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People often ask me how students can create textbooks when they are only just beginning to learn about the topics that the textbooks cover.  My answer to this is that unlike many other scholarly materials, textbooks are primarily designed to be accessible to students– to new scholars in a particular academic area or sub-specialty.  Students are the perfect people to help create textbooks, since they are the most keenly tuned in to what other students will need in order to engage with the material in meaningful ways.  By taking the foundational principles of a field– most of which are not “owned” by any prior textbook publisher– and refiguring them through their own lens, student textbook creators can easily tap their market.  They can access and learn about these principles in multiple ways (conventional or open textbooks, faculty lecture and guidance, reading current work in the field, conversations with related networks, videos and webinars, etc.), and they are quite capable, in my opinion, of designing engaging ways to reframe those principles in ways that will be more helpful to students than anything that has come before.

My answer to this is that unlike many other scholarly materials, textbooks are primarily designed to be accessible to students– to new scholars in a particular academic area or sub-specialty.  Students are the perfect people to help create textbooks, since they are the most keenly tuned in to what other students will need in order to engage with the material in meaningful ways.  By taking the foundational principles of a field– most of which are not “owned” by any prior textbook publisher– and refiguring them through their own lens, student textbook creators can easily tap their market.  They can access and learn about these principles in multiple ways (conventional or open textbooks, faculty lecture and guidance, reading current work in the field, conversations with related networks, videos and webinars, etc.), and they are quite capable, in my opinion, of designing engaging ways to reframe those principles in ways that will be more helpful to students than anything that has come before.

As students and alums worked with me over the summer to create that first skeletonic text, it was clear something amazing was happening.  The students immediately seemed invested in the project– almost like they were, well, writing a book with me. To me, the work seemed sort of second nature, since I often write for publication. But for my students, the idea that they were creating something that would be read/used by a different cohort of students a few months later was a truly novel and thrilling concept. They repeatedly volunteered to work for free (I resisted this), and they still sometimes inquire about whether there are roles they can play now that the book is at its next stage of development. When the students in the class started working with and contributing to the book, they often made comments about liking our textbook! But by getting to contribute to the book, make curatorial decisions about the kinds of texts to include, and frame the work in their own words, they seemed more connected to the textbook itself, more willing to engage with it. Here’s a short video featuring several of my students, which explores their experience of using OER and engaging in open pedagogy-based learning.

But the vast majority of the lessons posted on Skype in the Classroom come from teachers who want to Skype with classes abroad to expose their students to different languages and cultures — a necessity in a global economy. Think back to the old-fashioned pen pal, the tradition of writing handwritten letters to someone in another part of the country or the world. Skype in the Classroom adds video to that exchange to give students a much fuller view of pen pals’ worlds.

Teachers may need to buy a webcam and external speakers for their computers to Skype, but the service is free to download, so it seems like a low-cost tool for educators — especially at schools where budget constraints may limit field trips and funding for guest speakers. Twenty-six states are providing less funding per student to schools districts than they did last year, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Skype has 14 partnerships that help connect teachers with experts at Microsoft (which owns Skype), Penguin Books and the New York Philharmonic, to name a few. NASA’s Digital Learning Network partnered with the Internet phone service last month because web conferencing is dramatically cheaper for teachers to set up than video-conferencing systems, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars, according to Lead Education Specialist Caryn Long and fellow Education Specialist David Alexander. NASA would give out grants to certain schools so that they could purchase the video technology, but Long and Alexander hope their team will be able to reach more students nationwide via Skype, and therefore get more youngsters revved about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) — especially at a time when the STEM workforce is growing faster than the workforce overall. This month, NASA has started offering to teach aeronautics and “pulsar algebra,” which combines math with the study of stars.