Dr. Dan Furgason; Dr. Ken Vos; and joerdis
In the Spring 2017, I talked to the two Faculty Members from the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Dr. Kenneth Vos and Associate Chair Dr. Daniel Furgason, who were about to go fully open with open textbook adoptions for their PHYS and ASTR 1000 courses. The Department currently employs Open Stax textbooks the levels 1000, 2000, 3000.
Teaching Center (TC): Where does your interest in using OER for your own courses originate from?
Dan Furgason: It comes from a number of different directions. First and foremost is the exorbitant cost of textbooks; not only what students pay for a textbook, but the value the textbook returns to the student. Any time you teach a course, and I don’t think this is peculiar to any one discipline, you have the style of the instructor and what’s laid out in front of the student in terms of a textbook. Sometimes these two correlate reasonably well. Sometimes they don’t.
Often in introductory courses, you use a kind of standardized textbook – the one adopted by your department or your discipline. As you craft lectures to emphasize what you believe is important, there are times when the textbook gets in the way. Owing to that disconnect between my intellectual ambitions for the students and the foundational material I had available, I started looking for alternatives about two years ago. But there wasn’t much with respect to OER textbooks for introductory physics at the time. There was one book for introductory astronomy, however, that I have half-adopted this semester and I fully intend to adopt in the next term. The price for that text is $0 for the online version and about $20 for a printed version. The bottom line for me is it to say: I believe it’s unfair for students to bear the financial cost of some of these textbooks, and I am looking for a way to fix that.
TC: What will be involved in the full adoption of the astronomy textbook?
Dan Furgason: There are weaknesses in every textbook. The OER astronomy textbook I am looking at right now is no exception. While I think on balance it’s pretty good, it does not do a couple of things that I think should be done. This means that when I adopt it for the upcoming summer session, the onus will be on me to fill in the blanks. You could think of it as an iterative process, in which I will be creating the sections of the textbook that aren’t there yet. It’s like writing your own textbook without starting from scratch.
TC: What exactly do you feel is still missing from the astronomy book?
Dan Furgason: In the book we’re using from the Openstax collection this summer I have seen a couple of spots where from my point of view certain topics still need to be part of the discussion. These are more technical items like, for instance, introductory celestial mechanics. Obviously, I will need to craft content for them before we get there.
TC: Do you anticipate making the modifications in the astronomy book to be a challenge in terms of time and