Case study: Ultra and Open Educational Resources (Openstax)

Department of Health Sciences
David Graham

David Graham describes how he incorporated Open Educational resources (OER) within the year 1 Bioscience and Pharmacology module to support students with varying levels of prior knowledge and understanding. He integrated sections of the OpenStax Anatomy and Physiology textbook within the weekly structure of the module.

Openstax is a collection of peer-reviewed OER textbooks developed by Rice University in Texas, USA. The textbooks provide instructor and student support materials, and all resources are developed with digital accessibility in mind.

David described how he incorporated the text book using a Blackboard cartridge. This provided pages of content with descriptive links through to specific sections of the textbook. He was then able to adapt this content by adding narrative text to make connections to specific module aims.

Watch their presentation:

Blackboard and Openstax (Panopto viewer) (7 mins 40 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

Hi, my name is David Graham. This presentation is about using open educational resources in Blackboard Ultra after a recent personal experience of adopting an openstax online, peer-reviewed textbook and associated resources. I am module lead for a year on bioscience and pharmacology module in the Undergraduate Pre-registration Nursing programme. Our students have a broad range of previous bioscience experience from GCSE science through to undergraduate degrees. We also have a lot of mature students who may not have studied Biology for some time in reviewing the key text for this module and with the support of our librarian, David Brown, the module team looked for something that had learning technology built in to support students and staff. We wanted to find more resources for students, associated exam question banks, a little more applicability to nursing practice, and a resource that encouraged students to engage even more in the content. We were not able to find a single platform that offered all of this, but the resources offered by openstax look good were peer-reviewed and free, though we are in discussions with the library about making a financial contribution to openstax as a university.

We went with the anatomy and physiology second edition from Openstax. It had the following resources presented on this slide available to instructors, including PowerPoint slides, testable images and a course cartridge. More about the course cartridge later. But what is openstax? So Openstax is an open educational resource from Rice University in Houston, Texas. Their aim is opening education to all and reducing the cost of learning resources for students. It is run through philanthropic donations and funding from educational partners. The ever expanding list of textbooks are peer reviewed on offer instructor and student support resources. The anatomy and physiology second edition text as well as having a comprehensive 28 chapter textbook, has links for the student to study skills information, including note taking time management, and also higher education textbooks on how to be successful at university. All resources are developed with accessibility in mind. Textbooks can be viewed online or downloaded in PDF format for students with poor internet connection at home. There are supportive instructions on how lecturers can use the resources available to them. The instructor resources mentioned before are excellent and the course cartridge was useful in developing our VLE. A course cartridge is a pre-populated VLE package that is downloadable from the website and can then be uploaded to the VLE. As VLE instructors at the University of York, we cannot do this ourselves because of the security settings that we have. My thanks go to Rob Shaw, who was able to upload the cartridge to a sandbox area where I could copy content into my module.

I will now talk about the course cartridge in a bit more detail. The following screenshots are off the dropdown menus as they appear on the VLE. This content is what was download loaded unedited from open stax. There is one image at the end of this section where I discuss how we have adapted and edited the download to fit with our module. We don't have time here to go into every folder and resource on the course cartridge or all the links. But I will try to give you an overview. This is the Instructor Resources section which has various advice pages and pro forma pages that you can use to help set up your own VLE. This has the potential to save a lot of time or at least act as an aide memoire for the module leader. The getting started pages have links that students will find useful and further pro forma that can be adopted and adapted to meet the needs of your VLE site. This next section has an outline of every chapter in the book. Each document here has hyperlinks to all the separate sections in each chapter, which has proved useful for our module when guiding students in their learning. It presents information in sections and enables us to encourage reading in manageable chunks. Finally, there are all the PowerPoint slides for each of the chapters. These have some excellent images which again can be adopted and adapted as you need for your module. This is an example slide from one of the PowerPoints with images of a human torso showing the body cavities. This next image is what the file for one of the chapters looks like. All the links, all the links to the chapter sections in blue were pre-populated in the download in the course cartridge. We were able to add some narrative text to each of these to guide the student to prioritise the learning relevant to our module. It's early days in the adoption of this text, but so far I'm impressed with the resources available through openstax. The course cartridge for Blackboard Ultra has provided an excellent adaptable guide for students and saved the module team a lot of time.

Although we have all had a lot of work to do this year in moving to Blackboard Ultra, the interface seems a lot cleaner and more accessible for students. I think the way that Openstax is developing free resources is interesting. I imagine it like a cross between Wikipedia and a traditional academic publisher. It will be interesting to see how our traditional publishers respond to this competition in future years. One way seems to be with Openstax Allies. Openstax allies are publishers and learning technology companies who contribute financially to openstax and offer associated paid for educational resources to augment the student learning experience, linked to from the Openstax website. I hope this has been useful presentation. Thank you for listening.