Transcript ExperienceWithOpenSourceStatisticsText.pptx

Open Educational
Resources in Math
A report of success using an open textbook for
introductory statistics
Face-to-Face vs. online
• Much OER focus at Tacoma Community College has
been directed toward online and hybrid-online
classes.
• My efforts have been directed toward face-to-face
classes. (I spent enough time in my prior high-tech
career on a keyboard, my encore career of teaching
is motivated by my desire for personal contact and
“explaining”.)
Spiraling textbook costs
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/why-are-college-textbooks-soabsurdly-expensive/266801/
Why the cost problem?
• Lots of reasons have been offered.
• College professors often assign titles with little
consideration of cost.
• Amazon.com, ebay, halfprice, and others are
changing the marketplace by expediting access to
used texts.
• Publishers are forced to protect their margins by
increasing prices, shortening editions cycles, and
bundling seductive services like online homework
systems.
Students prefer textbooks
• Approximately 75% of students prefer print
textbooks. (http://www.lib.umich.edu/files/Cost-Analysis-Student-Survey.pdf)
• Tacoma News Tribune, Sunday March 1, 2015:
“Why Students prefer print over e-books”: “…
prefers scribbling in the margins, underlining
interesting sentences, …”
Statistics Textbook found
• Earlier OER text just “didn’t feel right”.
• Thanks to David Lippman at Pierce, we finally found
a textbook that looked good to us.
• We’ve worked with the author, Kathryn Kozak to
make additions and fixes.
• We’ve added our own material to supplement
calculator instruction.
• Our bookstore and copier center produced a very
inexpensive ( $20) printed version
Our text in use
• Hmm… what are
those tabs on
the top?
Unexpected Benefits
Paper or e-book?
• Some students purchase and take good advantage
of an inexpensive paper copy.
• Other students download the free PDF into their
computers, tablets, and even smartphones.
• Some do both! Why not, after all?
What about those “publisher extras”?
• Class room presentation material?
• Online homework?
Classroom presentation material
• We made a set of PowerPoint slides, published
under a Creative Commons “Share alike” license.
• Being able to copy-and-paste from the text was
very handy.
• A base set of slide allow instructors to make custom
versions.
Homework material
• Of course the book includes typical homework
problems.
• The author provided a solutions manual; we
extracted “answers to odd-numbered problems”
and inserted those in the text.
• WAMAP has a rich set of statistics problems.
WAMAP
• WAMAP.org
• Washington Mathematics Assessment and
Placement
• Masterfully established and organized by David
Lippman at Pierce.
• Hosted by the Washington State Board for
Community and Technical Colleges
• Has a rich set of algorithmically-generated
questions
Our WAMAP problem set
• We selected problems for each chapter from
existing WAMAP problems.
• Some were slightly modified to align terminology.
• This is an ongoing process.
• Students respond well.
On to other courses!
• We’ve now adopted David Eck’s JAVA text for CS142
and CS143.
• TCC is establishing support for instructors to do the
extra work of adopting OER texts.
• Since the support is coming from the E-Learning
group, we’re having to deal with a slight bias
toward online and hybrid courses.