One of the first projects I worked on as a student representative of APA Division 2 (Teaching of Psychology) was a summary of resources for teachers of psychology. We reviewed some of the best books on teaching with tech and some great online archives of psychological teaching resources. The information in the books was helpful, plentiful, relevant, and up-to-date. There was only one small problem with the resources for us: we had just a few weeks to read and review them and the process of accessing them too would take just a few weeks through library loan. Altogether, the dozens of books would cost thousands of dollars through a store and would then only be accessible by a single reader at a time. The solution to this problem came in the form of eBook copies available on my university’s online library system, which has a good-sized catalog of all types of texts – except student textbooks. This shortcoming caught my interest as a student who always avoided the bookstore.
Like me, many students are opting out of the bookstore shopping-spree. A recent poll found that 65% of students have skipped the purchase of a book because of the cost (US PIRGF Education Fund, http://senate.rutgers.edu/PIRGTextbookCostsReport.pdf). As an undergraduate, I settled for earlier-edition copies ($3-4 shipped) or I downloaded the PDF of the text from a popular India-based student message board (many students in India are also unable to afford the texts). Now as a graduate student, almost all of the required texts are freely accessible from the library’s Online Research Databases. To complete the circle, I am now in the role of teacher and once again concerned about textbook costs, this time for my students. Will the cost of my textbook choice burden students’ family budgets? Will some fail my course because of it? With libraries offering only hardcopies, what are the alternatives for access?
The problem: too many students need access to too many expensive books simultaneously. The current solution is to make every single student pay huge individual costs. We can look to how education handles a similar problem to see an alternative approach. When academic journals went electronic, academic researchers needed to access many expensive books, journals, and articles simultaneously. The solution was simple and effective: institutions pooled together resources to pay for shared access to the Online Research Databases I mentioned earlier. If you are not completely familiar with them, they are essentially online libraries full of donated works written by the very academics who access them. What a fantastically eloquent solution. Why not apply it to textbooks?
Unfortunately, Online Research Databases are obscenely expensive, despite providing access to works they do not own and despite the fact that they do not compensate the authors of those works. The catch in Online Research Databases is that they only become economically feasible when academia comes to a shared agreement to pool its resources together to access them. This philanthropic approach to solving problems is the essence of academia; it is what brings art to the streets, what saves lives in the emergency room, and what will provide open, free textbooks to the students of the world. The solution to academia’s textbook crisis is academia.
Stewart Brand coined the now-famous slogan of open source advocates: “information wants to be free.” In the software world, the concept is still revolutionary, but for academics, the phrase borders on trite. The academic community lives by a very simple task: to record and share information with the world. It is time for academia to start living up to this purpose in the classroom, starting with a catalog of comprehensive open textbooks for every course. The modern textbook model demands that those with the least contribute the most to a system that privatizes public information and sells it back to the academic workers responsible for producing it. If information really does want to be free, then the current textbook model is a prison. Academic psychology needs to quit its job as warden and become an information advocate, starting with projects like Noba and Wikibooks.
[Francis Yannaco is a PhD student of Psychology at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. His early graduate work focused on ethnic identity development in college students, while his current focus is on children’s human rights and their access to decision-making, education, and health. As a student representative of APA’s Division 2 (Teaching of Psychology) he hopes to help promote greater online collaboration between teachers.]
The Noba Team is excited to introduce the newest chapter to the Noba Collection - Social Anxiety. Todd Kashdan, an authority on personality, well-being and social relationships from George Mason University, looks in detail at the scope of the disorder, the impacts on those who experience it and its treatment options.
"A public speaker waits backstage before her name is called. She visualizes what will happen in a few moments: the audience will cheer as she walks out and then turn silent, with all eyes on her. She imagines this will cause her to feel uncomfortable and, instead of standing balanced, she will lean to one side, not quite sure what to do with her hands. And when her mouth opens, instead of words, guttural sounds will emerge from a parched throat before her mind goes blank. In front of friends, family, and strangers, she is paralyzed with fear and embarrassment. Physically, in the moments leading up to the performance, she sweats, trembles, has difficulty breathing, notices a racing heartbeat, and feels nauseated. When someone asks her a question, she loses her voice or its pitch rises a few octaves. She attempts to hide her anxiety by tensing her muscles or telling herself to breathe and stay calm. Behaviorally, she seeks ways to escape the audience’s gaze (e.g., by playing a video and asking the audience questions), and she tries to get through the performance as quickly as possible (e.g., rushing off the stage). Later, she works hard to avoid similar situations, passing up future speaking opportunities.
Welcome to the often terrifying world of social anxiety."
Noba is proud to announce the three top entries in the 2014 Noba Student Video Award. This year’s award recognizes outstanding student-made videos that effectively bring to life psychological concepts related to memory. The Award was open to currently enrolled students at colleges and universities around the world.
Winners:
First: Eureka Chen Yew Foong, Linfield College (OR, US), Topic: The Misinformation Effect
Second: Kara McCord, University of Kentucky (KY, US), Topic: Flashbulb Memories
Third: Ang Rui Xia & Ong Jun Hao, Singapore Management University (Singapore), Topic: The Misinformation Effect
In addition to the top three awards, six additional videos were selected as honorable mention recipients for their creative and educational presentations of topics ranging from Mnemonics to the Tunneling Effect to Chunking and Short Term Memory Capacity.
A total of $10,000 will be awarded to the winning video-makers, courtesy of the Diener Education Fund. In addition, the top three videos will be included in the Noba Psychology Collection, embedded within the online learning modules covering memory to serve as learning tools for other students.
The Noba catalogue has a terrific new addition from Jim Maddux and Evan Kleiman of George Mason University – Self-Efficacy.
“A concept that was first introduced by Albert Bandura in 1977, self-efficacy refers to a person’s beliefs that he or she is able to effectively perform the tasks needed to attain a valued goal. Since then, self-efficacy has become one of the most thoroughly researched concepts in psychology. Just about every important domain of human behavior has been investigated using self-efficacy theory. Self-efficacy does not refer to your abilities but rather to your beliefs about what you can do with your abilities. Also, self-efficacy is not a trait—there are not certain types of people with high self-efficacies and others with low self-efficacies. Rather, people have self-efficacy beliefs about specific goals and life domains. For example, if you believe that you have the skills necessary to do well in school and believe you can use those skills to excel, then you have high academic self-efficacy . . .
Self-efficacious adolescents perform better at school and self-efficacious adults perform better at work. These individuals have happier romantic relationships and work better in teams. People with strong self-efficacies have better health than those with weak self-efficacies; they are more likely to engage in behaviors that prevent health problems and actually increase their health. They are more likely to begin and continue exercise, have safer sex, and eat better foods. Higher self-efficacy is also useful for getting out of bad habits. People with strong self-efficacies are able to lose weight, quit smoking, and cut down on alcohol consumption more successfully than can people with low self-efficacies. As illustrated by the well-known children’s book The Little Engine That Could telling yourself “I think I can” can be a powerful motivator and can increase your chances for success.”
For more on Self-Efficacy - its study and influence on all our lives – treat yourself to the full chapter at --
http://noba.to/bmv4hd6p
Recently I have found myself at many meetings and events (e.g., the Open Textbook summit) centered on Open Education. Despite my non-representativeness due to self-selection, I am often called upon at these meetings to represent the “faculty perspective.”
As much as I would love to do this, in my experience, there is no single faculty perspective on open education in general and open textbooks in particular. Some, like myself, are early adopters. Others are willing to go along if their concerns are addressed. Still others remain skeptical and resistant. And there are many views in between, many of which contain a mixture of curiosity, interest, and concern. And this is not a bad thing. Academic freedom is sacred. And, at least in my experience, a faculty members’ teaching philosophy is often intimately connected with their openness to openness.
Most faculty I know consider the cost to students when assigning a textbook for their courses. For them, shifting to an open textbook (assuming one is available) provides a clear advantage. Students can download and use a digital copy of the textbook for free or even print a physical copy at a fraction of the cost of a traditional textbook. At a time when a growing number of students are attempting to hold down full-time jobs while pursuing their post-secondary educational ambitions, this is a tangible benefit with a human face. Every semester I notice students in my classes who elect not to purchase the course textbook (despite cautionary notes from me) due to financial constraints. My colleagues report the same. In the battle between groceries and a textbook, the textbook loses every time.
This is especially true given the increase in the price of a traditional textbook over the past decade. We cannot fault our students for questioning the value of their (forced) purchase. As an example, the textbook I previously assigned for Research Methods in Psychology (which just happens to be the most popular textbook for this course in BC) is a softcover book printed in black ink that runs 416 pages long and retails for $114.95 + taxes & shipping. I should say that it is a great book and well written. But, in contrast, the Canadian edition of the open textbook for Research Methods in Psychology that I revised includes colour graphics throughout, runs 378 pages long and costs my students nothing. If they wish to order a print copy of the book it will cost them $13.06 + taxes & shipping. At least on price, there is no contest.
So why are faculty not yet adopting open textbooks more widely?
1. Quite simply, for many disciplines and courses, there is no open textbook available. So other than putting together a set of existing open educational resources, the nontraditional options are limited. I should say here that cost-saving alternatives like e-textbooks put forward by the big publishers are often a terrible option for students because they come with a time-limited license and have no resale value, which means that they often end up costing the students the same (or even more) in the long run, as compared with biting the bullet and buying the assigned traditional textbook.
2. In my experience, reason #2 has to do with concerns about quality (e.g., comprehensiveness, clarity, currency, etc.). Some faculty are instantly skeptical of open textbooks and hold them to a higher standard than traditional textbooks. This is fair, because traditional textbooks typically have several sets of eyes on them through their development and are later sent to many other faculty for their review. Although some open textbook initiatives (such as the BC Campus Open Textbook Project) collect and post comprehensive faculty reviews for the books in their repository, others do not. Where available, open textbooks or chapters written by leading scholars (e.g., the NOBA project) are especially helpful in countering doubts about quality.
3. But let’s imagine that a high quality open textbook is available for a particular course. Sometimes these are entirely text-based – no illustrations, charts, or graphics to aid comprehension. No questions or critical thinking exercises embedded. No online learning management system available that students can rely on for formative feedback. And, crucially for many faculty, no testbank, which means that the instructor is then obligated to write every question for every assessment for their course. Considering the amount of time it takes to write good test questions that are reliably able to distinguish between different levels of understanding, this is a tall order.
4. The choice of textbook is sometimes not an individual one. Especially for large, multi-section introductory courses (sometimes offered in two halves), in order to facilitate student mobility, academic departments often mandate that faculty adopt the same textbook across all sections. This reality often makes switching to an open textbook a less nimble decision.
One of the myths I often try to dispel is that faculty are the enemy and have some great stake in upholding the traditional textbook model. To be clear – assuming they are not the author, faculty do not receive any benefit when they assign a particular publisher’s textbook. Faculty are, however, deeply concerned about student learning. For this reason I believe that if faculty are presented with an open textbook alternative that has been favourably reviewed by other faculty, embeds good pedagogical features, and has an available testbank, it would be more difficult for the majority to continue upholding the status quo.
Beyond merely speaking to the legitimate concerns of faculty, however, I find it more refreshing to speak to the additional advantages that open textbooks bring to faculty:
1. Faculty have the ability to adapt and remix the textbook to suit their needs. They may choose to delete specific chapters or sections or even write and insert sections for their open textbook, making it possible to incorporate recent developments in research and theory much faster than the traditional textbook’s five-year review cycle permits. In other words, an increase in academic freedom!
2. There is some evidence to suggest that when an open textbook is carefully adapted to suit a particular program, student performance and retention is actually enhanced.
3. The ideal textbook does not exist. My colleague Takashi Sato at Kwantlen Polytechnic University recently made this excellent point. There are always tradeoffs that faculty make when adopting a textbook. Often it is a question of whether the content is “good enough,” assuming that several other resources are in place. For the reasons listed above, open textbooks are very often better than “good enough.”
4. As soppy as this sounds, the looks on your students’ faces when you tell them that you have adopted an open textbook. You have them at hello.
5. Although this post is about open textbooks, I would be remiss if I did not point out that the open research movement is a natural and strong ally, particularly when addressing faculty. Open access journals like PLOS ONE have become mainstream as researchers have come to appreciate the need for the fruit of their labour (and public tax coffers) to be shared with the public. In many ways, open textbooks are merely an extension of this same philosophy and permit faculty to live more closely in concert with their values.
Of course there are many remaining issues to work on before open textbooks can go mainstream. The sustainability of who will continue to revise and update the open textbooks is one such question. Government support and resource sharing agreements help a great deal. But ultimately I believe that it is institutional culture that will need to shift. A university’s strategic priorities need to include moving towards open education. From the president’s office down, open education initiatives need to be supported for these to develop and mature. This includes time releases for faculty adapting/adopting open textbooks, institutional recognition of this work, practical and regularly offered professional development workshops, and the consideration of the development of open educational resources in the files of those on the tenure-track.
I recently met a student from the University of Regina who spoke eloquently about why we should avoid pitting different stakeholders (e.g., faculty and students) against one another. I believe she is correct. There is not just one reason to consider adopting open textbooks. The benefits to students are obvious, the benefits to faculty can be highlighted, and the benefits to the institution (e.g., with recruitment) may need to be spelled out. Open textbooks represent a rare win-win-win scenario, the kind we do not see very often in post-secondary education.
To finish, I ask you to engage in a useful thought exercise: Imagine a world in which open textbooks, open research, open pedagogy, and open educational resources are the norm. In this future world, imagine that a representative from a for-profit publishing house approaches a faculty member in order to persuade them to adopt one of their textbooks. What would their pitch look like? And what could they possibly say that would convince faculty to adopt their product?
[Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani teaches Psychology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, BC. Dr. Jhangiani is a friend of Noba and an early proponent of OER. This post was originally published on Dr. Jhangiani's blog at http://jhangiani.wordpress.com/blog/]
Noba is pleased to announce a fantastic new chapter - The Psychology of Groups - authored by a truly outstanding writer and well respected authority on Groups, Ethics, and Leadership - Don Forsyth from University of Richmond.
"A thorough understanding of people requires a thorough understanding of groups. Each of us is an autonomous individual seeking our own objectives, yet we are also members of groups—groups that constrain us, guide us, and sustain us. Just as each of us influences the group and the people in the group, so, too, do groups change each one of us. Joining groups satisfies our need to belong, gain information and understanding through social comparison, define our sense of self and social identity, and achieve goals that might elude us if we worked alone. Groups are also practically significant, for much of the world’s work is done by groups rather than by individuals. Success sometimes eludes our groups, but when group members learn to work together as a cohesive team their success becomes more certain. People also turn to groups when important decisions must be made, and this choice is justified as long as groups avoid such problems as group polarization and groupthink."
For more on this deeply interesting and important topic check out all of Dr. Forsyth's Noba chapter -
Students of all ages engage in a wide range of activities that they hope will improve their grades and learning. They form study groups, underline passages, pull all-nighters, make vocabulary flashcards, review homework assignments and drink coffee. Although many of these strategies are traditional students—and professors—tend to be unaware of how effective or ineffective these techniques are. Without a systematic evaluation of these study behaviors students might be wasting effort that could otherwise be used more effectively elsewhere.
Fortunately, just this past year John Dunlonsky and his colleagues published a meticulously researched and truly fascinating review of research concerning the efficacy of 10 of the most commonly practiced study techniques. Their conclusions about which methods were broadly effective in improving learning outcomes (and which weren’t!) might surprise you.
The good news is that some of these techniques do-- in fact-- prove to be effective in improving learning outcomes. This is even true across academic area and across student characteristics. Surprisingly, only two of the 10 techniques under scrutiny were judged to have high efficacy where learning outcomes were concerned. Here are some of the results:
The Most Effective Study Behaviors:
1. Practice testing
2. Distributed practice (breaking up study sessions)
The Least Effective Study Behaviors:
1. Summarization
2. Highlighting and underlining
3. Keyword mnemonics
4. Imagery use for text learning
5. Rereading
If you are a student you might want to trade in that highlighter for a stopwatch, so that you can take breaks and parse apart your grueling all night study sessions; those we refer to as study-hauls. If you are an instructor you might consider giving your students information on the science of best learning practices. The full report can be found here:
One size does not, in fact, fit all. This is as true in the study of psychology as anywhere. You should be able to structure your class text or your personal course of study in the way that fits your specific teaching or learning goals. From the start we've invited Noba users to create books from scratch with the help of our easy drag-and-drop book-building tools to combine our nearly 90 chapters into whatever combination was right for them. And over the last 6 months almost 1,300 customized books have been created this way. But just as one size does not fit all we've recognized that just one way to create a custom Noba textbook is also not enough.
Now for those who want a head-start to putting together a great book, you can start the process by selecting any one of our Ready-Made textbooks and then editing it so that it's exactly how you like. Our Ready-Made books have been put together carefully to fit the typical scope and sequence of some of the most common courses of study - Intro to Psychology, Psychology as a Biological Science, and Psychology as a Social Science. Now you can select one of these books and change it a little or change it a lot. Add a few chapters, or delete a few. Add an entire new section or change the book's title. All the editing options that have always been available when creating a book from scratch can now be used to shape a Ready-Made book so that it's your own unique version.
How does this new way of constructing a custom textbook work? It's simple.
1. Log-in to Noba and visit your Library
2. All Ready-Made books will be displayed there
3. Click the Ready-Made book you want to alter to open it
4. Click the "Customize Textbook" button
5. Drag new chapters from left-to-right to Add
6. Click the red "X" next to any included chapters or sections on the right to Delete them
7. Rename the book or section headings as you see fit
8. Click the "Publish Changes" button when you're finished
Your new customized textbook will appear in your library with your name on it for you to use, share, or edit again if and when you're ready for more changes.
The Noba Team is proud to announce that we have officially joined the Creative Commons community. As of today, all available Noba chapters are being offered to users under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. This allows anyone to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. It also permits Noba users to remix, transform, and build upon the original work.
The Noba mission has always been to provide the highest quality educational materials for free to as many people as possible. We believe that the addition of the CC license to current and future Noba materials will facilitate greater access, greater sharing, and the ability of users to tailor what we've created to be even more useful for themselves and their own audiences.
We hope you agree that this makes a better experience for everyone in the Noba community.
The idea that intelligence, personal interest, and mastery combine to support learning, job performance, and creative problem solving go back as far as Plato’s view of the human psyche as a charioteer (the intellect), and his two horses (interests and the will to master). Join Vanderbilt’s David Lubinski in Noba’s newest chapter - Intellectual Abilities, Interests, and Mastery - as he looks at “The Trilogy of the Mind” and how their interplay helps us achieve.
http://noba.to/4atgdkf6
