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Behind the Book script

 

Title slide

Josie:

Grateful to be with you all on the traditional lands of the Narragansett Indian Tribe and the Wampanoag Nation, who have called this area home for thousands of years. ​

My name is Josie Gray. I work with BCcampus, an organization in British Columbia, Canada, that supports all of the post-secondary institutions in the province in the areas of learning and teaching, open education, and other special projects. My in-person co-presenter is Krista Lambert, an instructional designer with the Justice Institute of British Columbia and my online co-presenter is Harper Friedman, who also works at BCcampus.​

Intro to topic​

For the last year, we’ve been supporting a project to adapt an Psychology open textbook through the lenses of diversity, equity, and inclusion​

Today, we are going to talk about that project – what the work looked like, what we were able to accomplish and wish we were able to accomplish, and our learnings and reflections​

For quite a few years, BCcampus has been doing a lot of work around equity – both within the organization and what it looks like to work for BCcampus as well as how equity shows up in the work that we do.​

For the open team, that has meant looking at equity in OER. We’ve done a lot of work around accessibility and have created rubrics and other resources around creating equitable and inclusive OER, but we hadn’t worked on a project where equity was the focus to really put it all into practice. As such, with funding from the Hewlett Foundation, we decided to fund an adaptation project focused specifically on improving the equity of an existing open textbook, and leverage the open license to make the book better.

What do we mean by equity?

Access and usability: Content is accessible to people with disabilities, and they are able to engage with content in ways that best fit their needs. ​

Student engagement: Students are welcomed, supported, and given agency throughout the resource.​

​Inclusive language: The words used throughout the resource are accurate, respectful, and inclusive.​

Diverse representation: Human diversity is represented throughout this resource in ways that are respectful and do not reinforce stereotypes. ​

Ways of knowing and sources of authority: The resource highlights and draws on the diversity of knowledge and expertise within and beyond the field of study in a way that is accurate, inclusive, and reflective.​

​Big Question

Is adapting existing OER an effective way to diversify and improve the equity of educational resources?

[More to add?]

Where we Started

[More to add?]

Goal: Find a Collaborative Team

We really wanted this to be a collaborative project. Adaption projects are complex, so having people with different areas of expertise is important. In addition, we wanted an authoring team who would be able to share the load and bring different perspectives to the project.​

As such, we crafted the grant to make it clear that we were expecting people to apply as a team. In addition, we wanted to facilitate the formation of teams in case there were individuals who wanted to work on this project but didn’t have others they could apply with. For this, I hosted an info session about the grant opportunity where I talked about BCcampus’s motivations and hopes for the grant and allowed people to ask questions. And then at the end, I invited people who were interested in connecting with potential team members to stay on the call to talk about ideas and share contact information. This ended up being a great idea because the people who ended up applying and receiving the grant met in this info session.​

In the end, we received two really good applications. And rather than pick one, we reached out to see if they would work together and combine their effors, and fortunately they agreed.

The Authoring

& the Advising

Teamwork

10 primary team members​

5 authors​

Inclusive designer​

Copyright librarian​

Illustrator​

2 project managers​

BC is large​

236x bigger than Rhode Island​

Texas is 25% smaller than BC​

We were distributed across the whole province​

I’ve never met 5 members of our team in person. ​

Project kicked off July 1st – and met weekly July & August to get to know one another​

Did comic slams as icebreakers​

Show a scene of a time when someone gave you psychological feedback about yourself and at first you thought, “no way!” but then later, after thinking about it, you said, “yes that’s correct.”​

“Show any scene or metaphor that best describes you-at-this-progress-point in relation to this EDI project. Feel free to focus on the literal, emotional, or other aspects of your relationship to this EDI project. You have 2 minutes. Go!”​

Show a scene of a time when a smell instantly brought back a memory​

Anyone attending participated – not mandatory to share out your post-it note ​

Discussed roles and responsibilities​

Discussed approaches and ideas for the book ​

Discussed how we wanted to incorporate diverse voices into the content ​

Later on, because we had built this report with each other, there was a layer of trust between members which helped facilitate critical peer review and feedback. [NS]

Very quickly the project went from…​

Learned about existing psych books that had already done some EDI work – and wanted to build upon that work. ​

Project went from single-text to multi-text remix​

It also further complicates things, most notably consistency across chapters in look, feel and voice. [NS]

Student Involvement

Authors started writing in the fall​

We recruited 10 students to be chapter reviewers​

2 step process​

Met once to give an overview of the project, and for them to understand their task in reviewing​

Each given a different early draft of a chapter​

Met a second time, two weeks later – focus group style, asked: ​

Likes and dislikes of chapter​

Do you like learning objectives? ​

Do you use practice questions? ​

Did you notice anything new or different from other textbooks you have? ​

Feedback became invaluable for authors​

Students given $150 honorarium​

Student Illustrators​

Grant​

Initially a handful of students​

Ultimately, due to workload, only one fully participated​

30 images [NS]

Advisors

Indigenous Perspectives​

Director of Office of Indigenization at JIBC​

Background in Psych​

Held monthly meetings with project team to talk about that month’s learnings and how to incorporate into the textbook​

Copyright librarian​

This is a must have – absolutely the best. ​

Accessibility and inclusive design​

Equity in curriculum​

Held workshops for positionality statements – which we included for each chapter​

Provided critical review of one chapter from each author to allow them a foundation to examine their other work​

An instructional designer who is also an illustrator who had worked on a previous version of this text and understood the copyright of all the images AND wanted to illustrate new, inclusive images for the text​

Copy editor​

Publishing expertise from BCcampus – who helped lead the sprint that Harper will talk about next [NS]

 

Sprint Process

[As Krista mentioned], we organised a Sprint session with the goal of getting the bulk of the content from Word documents into Pressbooks.​

This Sprint session looked like a big group of us sitting in an office on our computers. But of course, there was a lot more that went into it. [NS]

Preparation for Sprint

Before the actual Sprint session, we had to do a lot of prep-work.​

We created a Style Guide which explained in detail how we wanted each aspect of the book to be formatted, such as images, videos, headers, reading times, and how the various textboxes were to be used. We also included step-by-step instructions on how to make these formatting changes since different people had varying levels of familiarity with Pressbooks. This step was important so that all of our formatting would be the same and we had minimal cleanup to do afterwards.​

We set up spreadsheets for project tracking. This included checklists of all of the formatting tasks that had to be done, who was assigned to which chapters, and links to the Word documents for each chapter.​

The headings of this spreadsheet closely aligned with the style guide​

And lastly, we had to figure out the logistics for the sprint.​

Such as gathering the team, arranging the office space where we would work, giving everyone Pressbooks accounts, and getting everyone’s lunch orders.​

You know, all of the really glamourous stuff. [NS]​

​Orientation

A week before the Sprint, we held a virtual orientation session for the people participating in the sprint.

​

During this orientation:​

Krista and Melanie from JIBC went over the schedule for the day so we knew what to expect​

Josie gave an introduction to Pressbooks as well as an introduction to our Style Guide. This helped orient people to what the process would look like and gave them some familiarity going in.​

We discussed the different roles people would be playing during the sprint.​

Namely, we at BCcampus would be there to help with any Pressbooks questions or issues that people may have, as well as working on our own chapters.​

And lastly, we outlined which chapters we would be working on, which were about 15 out of 19 chapters. [NS]​

Sprint Day

On the day of the sprint, we all came to the Justice Institute of BC at their New Westminster campus to add the book content to Pressbooks.

Again, the BCcampus people were there to not only help put content into Pressbooks but also assist others with Pressbooks and accessibility questions.​

Something to note is that we were distributed evenly around the room where we worked which turned out to be really helpful as people didn’t need to come searching for us when they had a question. We were generally only 1 or 2 seats from anyone at any given time.​

And we had a stretch break halfway through! We all got up out of our seats and did some stretching and movement, which really helped reinvigorate us as well as save us from our terrible computer posture. [NS]

After Sprint

And last thing to talk about is after the sprint.​

Despite the huge amount of work we got done during that sprint session, we still had a lot to do afterwards.​

This included:​

Adding alt text or image descriptions to all of the images​

We had to add figure numbers to all the images​

We did do some cleaning up of formatting consistency and accessibility

This included fixing heading levels, image and video formatting, table and link accessibility, and adding reading time to all of the chapters.​

During the sprint, we only had 15/19 chapters, so we had to add those remaining chapters to Pressbooks.

We also created a supplement resource that goes along with our textbook, so we had to do the same formatting and accessibility checks on that.

And finally, we had to do all of the publishing steps before adding the book to the BC Open Collection. [NS]​

 

Tricky Bits

Josie:

Went into it with a plan to adapt one textbook – this really dictated our approach. If we had gone into it with a more open plan to adapt what we could and start new where we needed to. But that might have made new challenges as starting from scratch can be a huge amount of work as well.​

Another challenge we had was balancing articulation requirements for psychology courses – meaning ensuring the basic topics and learning objectives that psychology instructors are expected to cover are there, adding scholars, research, and examples to diversify the content, and length. This book is long, which on its own is often a barrier to student learning. This is likely something we could have improved with more time for developmental editing and more rounds of revisions.​

In addition, it was very obvious throughout this project that as much as we were working towards making this textbook more equitable, the project was not set up to do decolonization. There is lots of reasons for this (time, money, people, textbook format, working in a colonial field/colonial institution), but it’s important to acknowledge and reflect on. Ultimately, our project was still making a textbook to be used in a colonial post-secondary system based on a very colonial field of study​

And finally, this project was not immune to typical open project challenges: time, money, resources

Recommendations

Krista:

Hiring research assistants would have helped with the process of diversifying the references used throughout the book – we ran out of time during the process to do this but wanted to. ​

The summer meetings were invaluable for building team report – our team genuinely likes working together and were able to have tough conversations about content and approach due to this trust. ​

Priortize the work – there are a ton of “would’ve, could’ve, should’ves” for this project – and scope creep is inevitable. ​

We had a lead author – who was able to make the “final decision” on some important things that nobody felt particularly strong about – like the title. [NS]​

The Published Book

• 1500 pages​
• Plus a supplement with case studies and deep dives into different topics that are linked throughout the book​
• Adapted from 5 different open textbooks, plus original content​

 

QUESTIONS

[Harper to field online questions first]

Pressbooks link to book: https://opentextbc.ca/psychologymtdi/

B.C. Open Collection link to book: https://collection.bccampus.ca/textbooks/introduction-to-psychology-moving-towards-diversity-and-inclusion-bccampus-438/

 

Questions:

• Who did the after sprint work?
• How do you do reading times?
• What is a short vs. normal vs. long textbook?
• I’m curious to know why the decision was made to have multiple people add the content in (and potentially getting in each other’s way/making mistakes/etc.), rather than everyone submitting a formatted Word doc to one person to import?

It looks like this approach would have the side-benefit of all the authors gaining Pressbooks skills. Was that capacity-building a purposeful decision?