Varied Approaches from Concordia

Adopt a Textbook with Student Engagement

Explorations: An Open Invitation to Biological Anthropology, adopted by Salinda Hess for ANTH 203: Culture and Biology, is an excellent example of actively engaging students in an open textbook as a living document.  Hess adopted an existing open textbook, developed a student assignment for her students to critique their own textbook, and led them to expand on its knowledge foundation. Her approach offers a blueprint for immediately adopting existing open textbooks, encouraging criticality, and integrating resources in a rapidly changing field.

Notice the highlighted sections. These are recommended edits from her students based on her assignment, serving to collaboratively improve the overall quality of the book as the document continues to expand. Hess’ introduction describes her approach.

Streamlined and Easy to Navigate

A simplified design strategy has its merits. Customized by Peter Morden, Quantitative Research Methods for the Applied Human Sciences offers a streamlined and easy-to-navigate open textbook for AHSC 380: Quantitative Research Methods for Practitioners. Flow, clarity, consistency, and ease of navigation are priorities in this streamlined approach. Multimedia and interactive components have been stripped down. Meanwhile, each chapter concludes with key takeaways, exercises, and references.

Text-Image Pairings in Fine Arts

Text-image pairings from Creating the Modern Intersections of Art & Society in the Nineteenth Century by Loren Lerner and Karine Antaki is an open textbook designed for ARTH 366: Studies in 19th‑Century Art and Architecture.  The systematic text-image pairings in each chapter come together within the layout of a Pressbook project suited to the visual needs of art history. Art historians work with thousands of images and often require their students to practice formal analysis, which requires them to look at the images closely. Offering a renewed approach to viewing images on the slide projectors and in the cumbersome canonical art history textbooks of yesteryear, this open textbook showcases and grants quick access to relevant images amongst the thousands of public domain works available online and only more entering each year. The textbook subject matter is also suited to nineteenth-century studies and the fine arts more broadly.

Choose Your Own Adventure

The Better Practices in the Classroom textbook by Natalie Kouri-Towe and Myloe Martel-Perry illustrates how to encourage tailored learning. Notice how, at the beginning of each section, there are Self-Assessment Quizzes. These quizzes test the reader’s familiarity with the material through multiple-choice questions and suggestions at the end of each quiz. The approach allows readers to skim through familiar parts or read through sections where they can deepen their knowledge.

Although this open guidebook is meant for professors across all disciplines who teach undergraduate students, the choose-your-own-adventure approach could be developed for undergraduate courses, especially those required courses with students at various levels, including first-years and fourth-years. The interactive approach and checkpoints furthermore make it easier to navigate a large pool of material and to review when necessary.