Teaching Note—Adopting, Adapting, and Creating Open Textbooks: A Brief Guide for Faculty

ABSTRACT Across North America, the open education movement has blossomed in the past 10 years, with a majority of institutions of higher education employing open textbooks in at least one course. Unfortunately, social work lags behind other disciplines in the adoption, adaptation, and creation of open educational resources. This teaching note offers practical advice for faculty exploring open education based on the lessons learned from the author’s two open textbook projects for undergraduate and graduate social work research methods. As universities, states, and international bodies increase funding for open education projects, the field of social work should demonstrate its commitment to equity, inclusion, and justice by leading these efforts within our classrooms, discipline, and institutions.

delaying the purchase of required textbooks, skipping meals, taking on additional loans and work, and engaging in copyright infringement to afford textbooks (DeCarlo & Vandergrift, 2019). By providing free access, open textbooks can improve academic performance, particularly among individuals from historically underserved groups in higher education: part-time, nonwhite, and Pell-eligible students (Colvard et al., 2018).

Localization and decolonization
Because open content can be easily edited and republished, it enables faculty to localize and decolonize learning materials. For example, textbooks on child welfare might use common core content applicable across North America with localized content created by individual faculty for regulations, trends, and client populations relevant to their institutional context (see Lynham, 2018 for an example). As the field of social work looks to decolonize its curriculum, it may also draw from efforts such as those from Maskwacis Cultural College, which adapted open textbooks to reflect Indigenous perspectives on sociology and earth science (Farrow, n.d.).

Open pedagogy
Open pedagogy is a term with contested meaning. Similar to Wiley and Hilton's (2018) concept of OERenabled pedagogy, it can mean collaboratively adapting and creating public and openly licensed scholarship with students-for example, by adapting new resources from open content, collaboratively creating or annotating textbooks, or contributing to Wikipedia-in place of "disposable" assignments written or performed solely for the professor and trashed at the end of the semester (see Mays, n.d. for more examples). Other barriers to education addressed by open pedagogues include digital redlining, surveillance, and poverty, representing a critical, international, and human rights view of open pedagogy consonant with the grand challenge to harness technology for social good (DeRosa & Jhangiani, n.d.).

Community building
OER scales the informal resource-sharing between colleagues and on community electronic mailing lists as well as formal resource-sharing at academic conferences or in journal publications. Open education projects invite collaboration by providing free public access and explicit permission for transformative use through attaching an open copyright license. The connections, community, and criticism that come from sharing render community-driven resources more robust and relevant over time. Although OER are touted largely as a cost-saving and accessibility measure for students, it is truly the associated community-building aspects that will render open education a lasting and transformative pedagogical practice in higher education.

No Yes
Note. LMS = learning management system.

Open textbook projects: Adoption, adaptation, and creation
The purpose of this teaching note is to assist professors in implementing their own open textbook projects. Adoption projects are the smallest in scope, while adaptation and creation projects require more time and resources to complete. The following sections review lessons I learned from coordinating two open textbook projects in social work education.

Adoption
Open textbook adoption refers to replacing a commercial textbook with an openly licensed book. At present, 56% of all universities in the United States use an open textbook in at least one class, but most adoptions are in general education courses (Ruth, 2019;Seaman & Seaman, 2018). Faculty adopting open textbooks saved students over one billion dollars versus commercial alternatives in just 5 years (Allen, 2018). Lesson 2: Create a student access plan OER represents a culture shift for students accustomed to buying commercial textbooks. In my pilot project, students looked at the university bookstore for information about required textbooks and then bought them online from Chegg, Amazon, and other cheaper resellers. I distributed links to the open textbook via the syllabus, e-mail, and in class announcements; however, nearly all students purchased the bookstore's $50 print-on-demand edition of the textbook (DeCarlo et al., 2019). Based on student feedback, I now dedicate the first class meeting to reviewing how to download, read, and notate an open textbook in mobile and computer web browsers as well as where to find the textbook links in our learning management system.

Adaptation
The process of customizing an existing open textbook for new learning goals is called adaptation, and it can take many forms. Professors may find a textbook from another discipline that needs only a few edits to be relevant to social workers; alternately, book chapters, case studies, videos, and other OER can be curated, combined, and republished as an open textbook.

Lesson 3: Learn the basics of open licensing
Although Creative Commons licenses are designed to be easy to understand for the layperson, faculty adapting OER for their courses should consult a librarian for assistance. I adapted my textbook from Principles of Sociological Inquiry, by Blackstone (2012), licensed by the Saylor Foundation. It carries the most restrictive license for OER (CC-BY-NC-SA). This copyright license requires that, in adapting Dr. Blackstone's work, I attribute any of her content I use (BY, or attribution), forgo commercial profit (NC, or noncommercial), and apply the same license she used to my adapted book (SA, or share-alike).
Authors adapting existing open content are constrained by the original author's license, and when mixing works together, must check for license compatibility. In my textbook, I mixed in content from an open textbook (Frederiksen & Phelps, 2017) with a compatible license (CC-BY) as well as openly licensed photos from Pixabay, Unsplash, and Pexels.

Lesson 4: Personalize your book
I often felt my class lectures were largely translating the dense language in the commercial textbook for students. Addressing this problem was the most exciting part of adapting an open textbook. I chose Blackstone's book to adapt because it was written using conversational language intended to disarm and engage students, and I inserted stories from my lectures that reflected my interests, research experience, and personal life to help the book feel more human. I spent a summer revising Blackstone's textbook by first copying it from HTML to Word and doing a line-by-line edit, revising any sociologyfocused material (e.g., field research) and adding social work-focused material (e.g., evidence-based practice).

Lesson 5: Pilot test and revise
After my first summer on the project, I pilot tested the textbook on a satellite campus with a small class of students who joined our program through a local community college. They were appreciative of the nocost textbook option, and to access the book, most students simply printed out the Portable Document Format (PDF) copy of next week's chapter and created a binder that included textbook printouts, their notes, and classroom activities. At the end of the semester, students shared feedback on the textbook, including grammatical errors, unclear language, and formatting issues that informed future revisions.

Lesson 6: Measure learning outcomes
As a new pedagogical tool, open textbooks are likely to be met with some skepticism by faculty and administrators. Faculty using open textbooks should measure their effect on student learning, thereby augmenting the data from student evaluations of teaching. Common metrics of student outcomes include final grades, withdrawal and drop rates, and test scores. I supplemented these with two additional measures. First, I included a pretest and posttest using a previously published measure of research knowledge. I also worked with student researchers to conceptualize, facilitate, and analyze focus groups exploring student perceptions and use of the book (Hilton et al., 2016). The assessment of these data points, in addition to the $8,000 saved by students, supported my continued engagement with OER at my institution.

Lesson 7: Share on an open platform
To benefit the community, OER should be shared publicly. I worked with graduate and undergraduate student editors as well as volunteer labor from a librarian, textbook designer, and copyeditor to prepare and share a first edition of the textbook. where it received open (identifiable and public) peer reviews from faculty at other universities. Reviews were largely positive but noted the white male perspective was centered, indicating an area for growth in a second edition. I have also collaborated with reviewers after reaching out to thank them. In addition to open education platforms, outreach to social work professors on the Baccalaureate Program Directors (BPD) electronic mailing list and at conference presentations provided the largest source of early adoptions.

Lesson 8: Include an adoption survey
In the front matter of the textbook, I included a short survey for faculty who adopted the book. Based on the responses, the book has now been adopted at more than 50 campuses in the United States and several international schools, reaching at least 1,500 students in the first 2 years since publication. Financial effect can be challenging to measure, as students rarely pay full price for a textbook and routinely engage in cost-cutting strategies such as renting or buying used books. However, compared with the full price of the commercial textbooks previously used in each course, students have saved over $200,000 since the book's release in August 2018. For 83% of faculty adopters, this was their first time adopting an open textbook, with a majority of adopters reporting limited knowledge of OER.

Lesson 9: Plan for sustainability
Sustainability in OER has many meanings. For this project, sustainability involves correcting mistakes, adding suggested content, and updating the changelog in the front matter of the textbook over academic breaks. It also means assisting faculty users with questions on how to adopt the book or requests for ancillary resources. Volunteering my enthusiasm and experience to adopters helps ensure the sustainability and reach of my project. For example, after a faculty member said they were considering adapting the textbook for new learning goals, I made the Pressbooks extensible markup language file for my textbook available for download. With this file, she could easily import my book into her own Pressbooks project, rather than manually copy and paste content. This new textbook and a quiz bank from another faculty member are the first two adapted resources from my open textbook project. Social work faculty considering adapting an open textbook should consult the resources in Table 2.

Creation
Open textbook creation is challenging because one must write an entire textbook and also replicate the functions and resources of a textbook publisher. Creation projects are therefore larger in scope, often involving multi-institutional and interdisciplinary partnerships.
Lesson 10: Secure funding Although OER are free to students, they are not free to create. As junior and contingent faculty, authors were unable to take sabbaticals. However, we were grateful to receive a $23,750 grant through the Virtual Library of Virginia. Grants supporting OER generally focus on high enrollment courses, but our team was able to achieve similar student effect by redesigning multiple 20-to 30-student classes across institutions. We estimated our project would reach 175 students, and given the cost of the commercial resources replaced ($175-$200), students would save about $29,500 in the first year of implementation. OER grant programs are becoming more common on the university and state level, and multi-institutional partnerships will be key for social work faculty to win grants over faculty redesigning high-enrollment classes in other disciplines. Moreover, financial support helps legitimize the often-invisible labor that goes into open publication (Versluis et al., 2019).

Lesson 11: Dedicate a project manager
In transitioning from a sole-author to a team-based project, the biggest surprise was the increase in time spent on administrative tasks. As the project manager, I was responsible for coordinating paperwork, funding, contracts, and emergencies. I relied heavily on the Rebus Community Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far) (Ashok & Hyde, 2019), which helped me formalize job roles and responsibilities within a large team and guided me through each step of the process. However, time spent on project management made it difficult to complete my authoring and editing work on time.

Lesson 12: Build a team
Team members should include both subject matter experts and those with expertise relevant to academic publishing-designers, editors, and educational technologists. My coauthors were drawn from my professional network, three students in my PhD cohort who regularly teach Bachelor of Social Work and Master of Social Work research classes as assistant and adjunct professors. I trusted the quality of my coauthors' work and appreciated that they drew from a wide range of subject matter experience in government, nonprofit, and academic social work research. Authors should strongly consider collaborations that bring together academic and practitioner authors. Our team was fortunate that experts from across my state donated their wisdom in library publishing, instructional design, and educational technology to our project. If you do not know the resources in your state, consider using the Rebus Community platform to solicit contributors with specific skills, consult a librarian, or budget time to develop the necessary skills yourself.

Lesson 13: Solicit peer and student review
In addition to specialists and authors, our team recruited student and senior faculty advisors who provided formative feedback for a small stipend. Through each step of the process, student feedback grounded the project in what students truly needed to know to be successful in research classes. Students were also welcomed as content creators, and an appendix was added for student-to-student resources. Alongside student advisors, three senior faculty advisors provided formative feedback on early products as well as summative feedback on final drafts. After incorporating advisor feedback, we submitted an open call for reviewers on the BPD electronic mailing list. To our surprise, more than 20 faculty reviewers volunteered to provide additional review. External review imbued our resource with more faculty wisdom and made it relevant to other campuses, laying the groundwork for a community of faculty adopters, adapters, and collaborators. Peer review is significant, as research indicates that concerns about quality affect the adoption of OER (Seaman & Seaman, 2018). The final text includes a peer review statement including institutional affiliations of all reviewers, the review process, and how reviewer comments were integrated by authors.

Lesson 14: Set realistic timelines
Writing is likely to take place over summer break-likely, multiple summer breaks. It took me about a month to completely write a chapter, with additional time needed for peer review, visual design, and beta testing. Unfortunately, I had planned for writing to take far less time, and the missed deadlines compounded as the project moved forward. While collaborators were very understanding and supportive, the shifting deadlines led to some reviewers dropping out of the project and authors overwhelmed by work.

Open foundations and open futures
At its heart, open education is about using technology to inscribe social justice into pedagogy and scholarly communication. Adopting an open textbook ensures free, permanent, and first-day access to the textbook needed to succeed in the class for all students, eliminating the second tuition bill that comes from the bookstore. Furthermore, faculty who adapt and create open textbooks sustain a foundation of noncommercial and open access knowledge as part of a community. There is nothing new about professors sharing resources, but openness scales public sharing of educational resources to fashion a more equitable social work knowledge ecosystem.