Last week, I attended the 2024 Open Education conference, and presented current work on the need to rethink the way we understand open textbooks. Almost a decade ago, Robin deRosa–an inspiration in open education–called for a retheorization of the open textbook, and I agree with her deeply. She writes:
Fundamentally, I don’t want to be part of a movement that is focused on replacing static, over-priced textbooks with static, free textbooks. Textbooks, if we don’t re-theorize them, have generally (just) been repositories for the master’s ideas.
deRosa, “Open Texbtooks? UGH.“
Her point is well-taken. I surveyed all the literature anthologies on OER Commons and the Open Textbook Network, and discovered that almost all were published in PressBooks, with many offering only PDF download. A small number appeared in Manifold, a newer and more interactive platform for online publishing, but I was surprised by the consistency of these texts. There is a selection of primary source content (sometimes sourced, not always); some editorial apparatus; some image accompaniments; and often some learning resources–but, with the exception of texts in Manifold, no opportunities for social annotation, and in all cases, the texts give what they give. Teachers can select their textbook, but they cannot select what content goes into that textbook. OpenStax, a leader in open textbook publishing, had been planning to develop an open anthology of literature, but that plan seems to have fallen through–I think it’s worth considering the specific challenges of a literature anthology, as we quest to retheorize the open textbook itself.
What if we think of the open textbook not as essentially a PDF, but a database?
In such a context, teachers could curate their own content, developing highly targeted theme-based readings to their students. The needs and interests of our students are constantly changing, as the cultural context does. We should be able to leverage the agile affordances of online publishing to make new and more politically- or culturally-sensitive readings available to our students, rather than waiting for textbooks to catch up.
Further, I see this platform as an opportunity to engage students with fundamental questions of digital literacy. Student learners could be engaged to help develop and extend the database contents, so that new works are continually integrated and offered for inclusion in curated textbooks. Our students should understand how online content gets online; the role of an anthology in shaping history; and how teachers choose the curriculum, especially in an age when digital literacy is increasingly necessary (and always evolving). Jesse Stommel’s work on critical digital pedagogy has been formative for my thinking on this.
For the past several years, I’ve been working with colleagues at The University of Virginia and a wonderful web developer to create a new kind of anthology platform, envisioned much along these lines. Our project, Literature in Context: An Open Anthology of Literature in English, 1400-1925, has been generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities and VIVA, Virginia’s academic library consortium–and a state sponsor of open educational resources.
I shared our current thoughts on the shape of open textbooks in a talk at Open Education 2024, but the gist of it is that textbooks–whether commercially published or open–are not functioning as well as they should for our students:
- Open textbooks still bear the traces of their print origin, but as they maintain a foundation in the logic of print–and the PDF is essentially a print analogue–open textbooks nonetheless forget some of the things that make print such a rich technology: the ability to find pages easily, and to be on the same page, literally, with your students in the classroom. None of the open textbooks I looked at–except those, paradoxically, available for print-on-demand purchase or in PDF download–bore page or line numbers, which means citing them is…complicated.
- For all that we are an Internet society, the printed page still carries important information–size, typography, publication details, and more all carry traces of the people that made books, sold books, and read books. Our open anthology contains facsimile page images, so the classroom can engage with materiality, to the extent possible online.
- While all open anthologies carried an editorial apparatus, including introductory content and some explanatory footnotes, I think there is great opportunity for that apparatus to be generated, in part, by students, whose contributions are named (providing FERPA release). This puts students in a position of creative authority–carrying the weight of that responsibility, too.
- The digital realm affords many opportunities for media rich contextualization; audiobooks to help contemporary readers (who read very little) dig into the act of reading, videos that provide historical contextualization, images from the greatest repositories of human learning, references to thoughtful sources of all kinds. And by incorporating students into the creation of these resources, we can teach concepts of source reliability, fitness for purpose, and what it takes to create a persistent web-based project like ours.
- Very few open textbooks indicate where their primary source textual content was sourced from. I think that by making the provenance clear and transparent, we can engage more fully in conversations about digital textual authority, editorial practices that shape what and how we read, and so on.
- Social annotation and interactivity should be positioned front and center; we can do more to enable interactive elements like timelines, social network graphs, maps, and more. But this can only be done dynamically if the database contents are appropriately shaped to enable this interactivity.
Creating an open textbook platform like ours, however, has its own challenges–it takes a great deal of time and some degree of specialized knowledge of XML encoding, metadata and standardized vocabularies, and project schemae to add a new text to the database. It takes money to hire developers. And it takes users to make the project richer and the database contents more extensive. These challenges make adopting an anthology like ours more difficult; it doesn’t fit into the mold of “textbook,” so it also doesn’t fit into standard textbook adoption practices. These challenges also make sustaining and developing the project fragile, contingent on funding and use.
Nonetheless, we think it’s about time our approach to building open textbooks be extended. Will you join us?
Check out our Github repository, which houses both the anthology application and its contents, to learn more about the back end of the project, and visit our development site to explore on your own.
Tonya Howe 