Textbook Success Program Syllabus
May 2024 A Cohort
Mondays, 11:00am-12:30pm CT, Zoom
Facilitator: Natasha Whitton
Welcome to the Rebus Textbook Success Program (TSP), a course designed to support your OER publishing journey and help you create equitable learning materials and joyful experiences for your students.
Program Description
The TSP is a professional development program that equips faculty, librarians, administrators, and managers with the tools you need to make great OER. The program is one year long and comprises two phases:
- Phase 1: Planning Phase
- Phase 2: Writing and Editing Phase
- Phase 3: Production and Release Phase
Phase 1 Meetings (May - July)
• WHEN: Mondays, 11:00am-12:30pm CT, Zoom (see your calendar invitations for link)
• WHO: Facilitator: Natasha Whitton (@whittonn)
• WHAT: 8 weekly themed sessions with your cohort to give you an overview of the open publishing process, and plan out the steps for your independent practical work in Phase 2.
Phase 2 Meetings (August - December)
• WHEN: TBD on Zoom (see your calendar invitations for link)
• WHO: Facilitator: Natasha Whitton (@whittonn)
• WHAT: Hands-on stage where you and your team work on your OER projects, with a mix of group check-ins with your cohort and 1:1 support sessions with your facilitator. We will alternate between a monthly cohort meeting and an individual support check-in with your team and your facilitator.
Phase 3 Meetings (January - April)
• WHEN: TBD on Zoom (see your calendar invitations for link)
• WHO: Facilitator: Natasha Whitton (@whittonn)
• WHAT: 4 weekly themed sessions with your cohort to learn about the final stages of the publishing process while also working on your OER projects, with a mix of group check-ins with your cohort and 1:1 support sessions with your facilitator. We will alternate between a monthly cohort meeting and an individual support check-in with your team and your facilitator.
Please note: You are required to attend all sessions, to the best of your ability. In case of absences, please ensure that at least 2 members of your project team participate to ensure progress on your project work.
Objectives
- Get to know Rebus’ collaborative open publishing approach with open education peers in a supportive learning environment
- Connect and contribute to the OER community (eg.: professional development process, equitable and inclusive learning and OER that come out of it, relationships, advocacy, leadership)
- Reflect on your current pedagogical practices with the goal of creating accessible, equitable, and inclusive OER and learning experiences
- Create an efficient workflow and apply best practices that help your project progress in due time, with guidance from your Rebus facilitator and other cohort members
- Gain confidence using equitable open approaches and tools to advance your project and grow its user community
- Build and strengthen institutional capacity for current and future equity-empowered open publishing and/ teaching projects
- Recognize and grow your equity-informed open education leadership skills
Approaches and Methods
We have designed the TSP to help examine and unlearn assumptions about education and publishing. Our hope is that you engage in the program and transform both as individuals in your personal contexts and as educators in your institutional settings.
We strive to build a learning community in the program where both participants and facilitators learn actively from each other as they draw on their own knowledge sources. Take the time you need during the program to critically reflect on individual, institutional, and societal practices in higher education. To move forward and have positive change in the world, we need to ask ourselves “How do we practice now? Why do we practice in these ways?”
Some of this will be uncomfortable but this is critical and necessary work to make learning truly inclusive, which is what we believe you are all here to do with your OER projects and in your roles in the higher education system.
Please navigate through the program (materials, structure, conversations), with an openness and willingness for something new! This approach is critical to achieving the learning outcomes described earlier.
Logistics
TSP Participation Requirements
- You will need to be part of a project team with up to 4 members. Make sure you designate someone to organize your project work, keep everybody on track and help schedule your team meetings. In some cases, your initial team may be determined by your institution/grant committee and may see changes over time.
- You are required to attend all sessions, to the best of your ability, and in cases of absences, you must ensure that at least 1 member of your project team participates to update you and the cohort on your team’s progress.
- You will need to participate in regular team meetings outside of the TSP sessions to move your project forward in due time.
- Familiarize yourself with the TSP technology (presented above) by creating your own user accounts when prompted to do so.
How much time should I/my team set aside?
Phase 1 (First 2 months):
- 1.5 hours to attend weekly Zoom sessions
- We recommend 1 hour to do suggested homework activities designed to help you organise and steadily progress your project work
- Regular meeting times with your team (at least 1.5 hours every other week)
Phase 2 (Next 6 months):
- 1.5 hours for monthly Zoom cohort and 1:1 meetings
- As much time as you can put into your project
- Regular meeting times with your team (at least 1.5 hours every other week)
Phase 3 (Last 4 months):
- 1.5 hours to attend 4 weekly Zoom sessions
- 1.5 hours for monthly Zoom cohort and 1:1 meetings
- As much time as you can put into your project
- Regular meeting times with your team (at least 1.5 hours every other week)
Facilitator Information
Your TSP facilitator is an experienced educational practitioner and alumni of the TSP program, who will bring in their own practical OER creation experience whenever applicable. Natasha Whitton is an interdisciplinary scholar who currently serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Humanities at Baton Rouge Community College. After majoring in biology as an undergraduate, she went on to earn an M.A. in American and British Literature and a Ph.D. in Modern History and Literature. Her first experience with writing textbooks was in the area of composition. She collaborated on several custom writing handbooks and combined reader and rhetorics with faculty. More recently, she worked on a team to create both an open textbook and course for Western Civilization, particularly for dual enrollment students. In addition to being committed to OER as a tool to increase the accessibility of education, she has served as a faculty fellow for the Great Questions Foundation on revamping general education courses, and as a ChangeMaker with the Baton Rouge Alliance for Students.
Tools and Resources
The Textbook Success Program uses the following technology and resources:
- Rebus Community Forum: This will be our hub for all asynchronous cohort communication (including Q+A, team discussions, TSP session materials, summaries, surveys, etc.)
- You can sign up any time, but best do it prior to course start
- Watch the introductory video and navigation tutorial to get started
- Bookmark your May 2024 A 2024 Cohort Discussion in your preferred browser for quick access to the course syllabus and the weekly threads.
- Your facilitator will practice the use of this tool during the first 2 sessions.
- Please post all TSP-related comments, ideas, and questions to the forum rather than emailing your facilitator. Tag the people involved for in-time responses.
- NOTE: Your team will have a designated project forum space, which you can easily access through the “About the Cohort” thread. This tutorial offers further instructions.
- TSP Curriculum Hub: This is a Google Drive Folder where all session materials are compiled (i.e slides, handouts, templates).
- You can access these CC BY licensed materials anytime.
- Bookmark the hub in your browser for quick access.
- Links to session materials will be reshared in a timely manner on the Rebus Community forum (above) throughout the program.
- Zoom: This is the tool we are using for our live video sessions. You will find the Zoom links in your calendar once you accept the invitations from Rebus.
- If you have never used Zoom, you will need to download the software to participate.
- We greatly appreciate it if you turn on your camera whenever possible as this will enhance the session experience for everybody in the room. We also understand that video is not always an option, and hope you can be present during sessions regardless.
- Engage with your cohort via the chat function whenever you want to share your thoughts and questions. Please respond kindly to others’ contributions.
- Assigned OER:
- The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far)
- Making Open Textbooks: A Video Series
- Making Ripples: A Guidebook to Challenge Status Quo in OER Creation
- Management Information:
Memorandum of Understanding
This is a cohort based program, where participants and facilitators will interact and engage with one another both on online sessions and in the cohort discussion space. We expect that these communications will be respectful, and that everyone in the cohort feels welcome, safe, and accepted.
To help ensure such a space, we’ve drafted a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). The MOU articulates community guidelines, expectations of all attendees, steps for reporting unacceptable behaviour, and consequences.
Suggestions or revisions to the MOU are welcome. If you think there is something missing or needs to be changed, please let us know in the cohort discussion space.
All cohort members must read through this MOU within the first week of the program, and let the cohort know in the discussion space that you agree to its contents.
Schedule
Phase 1: Planning Phase
Month 1
Introductions
May 29 2024
We’ll start off with group introductions and learn about each project, in an effort to build a network of support and an awareness of each others’ work. We’ll also share the Rebus approach to OER: how collaboration makes OER stronger, improves and diversifies content, builds adoption vectors, and increases community buy-in. Finally, we’ll discuss why considerations like accessibility, marketing, formatting should be made early on.
Project Scoping
June 3 2024
Defining your project scope and expectations is critical to a successful project. We talk about how to scope a project to get the most buy-in possible from the start, while incorporating accessibility and marketing best practices into the creation process.
Storytelling and Communications
June 10 2024
Marketing and communications strategy must be more than an afterthought. Your method of talking about your project is an integral element of building a successful OER project. Sharing the project’s story helps grow the book’s community to build long-term sustainability and success.
Growing and Managing Teams
June 17 2024
In this session we cover various roles and responsibilities, tasks and workload, types of teams, and how to find people to help your project succeed. We highlight the ways strong leaders plan tasks, motivate the team, and keep the project on track. Finally, we discuss ways to manage a team consisting of volunteers and remote contributors.
Month 2
Team Check-in with your Facilitator
June 24 2024
This stage of the program will give you an opportunity for you and your team to meet 1:1 with your facilitator, and address any specific questions, challenges, or issues that have come up. It also offers your facilitator the chance to learn more about your work, and use this insight to tailor support in upcoming sessions.
Accessibility and Inclusive Design
July 8 2024
Thinking about accessibility and inclusive design up front yields resources that can be used by all students from the moment of release. By integrating these considerations into your project from the beginning you can reduce remediation work post-release.
Content Creation
July 15 2024
Content is one of the most anticipated parts of OER creation. In this session we discuss how to produce strong content that is optimal for learners and consistent across the OER project, while also keeping in mind considerations such as target audiences, diversity, accessibility, downstream uses like remixing, localizing, etc.
Authoring and Editing Logistics
July 22 2024
Content creation spans a wide range of activities and forms. This session encourages you to think outside of the box - what would be helpful for fellow educators to make full use of the resource you are creating? In this session we also explore editing, which is a critical phase of OER creation as it ensures the usability and readability of the text. We discuss how it plays out throughout the creation process in different ways, and how it helps your project become a cohesive resource.
Phase 2: Writing and Editing Phase
Creating high-quality, accessible, representative, and valuable open resources takes time. We want to make sure that you have the support you need from this learning community for a full year. During the monthly check-ins, we’ll get a chance to talk about challenges and successes as you apply what you’ve learned in the previous sessions to your project. You can lean on the cohort to get answers, share their experiences, celebrate milestones, and get the inspiration or motivation you need to keep progressing!
In Phase 2 of the program you will meet monthly (alternating between 90 min cohort meetings and 20 min 1:1 meetings with your facilitator) for a total of 6 months. You will move through the publishing cycle at different paces, based on your team resources and goals. Throughout this phase, your facilitator will reference useful materials and templates from Phase 1 to guide and support you. The dates for our check-ins running from August 2024 to December 2024 will look like this:
Month 3 (August 2024)
Cohort meeting
Month 4 (September 2024)
1:1 meeting
Month 5 (October 2024)
Cohort meeting
Month 6 (November 2024)
1:1 meeting
Month 7 (December 2024)
Cohort meeting
Month 8 (January 2025)
4 weekly planning meetings
Phase 3: Production and Release Phase
In the final phase of TSP, Phase 3, you will meet weekly (1.5 hours each) for a total of 4 weeks and learn about the final stages of the publishing process. See below for the session goals and materials. You will then meet monthly (alternating between 90 min cohort meetings and 20 min 1:1 meetings with your facilitator) for a total of 3 months. Your facilitator will make reference to useful resources, materials, and past discussions from Phases 1 and 2 to guide and support you and your teams as you continue to work on your OER projects.
Review and Feedback
TBD, January 2025
A critical piece of successful OER is getting feedback and review early on. In this session we talk about why peer review is important, how to get it done, and other methods to receive comments and critique on your project.
Formatting and Release Preparation
TBD, January 2025
Once your book’s content has been written, edited, and reviewed, you need to get it into formats to be shared in the world. We’ll talk about different approaches to formatting and layout, (using Pressbooks and other tools) and how to prepare for the book’s big release.
Post-release and Adoptions
TBD, January 2025
The OER is out there. Now what? We’ll discuss adoptions, improvements, maintenance, and ways to expand your book so that it and the community around it live on.
Curriculum Overview
TBD, January 2025
In this session, we look back on all the topics covered and reflect on the progress you have made. We discuss your plans for the final 3 months and highlight the ways in which you can continue to support and get support from your fellow cohort members.
Month 9 (February 2025)
1:1 meeting
Month 10 (March 2025)
Cohort meeting
Month 11 (April 2025)
1:1 meeting
Month 12 (May 2025)
Cohort meeting (final meeting for program)
We understand that your schedules vary greatly from term to term, and are willing to coordinate with the group to find alternative times for Phases 2 and 3 should this be necessary.
Deliverables
The deliverables outlined below are crucial elements necessary for earning participants’ certificates of completion.
Phase 1
Project Summary Template
Storytelling & Communications Template
OER Chapter Structure Template
Phase 2
Author Guide Template
Submit a Sample Chapter
Phase 3
Review Guide Template
Format Sample Chapter in Publishing Platform (share link with facilitator; screenshare in session)
Release Planning Template
Contact
We encourage transparency in what we do, so that everyone, including those outside the program, are aware of the work we are doing and can benefit from the knowledge shared. All communications will take place in the cohort discussion space. However, in the event of extraordinary circumstances, participants can contact Natasha Whitton (@whittonn) privately via direct message on the Rebus Community forum.