What Worked, What Didn't, and Plans for the Future

What worked

The short answer is "almost everything." Most of the challenges I had to navigate in teaching this semester had as much (or more) to do with the class being online than its being OER.

Following is a list of the benefits I found of teaching American Literature I without a textbook:

1. The cost to the students 
Currently on Amazon, the cost of the 8th edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, most likely the one I would have assigned, is $69.34. The cost of the 9th edition is a little better, at $51.56. However, $51.56 is still plenty of money, and I know that students must appreciate not having to spend the additional money on a textbook.

2. The relevance for students
The OER format is more in keeping with how students live and learn. Students today are used to finding materials online. Having them access the essays, stories, and poems for American Literature I online felt relevant to how they exist in the world—making the class and its materials a more integrated part of their daily lives instead of a separate thing (a textbook) that they would pick up occasionally and then set aside.

3. Freedom and creativity in designing the syllabus
 Having the freedom to choose from literally almost any relevant material online allowed me to think outside the box; it encouraged me to use material I may not have otherwise found or required. While it's true that I could have found supplemental material online even if I had stuck to using a textbook, I would have been much less likely to do so.

4. A renewed focus on goals and objectives
Additionally, going OER forced me to really think about my goals and objectives for the class. As I put together the syllabus, I gave more thought to what materials I wanted students to read (or watch) and why than I would have if I had been choosing the items from a table of contents in a textbook.

5. A greater investment in the class 
People often tend to be more invested in things when they have a say in creating or designing them—my experience with going OER was no exception. Though I am certainly invested in the classes where I use a traditional textbook, the time I spent reading through materials and carefully deliberating what to include led to, I'm certain, an even greater sense of instructor investment than usual.

What didn't
I cannot think of anything that didn't work. Truly. The only downside would be the time it took on the front end to find the materials. I could add to that the time it took, then, for me to create the historical and literary context overviews. However, the time spent on both endeavors had so many benefits that I am reluctant to even refer to this as a downside. Maybe the time involved is not a downside, then, so much as a practical consideration.

Odds & Ends
How to present the links on Moodle: One thing that I improved upon as the semester unfolded was how I presented the links to the Rio Salado online textbook each week. If a student started at the collegeopentextbooks.org  website, the students would have to go another three steps or so, entering some key phrases, to get to the Rio Salado text.

I started out, under each week's reading assignments, providing the collegeopentextbooks.org website and the list of instructions for how students should find the Rio Salado book once they got there. By about the fifth week, I started just posting the link to the Rio Salado book itself, without all of the extra "How to Find It" directions.

Plans for the future
I am already looking forward to teaching the class again with thoughts on how I could improve both the OER and the online aspects of the course. Now that I have done the work of finding all of the necessary primary sources, the main thing I will focus on, in terms of OER, will be finding an even greater number of additional resources for students to read and watch. I also plan to turn my three historical overview power points into H5P presentations. I would also like to make five short videos: one that works as an introduction to the class; three short ones to go with the historical overviews of each main era; and one where I would offer "Tips for Writing a Literary Research Paper" towards the semester's end.

Providing Context and Other Resources

Searching for context
Once I had found all of the 54 primary sources I planned to assign, the only challenge of significance that remained in my OER adventure was finding a way to provide the students with a context about these sources.

This challenge was intensified because I had also chosen to make the class entirely online. I would not be able to rely on typical classroom discussions to provide relevant facts about the writers or the historical context for the readings.

American Literature I is usually divided into three sections: Early beginnings to 1700; 1700-1820; and 1820-1865. Most editions of "The Norton Anthology of American Literature" provide helpful overviews of each of these eras in terms of the literature that they produced. The Rio Salado online text I planned to use for many of the readings did not feature any such overviews.

It would be one thing to find essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson and to tell my students to read them. But how would they know what to make of it if they did not also have a basic understanding of the Transcendentalist movement of which Emerson was a part?

I could assign them to read the letter that Christopher Columbus wrote to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, but how could I expect the students to fully appreciate the significance of Columbus' words if they did not have a basic understanding of the political, historical, and sociological forces at work?

Usually, in a literature course, I would have relied on two things to help provide this context:
1). The historical overview sections provided by the textbook
2). Class discussion

In this case, I had neither.

I spent quite a bit of time searching for online resources—both written and video form—that would do a good job of providing context for each of these three major eras. I did find some resources that came fairly close to being what I wanted. There were a number of videos available on good old Youtube, for example (which would likely have had the added bonus of already being ADA compliant), created by high school and college English instructors on the topic.

Making my own materials
In the end, though, I made three power points on the eras on my own (my goal, next time, is to turn these into H5P resources, but first things first).  I made good use of the "notes" feature (and told my students to be sure to read the notes) so that I could include lots and lots of material without the slides themselves becoming overwhelmed with text.

Though making these power points took a good deal of time, I was ultimately glad that I chose to make my own. Doing so forced me to really think about what the students should know and needed to know. It also made me think about the kinds of questions I wanted to pose for our online discussions, and what kinds of topics I wanted to offer for their writing assignments.

Additional resources
I also provided an "Additional Resources" section on our class Moodle page, something I have been doing in all of my classes for a while, but which took on a more important role in my OER & online class. I would encourage students to make use of these materials to further their understanding (but they would not be quizzed over these materials, nor would they be required to refer to them when answering discussion questions).

Finding and adding material to this section as the semester unfolded was great fun. The materials I linked to this section included everything from a Shmoop breakdown of Transcendentalism to a wonderful 44-minute video from a Great Books series on Henry David Thoreau to a fantastic interactive, annotated version of Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" on Slate.com. There is a good chance that if I had not been teaching this class as an OER, I would not have found this excellent resource:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/10/herman_melville_s_bartleby_the_scrivener_an_interactive_annotated_text.html

Only 26 more to go . . .

The good news is that finding the remaining 26 essays, short stories, and poems online wasn't particularly difficult. It just took time. I was glad I had chosen to work on the OER class between semesters. Making the time to find the materials would have been far more stressful if I had also been trying to keep up with lesson plans and lectures and gradings in other classes. As it was, I just spent several days with lots of coffee and Google.

Latte courtesy of The Beanhive 
on Simmons Street

The pieces that proved most difficult to find were ones that I wanted to use at the beginning of the semester, talking about the Iroquois and Navajo creation stories. Recent editions of "The Norton Anthology" have done an increasingly good job of providing more diverse voices, such as those of Native Americans from the era, whereas the Rio Salado text I was going to use did not. Finding poems and stories online, however, by better known writers such as Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe was not a problem.

Eventually, I found links for all of the 26 pieces, and I added those links to the corresponding weeks to which they would be assigned on the class Moodle page as I went along. The final two pieces I ended up adding to the syllabus were available in the Rio Salado text. All in all, the search experience was a bit time-consuming, but not unpleasant. Spending a number of days immersing myself in searches for the material to use had some wonderful, unexpected benefits. For starters, I inadvertently came across some good secondary source material that I could, in some cases, share with students, and, at other times, use just for my own benefit to add to my own understanding. Furthermore, searching for the materials caused me to look at the texts and to consider the course objectives more holistically than if I had stuck to my old routine of assigning readings only from a text that already existed.

Getting Started

I admit, when I first started thinking about trying to teach without textbooks for American Lit I, I kept hearing the voice of Doc Brown from "Back to the Future" saying, "Roads? Where we're going, we don't need . . . roads." Only, in this case, it was "books." Where we're going, we don't need books.

I had heard discussions about OER at Sandburg for months, and I was intrigued. Though the idea seemed daunting at first, I had made changes last year to the structure of my Comp II class that helped me see the possibilities. When I learned I would be teaching an online section of American Literature I this summer, the time seemed right to jump in and commit to going OER.

Step 1: Creating the Syllabus
I knew I would end up spending a lot of time searching for materials. My first step, then, would be to determine which essays, short stories, and poems I wanted to include on the syllabus in the first place.

The summer semester moves fast, so I wanted to have all of the materials ready to go on the first day. I spent several days building my reading list for the class. In the end, I settled on 52 readings (By the end of the semester, I would add two more, for a grand total of 54). The next step would be finding them.

Step 2: Finding an Online Textbook 
This step—by far the most time-consuming in my OER journey—should be subtitled "Whereupon I Give Thanks for the Goodness and Talents of the Sandburg Librarians and the FTLC Staff."

In the past, I had always used the Norton Anthology of American Literature when teaching American Lit. A preliminary conversation with Librarian Jennie Archer earlier that spring, however, had let me know that the Norton Anthologies were not yet available online. Alas.

I met with Jennie after the spring semester ended, and she helped familiarize me with OER resources, including those provided by our very own FTLC. I had several conversations with Cindy and Gail about the resources as well. I hoped to find a single anthology that would contain the majority of the readings I wanted to use.

In the end, I found an American Literature I anthology available through College Open Textbooks.
http://www.collegeopentextbooks.org/

Specifically, the book I would end up using was "American Literature Before 1860" by Rio Salado College. I had never of Rio Salado College, though, so I thought I should do a little investigating. Yes, what I mean here is that I fell down a Google-search-Internet-rabbit-hole for about 15 minutes. Turns out, Rio Salado is a two-year college in Tempe, Arizona, and it is part of the Maricopa Community College District.

This probably is not a great secret: we English major types tend to love our books. The Norton Anthology of American Literature (Volumes I and II) and I had spent many years together, first when I was a student, and then when I became an instructor. If I was going to abandon the classic Norton Anthology for an unknown, I wanted to get to know the up-and-comer a little better—or at least get a sense of the institution from which the text was produced. Here is a picture of Rio Salado:

The online Rio Salado textbook had 26 of the 52 readings I planned to assign. This meant that I still had 26 to go. Time to get some more coffee and settle in for a nice long stretch with my friend Google.