Dave Dillon’s Success Story
Like many major project plans, Dave Dillon’s Blueprint for Success in College and Career has seen a number of iterations along its lifeline. Today, Blueprint for Success is itself a striking triumph, with multiple adopters and users, and a great deal of value delivered to innumerable students. The idea for the textbook emerged out of a spectrum of needs—those of both teachers and learners, as well as the author’s own desire for a highly functional text. In early 2019, it won a Textbook Excellence Award from the Textbook & Academic Authors Association, and the accolades continue to flow in, including an Open Textbook Award for Excellence from the Open Education Consortium.
Back in 2005, Dave was working as an adjunct counsellor and instructor at five different community colleges in four different districts in Southern California. Working at multiple institutions made choosing a textbook complicated. Students had different needs, bureaucracies had different procedures. He began thinking that, once he became full-time, he would just write his own textbook. With the diversity of his teaching and counselling experience, he had a very clear idea about the kinds of learning materials that he wanted for his students.
At the time, Dave wasn’t particularly familiar with the concept of openness, but he was starting to feel the needs that openly published textbooks fill so well. He knew he wanted control over the educational content he included in his lessons, and he knew a lot of that content existed in the world in different publications and formats. He also knew that the student experience is constantly changing, and that, over time, whatever he put together would need to be adapted and revised. Two years after reaching the conclusion that he was eventually going to create his own textbook, Dave became a full-time faculty member at Grossmont College in El Cajon, California. And so began his plan to start construction on Blueprint.
It wouldn’t be until 2009 that Dave actually got going, however, focusing on creating a textbook for a one-unit study skills and time management course. He gave himself two years to make it happen. In all, it took five years and was, as he describes it, “a wonderful learning process” about all the things that go into putting a book together.
A couple of national publishing offers came in, but Dave wasn’t confident about the attention and promotion that his book would receive. In the end, somewhat by accident, he discovered Montezuma Publishing, on the San Diego State University campus, located not far from his home institution. They did the formatting and printing, although Dave had to pay for his own editor. They negotiated a price of $29.00 for the 100-page-book, and it was published in 2014.
Overall, Dave was happy with this experience, and in particular that the book would be more affordable for students. In his work as a counsellor, Dave had already witnessed first-hand how the high prices of tex