Introduction to Psychological Statistics

Purpose: to help other instructors teaching the same course

Common Course ID: Psyc 104/ Psyc 241
CSU Instructor Open Textbook Adoption Portrait

Abstract: This open textbook is being utilized in a psychology course for undergraduate students by Brandi Goodspeed, M.A. at Humboldt State University. The open textbook provides a fully customizable and incredibly straight-forward/easy-to-read introduction to important concepts in the field of psychology. The main motivation to adopt an open textbook was to make the classroom more accessible. Most student access the open textbook through The Nova Project.

Course Title and Number  PSYC 104. Introduction to Psychology doesn’t have any prerequisites and counts as a Lower Division Area-D general education course. Meanwhile PSYC 241, a major course, requires students place into math placement categories I, II, or III. Course catalog

Student population: PSYC 104 has a combination of new psychology majors and people fulfilling GE requirements. PSYC 241 is specifically for psychology majors, but it’s still considered an intro course so expertise is not expected.

Textbook or OER/Low cost Title: 

Brief Description: The Noba Project. The Noba Project lets you customize your own version of their textbooks by selecting which chapters to include/exclude. Thus, each class’s version of the textbook is unique and specifically curtailed to meet the different learning needs of each community/classroom. It also comes with presentation slides, lecture outlines, and quizzing materials that you may need.
Authors:  Brandi Goodspeed (Editor)
Student access:  The Noba Project textbook is easily accessible through a computer, tablet, or smartphone, but she also offers a print version at the HSU store for $13.

Lessons learned: The hardest part is teaching students how to navigate their new online textbook, how to access the ancillary materials. A few semesters in, however, and that process has been streamlined. She made a PowerPoint presentation and everything to make the transition easier. It only takes about two weeks for everyone to be on the same page.

Cost Savings:  By choosing to adopt The Noba Project in her class, her students save somewhere between $60-100 each, and that’s for between 75-100 students per semester.

License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

OER/Low Cost Adoption Process

Provide an explanation or what motivated you to use this textbook or OER/Low Cost option. As a teacher, Goodspeed has only ever used OER, so she doesn’t necessarily know what her class would look like without it. The psychology department had started moving to OER before she joined the program.

How did you find and select the open textbook for this course? Before Goodspeed joined the psychology department, Dr. Melinda Myers laid the groundwork for the program’s approach to OER. She was the one who found The Noba Project and dramatically overhauled the department.

Sharing Best Practices: You should be thorough in your search for OER--don’t just look for open; look for accessible and effective.   Goodpseed has exclusively taught using OER, so she has not had to make changes to her teaching style. She has, however, noted being able to switch chapters around or cut chapters out whole cloth has allowed her to teach the material in the order she wants to teach it without having to force students into jumping around in a textbook. They just go from the first chapter to the last chapter and figuring out that process has made teaching more streamlined..

Brandi Goodspeed
Humboldt University