Development Across the Lifespan: Adulthood & Aging (CHDV 3410)

Purpose: to help other instructors teaching the same course

Common Course ID:  Development Across the Lifespan: Adulthood & Aging (CHDV 3410)
CSU Instructor Open Textbook Adoption Portrait

Abstract: These open textbooks are being utilized in a Child and Family Studies course for undergraduate students by Dr. Wook Yang at the California State University Los Angeles (Cal State LA). These open textbooks provide a wide range of materials related to aging and health. The main motivation to adopt open textbooks was to reduce course related costs for students. Most student access the open textbooks through their institutional library website. 

Course Title and Number: Development Across the Lifespan: Adulthood & Aging (CHDV 3410)

Brief Description of course highlights:  The course examines adult development from emerging adulthood through the end of life across diverse contexts. The course will explore the interaction among biological, social/cultural, and psychological domains from a developmental / life-span perspective. In addition, course activities are aimed at helping students reflect on the development and experiences of aging adults. 

Student population: This course is required for Child and Family Studies (General Option) and it is intended for junior and senior students. Prior to this course, students are required to take a human development course that covers from conception to adolescence.

Learning or student outcomes: 
1. Develop an awareness of adult-physical, -cognitive, and -social-emotional transitions and stages from emerging adulthood through the end of life from an interdisciplinary theory-driven perspective.
2. Explain family, community, and cultural factors affecting the development of adults from emerging adulthood to end of life.
3. Explore changes and continuity in the aging process from emerging adulthood through the end of life using an intersectional lens to address variation across race/ethnicity, socio-economic status, sex, gender, sexual orientation, and ability.
4. Familiarity with current public programs and resources for contemporary older adults that enhance healthy aging. 

Key challenges faced and how resolved: It was difficult to monitor whether students were learning the textbook materials since the course was delivered online. However, the course had a series of guest lectures that were associated with the textbook materials. Students were asked to write four separate reports on different topics throughout the semester and the teaching team was able to assess our students’ level of understanding.

Textbook or OER/Low cost Title: 
Handbook of aging and the social sciences
Handbook of the psychology of aging 

Brief Description:  
From Handbook of aging and the social sciences:
Measuring life course events and life histories (Chapter 3)
Social exclusion and social isolation in later life (Chapter 7)
The interplay of age, period, and cohort effects on obesity and metabolic diseases in later life (Chapter 11)
Housing older Americans: the challenges of accessibility, affordability, and quality (Chapter 20)

From Handbook of the psychology of aging:
History of adult cognitive aging research (Chapter 1)
Memory: behavior and neural basis (Chapter 4)
Executive functions and neurocognitive aging (Chapter 5)

Please provide a link to the resource
https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780128159705/handbook-of-aging-and-the-social-sciences
https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780128160947/handbook-of-the-psychology-of-aging

Authors:Ferraro, Kenneth & Carr, Deborah (Social Sciences)
K. Warner Schaie & Sherry L. Willis (Psychology of Aging)

Student access:  Through Sciencedirect via Cal State LA Library website. 

Supplemental resources: List resources including online homework systems, interactive study guides for students, and faculty-only resources such as solutions and slides that are available.

Provide the cost savings from that of a traditional textbook. Since these online textbooks are available to our students for free, these changes saved over 100$ per student in our class.

License:  Copyrighted

OER/Low Cost Adoption Process

Provide an explanation or what motivated you to use this textbook or OER/Low Cost option. Instead of using a single textbook that students need to purchase, it was great to use two different sources that are free for our students. By doing so, we were able to examine aging and health from different perspectives.

How did you find and select the open textbook for this course? Through our library’s online training modules, I was able to pinpoint couple places that I can use to explore. Since our students are familiar with the library system, I used the library search to find the most suitable textbooks.

Sharing Best Practices: I would like to encourage our colleagues to use at least two different sources in order to provide a wider range of topics. By doing so, instructors would be able to highlight the importance of multidisciplinary nature of human development. 

Describe any challenges you experienced, and lessons learned. As I do not use materials associated with textbook (e.g. slides by authors and/or publishers), I did not choose these textbooks based on their supplemental resources. However, I think they could be useful for students and teaching assistants. Especially for an online course, extra materials that can consolidate information from the textbook would help our students with further understanding. 

Instructor Name:  Wook Yang
Assisant Professor Caiforina State University, LA 
I am a Child and Family Studies faculty member (Assistant Professor).  

Please provide a link to your university page.
https://www.calstatela.edu/hhs/cfs/faculty-and-staff

Please describe the courses you teach.
I teach courses such as CHDV 3410 (Development in Adulthood and Aging), CHDV 3470 (Culture and Wellness across the Lifespan), and CHDV 5080 (Research Methods).

Describe your teaching philosophy and any research interests related to your discipline or teaching.  My teaching philosophy involves fostering a creative intellectual venue for our students to express their thoughts in order to nurture their passion while furthering their knowledge on human development, minority populations, and health. My research interests include mental health and aging among minority populations. Current research projects involve behavioral intervention design and population-based data analysis.