Care to contribute to an open educational resource for introducing college students to physical geology? In other words, help write and edit a free and open online textbook for Geology 101?

 

You have probably heard about open educational resources. Besides being easily found on the Web, the key criteria for an open educational resource (OER) are that it:

1.     Is free of charge.

2.     Is copyrighted for free use (or free with attribution), including use in altered, edited, and excerpted forms.

3.     Requires no login, registration, or user information to be accessed.

 

If enough of us get together and create an open Geology 101 textbook online, we can leverage (1) each other’s experience in teaching introductory geology, (2) each other’s content knowledge from our earth science research backgrounds, and (3) each other’s pedagogical knowledge from up-to-date educational research, in order to group-source, as they say, a high-quality digital textbook.

 

Once it is available to the world at large, we can keep improving the digital textbook with future edits and revisions as it gets perused, used, and commented upon.

 

The next common questions might be: What’s in it for me? Don’t people write textbooks, which can take years of effort, at least partly for a profit motive? Yes, there is a lot to be said for traditional textbooks, including letting the publishers provide editing, image-making artwork, publicity, printing, and shipping; letting the academic marketplace filter textbooks by purchasing more of those with the desired qualities; and in the end rewarding those who write good-quality textbooks and get them published.

 

However, in spite of the questions we may raise about the nebulous-seeming enterprise of open educational resources, and the benefits of traditional for-profit textbooks, OER textbooks are going to happen. In my view, the best way for an open, online, digital textbook for Geology 101 to happen is for those of us who care most about having students be introduced to geology properly at the college level be the ones who create it.

 

That is why I am asking you to join me in this endeavor. At this point, it is just an inquiry on my part. If several of you express interest, we can go ahead and set up a wiki to work together, agree on the editing controls, and go from there until the digital text creation and editing site is up, online, and its contents being composed by us, presumably sometime during 2011. There are no deadlines.

 

By the way, if we spot some grant requests for proposals that the Geology 101 OER textbook might be suitable for, we should consider applying, as there will be some aspects of the work that a grant could help us deal with more efficiently. But regardless of whether we do this as a bootstrapped, from-the-grassroots, on-our-own-time side project, or whether we find some support along the way, the two key words are open and educational. In my view, only those who have a sense of urgency about wanting to do this should step forward and get involved in helping to make this happen.

 

In the meantime, all inquiries and comments are welcome. Thank you.

 

--Ralph

 

Ralph Dawes, Ph.D.
Earth Sciences
Wenatchee Valley College
1300 Fifth Street
Wenatchee, WA 98801
(509) 682-6754
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