Thinking Outside the Textbook:

Dr. Maria Gallardo-WilliamsDepartment of Chemistry

Will CrossNCSU Libraries

Using OER grants to fund faculty innovation in teaching and learning

$1,200Per student each year

65%Of students don’t buy

the book

$200,00Saved for students in our

first year

One Size

Doesn’t Fit All

“Teacher -proof”

Your materials

to support your teaching“Teacher at Chalkboard”

© Cybrarian CC-BY

Doing Something

Textbooks Can’t!“Students in Immersion Theater” © North Carolina State University

Grants to . . .• Hire a Graduate Student

• Pay for web design and hosting

• License images

• Pay for your time & expertise

Here to Help:

Anne BurkeUndergraduate

Instruction

Will CrossCopyright & Digital Scholarship Center

Kris AlpiVet Med

Sydney ThompsonAccess & Delivery

Services

Jason CasdenDigital Library

Initiatives

Josephine McRobbie

Libraries Fellow

Madison SullivanLibraries Fellow

Leverage Technology for Innovation

Underserved Communities and

Disciplines

New Ways to Teach and Learn

MICHAEL A. EVANS & DANIELLE BOULDEN

Alt-Textbook Project: Multimedia Design and Apps in

Instruction

Rationale• Graduate students enrolled in this distance

education course are obligated to spend approximately $200.00 on required textbooks

• Traditional, paper-based textbooks cannot fully serve pedagogies underlying the course nor ethos of online, connected, and participatory learning.

Course Context & Goals• Multimedia Design & Apps is a grad-level

distance education course (n=16)• Students are required to incrementally,

iteratively develop a working prototype • Focus more on design principles & practices

as opposed to development• Few resources available that capture design

process & iterative creation of artifacts

Why GitHub? • Engages graduate students in the collaborative writing of an

academic resource that serves well the pedagogy of connected, participatory learning as well as having the potential to reach an audience beyond the course;

• Establishes a precedent for understanding the learning dynamics, assessment challenges, and workflow complexities associated with a crowd-sourced, rigorously-researched scholarly resource in a a higher education setting; and

• Documents and formalizes the tools, processes, and products of academic crowd-sourcing to determine whether the solution could scale and sustain to future iterations of the course.

GitHub Workflow - Backend

• Step 1: Accessing document on Google Doc via Moodle

• Step 2: Running script editor to convert to markdown

• Step 3: Use GitHub Desktop to commit and synch

• Step 4: Use MOU to update readme files

• Step 5: Publish to Github Pages • Step 6: View on GitHub Pages

Next Steps

• Continuing to familiarize ourselves with the workflow for more efficiently publishing case artifacts;

• Make backend database publically available in preparation of next offering of course;

• Establish workflow for contributions from students, understanding potential costs of overhead in terms of class effort.

An alternative to Organic Chemistry Lab Technique Textbooks

Previous textbook: $250Replaced with student-generated video collection on an open access format: $0

S.M.A.R.T.• Student-Made Audiovisuals Reinforcing

Techniques • Short videos created by undergraduate

students to supplement learning in the Organic Chemistry Laboratories.

• Faculty supervision every step of the way

Effectiveness of Student-Generated Video as a Teaching Tool for an Instrumental Technique in the Organic Chemistry Laboratory

Journal of Chemical Education, 2015Jeremy T. Jordan, Melinda C. Box, Kristen E. Eguren, Thomas A. Parker, Victoria M. Saraldi-Gallardo, Michael I. Wolfe, and

Maria T. Gallardo-Williams

Questions

1. Do you feel prepared to take an infrared spectrum?2. Do you understand each step of the procedure?3. Why is it important to run a background IR?4. What does an IR spectrometer do? Why is it important?5. Handling salt plates requires the use of what safety equipment?6. Why is the above safety requirement important?7. What software is used in this experiment?8. Select the correct set of commands for operating the IR software.

Produces measurable gains in student outcomes

How to get S.M.A.R.T.• Follow the links from the lab e-books• Go to our website:

http://www.ncsu.edu/chemistry/octl/ • Go to our YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr1PT0JducMG1-SP8hpt18A

• Scan the QR codes in any of our lab instruments

Next Steps

Resources & Acknowledgements

• GitHub: https://github.ncsu.edu/ • GitHub Desktop: https://desktop.github.com/• MOU (for Mac): http://25.io/mou/ • Google Docs:

https://www.google.com/docs/about/ • Google Script: https://github.com/mangini/

gdocs2md