last few years. But at my school, we’re only in the second-year of our formal OER initiative. So we’ll see how it goes. The other thing that I think gets in the way of adoption of OER is path dependence, and the unwillingness of many faculty to change their textbooks because of the fixed costs involved. “I’m going to have to go through my lecture notes and make sure that I’m using all the same terms as the textbook does,” and that sort of thing. I don’t know the answer to that question. I know that some schools have used financial incentives, fairly modest financial incentives, to get faculty to try to make the switch. As far as my own assessment goes, every summer, I do statistical analysis of the effectiveness of the texts that I’m using. I looked at both the OpenStax Principles book, and also most recently, the Waymaker package. What I’ve looked at is, textbook alone, textbook with ancillary website, digital courseware, and because I used to teach a writing intensive version of the principles courses, I also looked at writing intensive. And what I found is pretty predictable, at least from somebody who has done this for a while. What I found is that there is no significant difference between student learning using OER, with commercial textbooks. I found that using either courseware or an ancillary website improves student learning outcomes, regardless of what the text is that you’re using. And I’ve also found that writing intensive courses seem to work better than non-writing intensive courses, because the students are getting into it in more detail. Over the last two years, I’ve been doing a randomized control trial, where I can really drill down and see what’s going on. And what I found is that using the full Waymaker package seems to have a statistically significant positive impact on student learning. So I’m going to rerun the analysis using last semester data, which I haven’t had a chance to get yet, but I’m anxious to see how that goes too. I believe this stuff works. And so I think sooner or later, more and more publishers—the commercial publishers too—are going to move towards digital courseware type products.

John: I think most of them have started to at least.

Steve: Yes, but it’s like turning the Titanic. Their base is so large that it’s going to take a while before even all of those people get on-board with this.

John: One thing I was wondering is whether you see more collaboration or competition in OER textbooks?

Steve: Initially, there was more collaboration in the early years. And the reason why is because anybody who was doing OER, was increasing the interest in users for everybody’s OER. Now, I think we’re going to see more competition between the users. Especially as more publishers are going to adaptive and personalized learning type courseware. I think that’s a way that publishers are going to be able to say, “Well, yeah, we’re doing that. But we’re doing better in our own particular way.” So I think there’s going to be a fair amount of product differentiation. And it will be harder for faculty, it’s going to take more work to dig in and see exactly what’s going on. I would love to see more published assessment of efficacy on the part of the commercial publishers. They’re only now starting to do that, and the studies that they publish are heavily controlled by them. So it’s not clear that they’re telling us about all of their things, just the ones that work. But at least it’s a start.

John: One of the things I see in most of those studies is comment to the effect that, “Students who use our adaptive learning platform have letter grades on average, one letter grade higher or point eight points higher.”

Steve: Yes, that’s right.

John: And there’s no evidence that they’ve done any control for the students who chose to use it versus those who didn’t.

Steve: That’s right.

John: But it would be nice if we could see more research on that.

Steve: And I think we will. At least I’m hopeful.

John: Earlier you told us a little bit about how your course is structured with some “just-in-time teaching,” and some activities there where you have students work on problems. Could you tell us a little bit more about how you structure your course so that it’s not duplicating the textbook?

Steve: The first thing that I would say is that, my intro course looks like almost anyone else’s Principles of Micro or Macro course. If you look at the course outline, it has all the normal topics in it. A very slight difference is, instead of assigning students chapters to read and problem sets to do, students have modules with content and learning activities to complete. There is some difference between my face-to-face sections and my online sections, because I teach both. My face-to-face sections are pretty much the way I described them to you earlier. My general approach is to do Socratic lecturing with a lot of in-class activities, like the supply and demand problems that I mentioned. I also like to have formal in-class discussions on interesting questions that don’t have a right answer. In the macro class, I spend a day talking about what is money. And I spend the day talking about what is government. And those are things that aren’t done in the same way and the same degree with a textbook, whether it’s Waymaker or something else. My online course is roughly similar. But what I do is I add group and individual activities to the online course to mimic what I do in class. I also have a weekly Google Hangout, a synchronous Google Hangout, where I can give students guidance about what I think they should be doing. And I can give little mini lectures on things that I know students have trouble with. But it also gives them a chance to ask me individual questions in a real time basis, one on one. Not a lot of students come to those Hangouts. I usually have between five and ten, and my classes are about 35. But more than 90% of the students watch the recordings. Google Hangouts are automatically recorded and archived in YouTube. So the students seem to like that a lot.

John: You mentioned that a number of people at Mary Washington have switched over, what proportion, would you say, of the faculty at Mary Washington has moved to using OER?

Steve: Single digits, a handful, probably less than ten at this point. But this semester, I have two new people. So I’m excited about that. And we haven’t yet given them any money or anything to do this. I’ve just been talking to people. I was invited to the College of Business’s summer retreat, and I gave a little talk about OER. And I got two people who expressed an interest in following up. One of whom has already done it. So I think we’re getting there. We just have to be patient.

Rebecca: So we normally wrap up by asking, well, what’s next?

Steve: What’s next for me is I’m continuing to iterate to improve Waymaker. I’m going to continue doing my own statistical analysis. So I get access to the aggregate analysis that Lumen does, but I also have my own analysis. So I can tailor that to my particular students. I also want to do something this semester that I’ve wanted to do for a long time, but have never done it. And that is to write a new non-traditional chapter for the micro book, which is relatively easy to do. It’s just really a question of me sitting down and doing it. So I know it’s doable, but I do want to actually make my version of Waymaker different from the standard version. In part, because it’ll better match the way I teach. But also because I want to see that it’s relatively easy to do so that I can talk about that to faculty.

John: Very good.

Steve: I’m going to the CTREE conference this summer to talk about Waymaker. And this is the first time we’ve actually reached out to a disciplinary conference. So I think that’ll be fun.

John: You know, I always want to go to the CTREE conference, but I teach at Duke in the summer and it runs right into that. So I haven’t been able to go. And we should note that the CTREE conference is a Conference on Teaching and Research and Economic Education.

Steve: I love to talk about this stuff, because I believe it.

Rebecca: Yeah, it was really interesting.

John: Thank you.

Steve: Oh, you’re very welcome. Thanks for the opportunity.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

John: Editing assistance provided by Kelly Knight, Kim Fischer, and Jacob Alverson.

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