For almost two decades, I have taught International Political Economy (IPE), the study of markets and power and their complex interplay in world politics. Three things frustrated me about the textbooks that I used. First, IPE textbooks were rarely current – publishing a traditional textbook is time-consuming, and the world changes fast. One book seemed particularly quaint in its original depiction of the Chinese economy even as it grew to rival that of the United States. Including the impact of recent changes in IPE seems quite important for impactful events like the Great Recession, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the War in Ukraine.  Second, IPE textbooks were just text on a page, and my current students are used to more interactive methods of learning. Reading is one way to learn, and I love it, but varying the presentation of materials can help promote interest in the topics. Third, IPE textbooks were written entirely by a narrow demographic, almost entirely white men. I am part of that cabal, in fact, having coauthored my textbook for another class, Global Politics, and so I did not want to write another book on my own. The world is a complex and diverse place the the study of IPE has plenty of room for other perspectives. The professoriate is gradually reflecting increased diversity, but the demographics of Ph.D. production are still unrepresentative. The combination of these frustrations has led me in a new direction.

I teach at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD), a public university in the United States. Since my arrival in 2005, the university has grown dramatically and now enrolls just under 30,000 students. Those students are excellent, and importantly for this project, they come from many different walks of life. My classes usually include a number of military veterans, transfer students, traditional-age college students, parents, full-time and part-time employees outside the university, and varying ethnic and immigration backgrounds. They have taught me a lot over the years, and when I encountered the idea of open pedagogy, I saw a way to eradicate some of my frustrations.

Understanding open pedagogy starts with open educational resources (OER), which are (generally) freely available materials that can be accessed anywhere by anyone. OER are licensed, like open-source software, and so are not public domain. They can be used with attribution, and other aspects of licenses determine whether they can be used commercially, can be changed, or can be used partially or as a whole. Open pedagogy as I understand it means teaching with OER but focusing not just on passively consuming OER but also actively contributing to them. In other words, the students write the text!

In 2018 I received a grant from UTD’s Center for Teaching and Learning to explore the pedagogy and to explore what open access resources already existed in IPE. With the help of some of my former students, Emaan Bangash and Mike McColloch, I developed a database of relevant OER and prepared to begin the textbook the next time I taught. Then, the pandemic hit, and my class went virtual, so I postponed the experiment.

Finally, in spring 2022, my undergraduates were back in the classroom. They embraced the work of creating a new OER textbook in International Political Economy. We now have a rough draft of fifteen chapters for that end goal. They are of varying quality and reflect a lot of my lecture material, but they are a starting point. These initial chapters are only text and some graphics, with no interactive elements, and they need peer review. After peer review, the texts will be made available online for free to anyone in the world who can access them on the web. Next year’s class will use these texts as their primary reading material, and they will improve on the text with edits and new contributions. Each successive class will continue to improve on the material, and each UTD student will have the opportunity to contribute their own voice to the introductory text. Ideally, future contributions will be made not just by UTD students but by students at other universities around the world to help diversify the perspectives currently offered in the introductory texts.

Interactive elements are almost impossible to incorporate within a single semester, but I have gathered my students’ initial ideas, and I would love the ability to hire some of these students along with technical assistance from ATEC or ECS students to implement some of the interactive elements of the textbook, including tutorials, interactive maps and timelines, simulations, and the like.

Thanks for reading this brief intellectual history of the project, and if you are interested in helping with the project, please contact me. Much remains to be done.