HIST 110A: World Civilization to 16th Century

Purpose: to help other instructors teaching the same course

Common Course ID:  HIST 110A: World Civilization to 16th Century
CSU Instructor Open Textbook Adoption Portrait

Abstract: These zero-cost course materials are being utilized in a History course for undergraduate students by Lisa Tran at CSU Fullerton. The main motivation to adopt an open textbook was to reduce course costs and make resources more applicable to student experience.

Course Title and Number:  HIST 110A: World Civilization to 16th Century
Brief Description of course highlights:  

Development of Western and non-Western civilizations from their origins to the 16th century.  
Student population: The course is LD GE, so students are predominantly in their first or second year and non-majors. No prerequisites.  . 
Learning or student outcomes: 

a. Acquire a holistic understanding of the origins and historical development of world civilizations to 1500, including the contributions of religion, language, philosophy, material and non-material culture and their interaction with the environment.

b. Describe and critically analyze the reciprocal influence of institutions, values, and ideas upon each other within and between various cultures.
c. Understand and describe critically major political, economic, intellectual and cultural themes that recur throughout history.

d. Critically engage with source material, including these from the canon of world literature, art, and archaeology.
Key challenges faced and how resolved:

Challenge: Finding exact matches for all the primary source excerpts.
Resolution: Substitution of comparable sources; duplication of source within fair use guidelines

Challenge: Finding commentary on all the primary source excerpts.
Resolution: Instructor wrote the commentary when open access commentary was not available.

Syllabus and/or Sample assignment from the course or the adoption [optional]: Example 1: links to online sourcesExample 2: instructor-created commentary on sources

Instructor Name:  Lisa Tran
I am a History professor at CSU Fullerton. 
I teach Concepts in World History, Modern Asia, The Chinese Diaspora, History of China, and World Civilizations 

Please provide a link to your university page.  https://hist.fullerton.edu/faculty_staff/profiles/Lisa%20Tran.aspx
Describe your teaching philosophy and any research interests related to your discipline or teaching.  Since the publication of my book, Concubines in Court: Marriage and Monogamy in Twentieth-Century China (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), my research agenda has shifted dramatically, from women in China to ethnic Chinese in Vietnam, from nation-centered narratives to global connections, from legal history to refugee studies, and from archival research to oral history.  My current project focuses on the ethnic Chinese who left Vietnam during the refugee crisis in the late 1970s. I place the global dispersion of Chinese from Vietnam within the geopolitical context of shifting alliances in the international order and national discussions on immigration in the United States, Canada, and Australia. I am also writing a book on Asia that emphasizes the interconnections that have shaped the peoples of Asia and their relationships with the rest of the world, to be published by Cambridge University Press. Fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, Fulbright Association, and the Association for Asian Studies have funded my writing and research activities.

OER/Low Cost Adoption Process

Provide an explanation or what motivated you to use this textbook or OER/Low Cost option.  Reduced student cost.  Control over content of learning materials (customize to what I want to emphasize)

How did you find and select the open textbook for this course? Michaela did an awesome job finding almost all the primary sources that I was using. If she couldn’t find an exact substitute, then she located a variety of alternatives.

Sharing Best Practices: A centralized website with all OER sources that is user-friendly would be great. I found Merlot difficult to use and not that helpful for my purposes.

Describe any challenges you experienced, and lessons learned. I had a great experience. Michaela’s expertise was instrumental in locating the sources I needed to transition completely to OER. 

Textbook or OER/Low cost Title: 

Brief Description: Utilized a combination of unlimited user access library books and OER including: World History: Cultures, States, and Societies to 1500; Western Civilization: A Concise History Volume 1 (8000 BCE - 1000 CE); Boundless World History
Authors:  Lisa Tran – commentary on primary sources.  Primary Sources:

• Pyramid Texts 
• Enuma Elish
• Epic of Gilgamesh 
• Genesis 
• Rig Veda 
• Popol Vuh
• Book of the Dead
• Bhagavad Gita
• The Avesta
• The Qur'an
• Mandate of Heaven
• Analects of Confucius
• Confucius: The Great Learning
• Han Feizi
• Plato, The Republic
• Code of Hammurabi
• Tang Code
• Twelve Tables of Roman Law

Student access:  Canvas (for online materials and PDFs).  Library website (for e-books)

Supplemental resources: Interactive review exercises.  Images and maps with “hotspots” students can click on for more information.  Videos embedded in Canvas

Provide the cost savings from that of a traditional textbook.  $24.95/student for Milestone Documents- Custom Sourcebook: World History I to 1500
License: All OER are under CC licenses