The effort spent peer reviewing and rendering Open Textbooks accessible will not be well expended unless these texts find their way into the university classroom. It is therefore important to discuss strategies and challenges for disseminating Open Textbooks, so they can help to create a more equitable education system. Similar to the work on curation and testing, Rebus’ marketing efforts are in their early stages and present a diverse set of issues. Consequently, this section focuses on the range of issues Rebus is experiencing in marketing, promoting, and updating community-supported Open Textbooks.
4.1 How Do We Get Them into the Classroom?
Marketing is the primary problem in introducing Open Textbooks into university classrooms. At present, there is not enough awareness of open educational resources. According to a 2014 survey conducted in the United States, only one-third of the 2,144 faculty polled (15.2%) were aware of Open Textbooks and 33.1% found OERs more difficult to find than traditional resources (Allen and Seaman 2014). Open Textbooks, particularly Rebus’ iteration, have numerous benefits for professors. Usually, professors have to plan their courses based on information already contained in a traditional textbook, which can restrict the scope of material they cover, or alternatively, must assign students more than one book per course. With Open Textbooks, however, professors have more flexibility in designing courses without burdening students further financially.
Given the status quo, Rebus is currently prioritizing making instructors aware of the resources it offers. In so doing, Rebus relies upon principles of the AIDA funnel: Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action (Barry 1987). Guided by these principles, it aims to make instructors aware of its products, with the final goal being that they desire it enough to act and adopt Rebus books (Barry 1987).
Rebus is beginning to develop its model for marketing: they currently have published only one textbook while others are at in classroom beta testing. Marketing these books is thus still unknown territory. Moreover, Rebus has a very small marketing budget, which inhibits the kind of advertising it can commit to. However, Rebus has done significant work despite this lack of funding by leveraging networks of contributors including authors, editors, and reviewers to adopt the book or to reach out to others to do the same. Since the proven efficacy and trusted quality of a resource are the highest criteria for faculty to adopt Open Textbooks, this type of word-of-mouth approach has worked well for Rebus thus far (Allen and Seaman 2014).
Having books peer reviewed significantly encourages adoption, as this indicates the reliability of the textbook as a resource. Karen Lauritsen from the Open Textbook Network noted that approximately 40% of reviewers end up adopting the text post the review, likely because they have been convinced of the quality of the resource (Rebus 2017). As Rebus brings community-driven Open Textbooks to market more aggressively in future, it would be to its advantage to send books to scholarly journals to make them available for review. Doing so would further convey that its Open Textbooks are comparable alternatives to the traditional printed textbook.
Another means of marketing is to get students and faculty directly involved in the production process. Some projects in Rebus’ stable rely on the collective efforts of students and faculty to expand existing texts through a semester long classroom assignment that involves students in the production process. For instance, Rebus has found nine instructors to run a critical edition assignment to expand the Antología abierta de literatura hispána. Timothy Robbins, project lead and professor at Graceland University, is also running an assignment to expand the Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature in his course (Fall 2017 semester). In both projects, students work with professors to expand these open anthology resources.
Finding professors willing to run these types of assignments to create and expand these works is challenging, as it too requires the project management team to cold call instructors or heads of departments. The task, being larger and requiring more involvement on the part of the professor, also generates more negative responses. Nonetheless, assignments like these are valuable because they allow Rebus to gather information on students’ perceptions about Open Textbooks in general, and may also shed some insight on how the resource can be improved. Given the lack of other means for enrolling project participants, cold calling proves a necessary bane at present.
Another challenge pertains to the timing of the production cycle. Part of this challenge is that instructors need to read the book in advance to determine whether it is suitable for their course. Unfortunately, due to Rebus’ small size, and because of other delays, the books have not been ready in time for recent semesters. In the future, Rebus should carefully factor time for potential adopters to read its book, meaning they must be available at least two months before the semester begins. When sending advance copies out to professors, Rebus should emphasize that the book has been peer-reviewed and passed an accessibility audit, to signal that it is either on-par with, or better than, traditional textbooks. The messaging with this advanced copy should also list some of the benefits of using Rebus’ Open Textbooks, including easy modularity, regular updates, and reduced cost for students.
Finally, there are also immense challenges in reaching professors who, unlike other consumers, are not always reachable via a single social media platform. While Rebus conducts campaigns mainly on Twitter and Facebook, these posts are not boosted and seldom reach their target market. In addition, most professors rely on top publishers in the market for their textbooks and know whom to contact for books in their fields. Word of mouth and peer-to-peer referrals are thus important channels for communication regarding Open Textbook adoption. As stated earlier, proven efficacy is important for professors who are considering Open Textbooks for their classrooms. Given that professors are less likely to use Open Textbooks if their colleagues are not using them, hearing about Rebus’ Open Textbooks from a peer will be more impactful than hearing this through the organization’s social media accounts (Allen and Seaman 2016). Thus, building an organic approach to Open Textbook promotion and adoption, where collaborators become champions of books, is critical for a book’s long-term success.
4.2 Updating Open Textbooks
A corollary of the marketing process for Rebus’ Open Textbooks is the need to update them. A significant challenge for traditional textbooks is that they become partially obsolete quickly, as publishers produce new editions every few years. This process proves particularly baneful for students as they are often unable to use older editions or, conversely—if they have already taken the course—cannot sell their old textbooks for a fair price. Given such issues, it is imperative to find more user-oriented means for updating their textbooks—a goal that Rebus is currently working towards.
In collaborative events between Rebus and the Open Textbook Network, participants discussed issues with and improvements for updating Open Textbooks. Several key ideas were exchanged at this event. Alina Slavik from OpenStax,[1] for example, described using an errata tool to collect feedback and suggestions for correcting their texts (Rebus and OTN 2017). These changes would be added to a public list of errata that would show individuals how various errors had been dealt with. Slavik also noted that release notes containing a list of changes accompany each new PDF edition of OpenStax (Rebus and OTN 2017). It was also made clear that the subject type of a textbook is a good indicator of how often the text may need updating: a Philosophy textbook, for instance, may require less frequent updates than a Health Science textbook (Rebus and OTN 2017). Kristen Munger, from SUNY Oswego, suggested involving the author in updates, possibly over a span of five years after the book’s release (Rebus and OTN 2017). This is a unique way to keep authors engaged with books post the content creation stages, although whether this task becomes an additional burden on the author or a reasonable ask remains to be seen.
Another method of securing feedback to update textbooks is by polling faculty and staff. At BCcampus, regular polls are conducted to find gaps and areas of improvement in certain books (Rebus and OTN 2017). Rebus has implemented other mechanisms for obtaining feedback from faculty using the book itself. For instance, with Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship, project lead Elizabeth Mays (a Rebus staff member and editor of this Open Textbook) is using five channels to receive feedback: the Rebus Community forum, email, Google Forms, Hypothesis annotation software directly on the book, and fortnightly “Community of Practice[2]” calls with various beta testers of the book. Mays encourages students and instructors to leave their comments or suggestions for the second edition in any of these channels, and even hopes to implement some changes before the book’s official release in January 2018.
Building on previous discussions, Rebus has recognized key advantages of the updating processes integral to its incarnation of Open Textbooks. Significantly, Rebus’ Open Textbooks can be regularly revised and updated using book formatting software on the web such as Pressbooks. Any errors that are also flagged once the textbook has been adopted or adapted can be helpful when updating the book. These Open Textbook provide a lot of flexibility to preserve their lifespan, in that they can be updated more easily than a print book (where more errors or updates must be identified to warrant the printing of a new edition or version).
Importantly, Rebus’ Open Textbooks are modular, meaning that the content in books can be modified based on the user’s needs. For instance, while the Human Geography textbook is a Canada-specific practical geography book, authors Paul Hackett and Arthur Gill Green are writing the content such that geography instructors around the world can replace Canadian examples with those pertinent to their local regions. This kind of modularity, working together with the books’ open license, makes it possible for instructors to edit these books—a task previously conducted only by the publishers of the book. Rebus licenses books with CC-BY[3] to enable these activities, allowing any individual to take the text and create a new version of the book as needed, provided that they attribute the original authors.
However, versioning also introduces related challenges. While versioning is ideally captured automatically in a book’s metadata, it needs to be carefully transferred along with book files into repositories and libraries (by ensuring that the metadata schemas are compatible), as well as displayed to users on the front end. Users should be able to identify new editions of a modular and updated Open Textbook, trace the original version of the book, and compare differences between the two to decide which is better suited for their use. As some users will adapt and update the books individually, libraries and other institutions may keep static copies of the original textbook to maintain a standard version that can provide a common basis for citation. Currently, Rebus is working to resolve these questions and others like them by working with Pressbooks to implement best practices for handling book-object metadata and tracing lineage across the various editions of a book.
Despite the difficulties of resolving issues in the updating and versioning of these types of Open Textbooks, their incredibly benefits spur the Open Education community towards finding solutions. The most important benefit is that changes made on the books are instantaneous, and students can view them immediately. Updating an Open Textbook requires fewer resources than updating a traditional print textbook, which must run through the full print cycle to reach the student consumer. With Open Textbooks, broken hyperlinks, grammatical, or larger content errors can be easily fixed. Rebus is developing workable mechanisms to refine and perfect this system, so that it may become a model for Open Textbook publishing in every sense of the word.
- OpenStax is a nonprofit based at Rice University, producing OERs in order to improve student access to education. ↵
- The Community of Practice comprises faculty who are using the Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship textbook in their course in Fall 2017. During fortnightly calls, the faculty discuss various chapters of the textbook—whether any information is missing, how the chapter could be improved, how their students responded to these chapters, and whether they employed certain pedagogical methods to teach this chapter that others could replicate. ↵
- “All books created with support from the Rebus Open Textbook Community are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY license, which states that anyone may use the content for any purpose, as long as they provide proper attribution to the original creators of the content. CC-BY is the ‘most open’ of the Creative Commons licenses, and allows others to: reuse, adapt, remix and redistribute the licensed content, so long as it is attributed to its original author(s), even for commercial purposes” (Rebus 2016). ↵