Creating an Open Textbook
As a MacEwan instructor, perhaps you have reviewed existing open textbooks and not been able to find one that meets your needs. If you are committed to using open textbooks in your teaching, the next step could be to create your own.
Getting Started
Once you have decided to create your own open textbook, review the MacEwan Open Books Terms of Use and fill out a Request Form to request an account, or contact<EMAIL_ADDRESS>to discuss whether MacEwan University Library’s Pressbooks platform is the best fit for your project.
Upon receiving a request for a MacEwan Open Books account, the librarian overseeing the service will be in touch to set up a session with you and any collaborators to discuss your project in more detail and provide an introduction to Pressbooks functionality and features (see: Pressbooks Training Checklist).
Planning Your Open Textbook
How can you ensure that your textbook is of the greatest utility to students and other instructors? The way you select and organize your content will determine how useful the book will be as an instructional tool.
You may want to develop a workflow for how you will approach the project. A typical writing workflow could be something like this:
Conceptualize → Outline → Write → Review → Edit → Publish
Here is a detailed workflow of typical open textbook production in MacEwan Open Books:
Setting Learning Objectives
Before beginning to write, think about planning your book chapters in terms of desired learning objectives. By the end of the chapter, what should students be able to do? Setting learning objectives will help you determine the level of the material, the content you include, and the design of any assessments that might be included at the end of each chapter or section.
Learning objectives for your textbook can be written using Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (1956) as shown in Figure 2.1. The taxonomy has six levels, moving from the least complex type of learning, “Remember,” to the most complex, “Create.” An effective learning objective will use an appropriate action verb to define the level of learning. For example, “By the end of this section, learners will be able to organize their textbook content according to Bloom’s Taxonomy of educational objectives.” By using the verb “organize,” the level of learning is set at the “Analyze” level of Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Using Bloom’s Taxonomy to write learning objectives for each chapter can help you keep the level of your textbook consistent (for instance, an introductory textbook aimed at first or second year students may never move past the “apply” level) or help you structure your chapters so that they build on each other, moving from a low level to a high level of learning.
Selecting and Organizing Your Content
Most textbooks follow a specific framework and consistent pattern. One way to think about designing each chapter is with Robert Gagné’s “Nine Events of Instruction,” as described in Gagné et al.’s Princ