ENGL 145: Reasoning, Writing, & Argumentation

Purpose: to help other instructors teaching the same course

Common Course ID: ENGL 145
CSU Instructor Open Textbook Adoption Portrait

Abstract: This open textbook is being utilized in a English course for undergraduate students by Amy Wiley at California State University, San Luis Obispo. The open textbook provides highlights of the OER adoption. 

Course Title and Number
Brief Description of course highlights:  ENGL 145 - Examination of rhetorical principles and ethical rhetorical action. Application of these principles and practices to arguments across a range of genres and media. Evaluate credibility of evidence and sources. 

Student population: 50-75 undergrads 
Learning or student outcomes: When, at the beginning of the quarter, I explain my choices regarding texts, they are quite happy: they just saved a hundred bucks. I’ve polled students, inquiring as to how they’d like reading and support matter delivered to them (PDFs, web links, PDF course readers, printed course readers), and our collaboration in this aspect seems to give them a sense of investment and ownership that I think greatly aids them in developing an attachment to the course and course content while offsetting a bit of the inconveniences such a fragmented material relationship to course materials entails.

There are, I think, students who struggle with the freedom of this approach—who wish for more of a template-approach to research and developing their final researched argument. I suspect that those students are not any different, in essence, from students who struggled in previous, text-book iterations of the course; but the lack of a textbooks makes these students more aware of the challenges their project entails. I think, therefore, that they experience a kind of existential angst of which students who had a textbook to carry around and highlight and refer to weren’t aware.

Nevertheless, such students have been very much at the forefront of my mind as I develop intermediary, support assignments and benchmarks to create opportunities for various types and levels of assessment. They have also been instrumental in my thinking regarding ways to increase peer feedback systems, so that secure and insecure learners can obtain methods and materials reinforcement in a manner that is geared toward iterative skills-refinement rather than one that is authoritatively corrective (since the course attempts to develop their intellectual self-sufficiency).
Furthermore, while students who have participated in these Open Education Resources experiments are not necessarily aware of the 'increased' openness of their assignments and projects compared to previous quarters, they are very aware of the latitude they have in comparison to their peers, and they have articulated with great consistency their appreciation for being able to pursue topics and materials of fundamental interest to them while using their own discretion and developing skills. Early in the quarter, there is a mixture of excitement and trepidation or hesitancy, and, in the middle of the quarter, they do wish, I think, for a template and some clearer boundaries, but by the end, as their projects reach fruition, they seem both satisfied and empowered.

Key challenges faced and how resolved: Many challenges. I took up the challenge in the fall of 2014, and in fall, winter, and spring, I have taught an entirely different version of the course, from exams to assignments to support materials, which has been, as one might expect, exhausting.

Immediately, I became aware of the extent to which even the simplest text, especially in a skills-driven course, creates a skeleton for the course that spawns assignments/assignment structures—they become flesh, if you will. By embracing the form and variety of resources that I did, I (accidentally) reversed that dynamic: suddenly, assignments became the weight-bearing skeleton in a more organic, obvious, and unstructured way. It was pure and intellectually gratifying, but it was also destabilizing and quite revealing.

Another immediate issue arose regarding copyright and attribution. My approach to my own online reading altered fundamentally, so that I was constantly on the lookout for longform pieces that could illustrate principles for our course—and then realizing the extent to which I needed to take care in selecting, providing pathways of access, and representing these publicly-available sources. While each of the course designs I developed over the year 'worked,' there were nonetheless aspects of each that I felt were stronger or weaker—here, the composition instruction suffered; there, it was the sourcing/attribution, and so on, and I found I was hyper-aware of these deficiencies because the foundational change made all the course criteria so much more evenly significant. I find myself speculating as to the extent that a conventional textbook aided me in perhaps ignoring oversights.

In the (so far) year-long process of developing alternate materials, I’ve attempted to address these constantly surfacing issues with each course iteration, engaging even more closely than usual in the very same kind of process of rethinking and revising that I ask of my students.

At times, that process can sometimes feel like I’m taking one step forward for every two steps back, but the rigor of the course I can see emerging is worth the struggle—without a doubt. And, again, this puts teacher and students in a more sympathetic position: I am very, very in touch with their mindset and struggles regarding revision as an ongoing critical practice, and I think—I hope—that makes me a more sympathetic and more effective teacher

OER/Low Cost Adoption Process

Provide an explanation or what motivated you to use this textbook or OER/Low Cost option. "'Open resource' has been a part of my general landscape for some time, as I have friends in other disciplines who have been proponents of OOS such as Linux, and a close friend worked on early versions of GnuCash; Creative Commons licenses have also been on my radar since the rise of Ravelry: pattern design and development fiber artists active in blogging about the fiber-arts community brought questions of 'original' and 'derived' designs, writing, photography and fair use to the community’s attention circa 2004-2008. Issues of fair-use, original design, and copyright continue to be subjects of deep interest within that community."

How did you find and select the open textbook for this course? " The shift also immediately made palpable that my students and I shared common ground in our mutual interest in finding reliable, credible, stable sources to support and illustrate course content. We were suddenly even more on the same team than when I required them to purchase an expensive text, and that team dynamic has pervaded the classroom in interesting and unexpected ways."

Sharing Best Practices:  "The most gratifying aspect of the shift is the extent to which foregoing the textbook has increased rather than decreased the rigor of my pedagogy and expectations for student performance. Because credibility of sources is a constant issue, I teach credibility assessment in a manner both far more precise and far more open than I had previously done, and students are constantly considering the source of espoused knowledge. In an attempt to take 'open' to its furthest implications, I allow my students to use any source type in their research projects—it is my understanding that the more common practice, at least in their experience, is to insist on easily verified peer-reviewed sources for this project.

 At the same time, because their sources can be wholly open, they are responsible for considering the appropriateness of their sources for their approach, topic, and argument to an extent that is more difficult for both them and me to assess but ultimately respects the course objectives with a great deal more integrity. They practice critical thinking in every aspect of their work, and so must I in assessing that work."

Textbook or OER/Low cost Title: 

Brief Description: Provide a brief description of the textbook, OER or Low Cost option, including anything relevant to your choice.
Authors:
Student access:  PDFs, web links, PDF course readers, printed course readers 

Cost Savings:  The most immediately savings benefit, for my students, has been the fact that they no longer pay $90 for a paperback text—however terrific that text is, that price tag hurts.

Amy Wiley, Lecturer 
California State University, San Luis Obispo

Department of English