Dr. Ying Zheng; Keith Aiken; and joerdis
Dr. Ying Zheng was the first recipient (Fall 2017) of the Open Access Learning Resource Fund the Teaching Centre now offers to all faculty who want transition to openly licensed teaching materials. With the assistance of the mature student, Keith Aiken, Dr. Zheng adapted and published her first open course pack within only a few months. After the course pack was ready, it had quickly been put to a test in the Spring term of 2018.
Teaching Centre: How did you get interested in writing an openly licensed textbook?
Ying Zheng: I have been entertaining the idea to write a second textbook since I had finished my first one for the first year-level Chemistry for the Life Sciences I course in 2008, but I could never really find the time. In the end, it is a major undertaking for one person to write a book of high quality. Last year, however, something unexpected and wonderful happened that made me revisit that idea to write a textbook for the second-year level course Chemistry for the Life Sciences II. When I went to the SPARK Teaching Symposium in April 2017, I saw a session run by Dr. Sean Fitzpatrick and I also stopped by the Open Educational Resources (OER) booth the Teaching Centre had set up. Both places helped me realize that writing my second book wouldn’t have to be too demanding.
Before SPARK, I didn’t know much about OER and the Open Education Movement around it. Had I known, I would have loved to contribute to it at an earlier point when I wrote my first book. Instead I was doing that all by myself back then. When I started teaching the Chemistry courses in 2004, I learned quickly how expensive the textbooks were to the students and how the high costs prevented some from buying the books for my classes. Those who bought them, however, had to carry around these ridiculously gigantic books I had assigned at the time. Despite their great weight, I wasn’t totally convinced of their content and from 2007 onwards as a solution to the aforementioned problems, I spent two of my summers writing my first book, a textbook tailor designed for my students at the U of L. When students responded with positive comments on my first publication, they also often combined it with the request for another resource for the second-year course I was teaching too. Despite my intentions, I have never gotten around to do it. When I learned at SPARK that the amount of openly licensed educational resources was growing, I was very excited because OER seemed to be the way to finally get my second book done. In that sense, the 2017 SPARK symposium really “sparked” me because I understood how OER could turn such a project into a feasible task for me.
In the following months I started planning for it in terms of time and I also payed closer attention to any events on campus relating to Open Education where I could learn what other faculty and instructors were doing. At one of these events in August 2017, I learned about the Open Access