Writing and Implementing an Open Textbook in World Regional Geography: A Case Study

As the rising cost of college textbooks has outpaced both inflation and increases in tuition fees, this expense has created a significant barrier to student learning. Some instructors have adopted or created open educational resources, meaning materials which are freely and openly available. While the most obvious benefit of open course content might be cost savings, the fact that these materials can be freely adapted and changed can have substantial impact on the learning experience itself and enable an instructor to completely change the structure and outcomes of a course. This paper provides a case study on writing an open textbook for a course called World Regional Geography and details the writing process and platform options. I also offer practical guidance for faculty interested in authoring open materials and insight into how writing open materials might be framed in terms of a faculty member’s larger portfolio of professional activity.


Introduction
Authoring an open textbook might seem like a tedious endeavour in altruism. By  By their very nature, open educational resources can be adapted, remixed, and reconfigured to suit individual instructors, and authoring open content for students can provide an opportunity to completely rethink the way a course is designed and taught. As explored in this paper, authoring an open textbook for World Regional Geography enabled a complete shift in pedagogical approach that would not have been possible with a traditional textbook and has yielded a number of significant benefits for students.

Situating Open Textbook Authoring
It is no secret that the cost of college has risen substantially over the past few decades. But while the high cost of tuition and fees is often highlighted, the cost of textbooks has actually risen at an even faster rate, an increase of 88% from 2006 to 2016 within the United States according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2016). Looking back to the 1970s, textbook costs have actually increased more than 1,000% compared to today's prices (Popken, 2015). This high cost is having a significant impact on students that is, in turn, affecting the classroom experience for instructors, leading some to adopt or write their own content that is available freely and openly (Bissell, 2009;D'Antoni, 2009;Downes, 2007). Not surprisingly, many proponents of open educational resources (OER) tout the cost savings (see Bliss et al., 2013;Hilton & Wiley, 2011), but research has also found that students who use open textbooks can have better learning and student success outcomes than those who use traditional texts (Colvard, Watson, & Park, 2018;Bowen, Chingos, Lack, & Nygren, 2014;Pawlyshyn et al., 2013;Feldstein et al., 2012;Hilton & Laman, 2012;Lovett, Meyer, & Thille, 2008). Authoring open content then provides an effective way to address broader learning outcomes and enable a more accessible course experience for students.
As the use and adoption of OER has expanded, so too have guides for prospective authors interested in writing open content. The Open Textbook Network, for example, which manages the widely regarded Open Textbook Library (https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/), published Authoring Open Textbooks, a guide for prospective authors and others involved in the adoption of open content (Falldin & Lauritsen, 2017).
The guide, published openly, is free to view and download. BCcampus, another widely regarded organization promoting open education, has the comprehensive Self-Publishing Guide for prospective Writing and Implementing an Open Textbook in World Regional Geography: A Case Study Caitlin Finlayson 247 authors which is similarly free and openly available (Aesoph, 2018). Specific institutions also often have   information on open publishing, such as Virginia Tech's "getting started" guide, containing a   comprehensive list of guides, resources, and groups pertaining to open textbook authoring, editing, and adapting (Virginia Tech, 2019). This paper builds upon existing guides and research to offer a specific case study about the textbook writing process from start to finish as well as practical guidance for how this work might be framed in a professional context.

The Open Authoring Process
During the summer of 2016, I wrote and published an open textbook for my World Regional Geography course, an introductory undergraduate class. The original goal, however, was not to write an open textbook but instead to revise my course using the backward course design model developed by Wiggins and McTighe (1998), where an instructor begins course planning by considering the desired end results, determines appropriate assessment methods, and plans learning experiences (see Bowen 2017), and to shift to a teambased learning approach, where students work together in small groups to solve real-world problems. Traditional World Regional Geography classes and textbooks essentially take a novice approach to the discipline, focusing on fact-based information about the world and the locations of specific places, most often in a lecture format. For expert geographers, though, it is the connections between places that matter as well as their underlying geographic contexts. What I wanted students to gain from my course and remember years later was not the location of particular cities or rivers but a deeper understanding about how the world is connected and interrelated-essentially an expert understanding rather than a novice approach. With team-based learning, students could come to class, either in person or in a virtual setting, with a basic foundational understanding of core geographic ideas and then apply these concepts to case studies.
One critical barrier to revising the class and adopting a team-based learning approach, however, was the textbook itself. With traditional World Regional Geography textbooks, specific places and particular issues are emphasized over connections between regions and underlying geographic concepts. In essence, they favor breadth over depth. World Regional Geography courses, which typically attempt to teach students, often non-majors, about the geography of the world in a single semester at the 100-level, necessarily have to synthesize and generalize, but rather than accept focus on core ideas of geography and synthesizing where needed, most textbooks seem to concentrate on the details. With this approach, teaching World Regional Geography often feels disconnected-one instructor describes it as "like teaching the encyclopedia"-with no overarching themes tying the world's regions together. Furthermore, emphasizing breadth over depth in a discipline that few students are exposed to before college often leaves them feeling overwhelmed and having difficulty identifying what's important. Other geography instructors have clearly faced similar challenges, as evidenced by a session at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, which was titled: "Teach the World, No Problem: Challenges to Teaching World Regional Geography in One Semester." Using the backward course design model, one of the main revised objectives for the course was for students to learn how to think like geographers and connect concepts across complex world regions; traditional textbooks did not adequately address this goal.
Writing and Implementing an Open Textbook in World Regional Geography: A Case Study Caitlin Finlayson

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In exploring my course notes, which I had amassed teaching the course for almost a decade, I realized that my lecture notes themselves would be more useful to students than the textbook I had previously assigned, and, with the addition of a narrative framework, could develop into a textbook of sorts. This notion of not feeling tied to a particular book already in print was pedagogically freeing. If I did not have to follow a particular book's approach and learning outcomes, I could develop entirely new objectives for my course and chapters and write content that specifically addressed these goals.
The first step, then, again following the backward course design model, was to develop overarching course goals, which would become the focus of the textbook and would be woven throughout each chapter. A laundry list of ten learning objectives for the course was whittled down and revised to four specific and measurable outcomes, most notably that students "learn how to think like a geographer by integrating concepts across complex world regions and by synthesizing and analyzing information from a geographic perspective." In addition, a focus on globalization and inequality would provide a cohesive thread to weave the chapters together, avoiding the disconnect that was common in previous iterations of the course.
Next, I developed learning objectives for each chapter. In my experience, the learning objectives featured in traditional World Regional Geography textbooks often seemed tangential to the chapter content.
Students rarely made use of them, and they often failed to capture the breadth of the material present in the reading. Instead, I wanted the learning objectives of my chapters to guide the writing of the material, not be written after as a summary of the content. With World Regional Geography, again, most texts emphasized breadth over depth, and thus chapters might include a wide array of content, from physical features to important places to historical events to culture to politics to contentious issues, and the list goes on. For my text, I wanted each chapter to explore a core concept in geography through the lens of a particular world region. In the chapter on Europe, for example, the core concept is migration, and the chapter explores the geography of Europe as it relates to migration-investigating the industrial revolution and the subsequent rural to urban migration, including the physical geography and location of coal deposits, to the modern issues related to nationalism and debates over migration from North Africa and Southwest Asia. Once I established these learning objectives for each chapter, I adapted my course notes, adding a narrative framework, and wrote additional content where needed, but aligned closely with the learning objectives, eliminating any content that was not essential.
The resulting text was far more concise than a traditional geography textbook and, as confirmed by an online survey of students conducted at the end of each semester, was written in a much more approachable style. I was writing for my students, students who are generally not majors and come to my course either uninterested in geography or, worse, with a preconceived idea that they will not enjoy it. While LaTeX enables the creation of a high-quality PDF, it does not create an accessible document and does not support the use of alternative text (or "alt text"), for instance. In addition, while I have updated some maps to optimize black and white printing and to ensure a color scheme compatible with students who might be color blind, many black and white images and maps in the course pack from the bookstore were low quality. To address these issues, I will be shifting to hosting the textbook on Pressbooks, a platform for creating open content. Pressbooks will allow me to create a text that is fully accessible and will, unlike my current PDF, be optimized for any viewing platform. If students want to access the textbook on their mobile device, for example, it will be much easier to browse and scroll through. In addition, Pressbooks allows users to export files for publishing with print-on-demand services, so students at my university and other institutions will be able to order a full-color version of the textbook for around $40 depending on the printon-demand platform. The text will still be fully open and free online and will continue to be published under the Creative Commons license.
Writing and Implementing an Open Textbook in World

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Within  does not have to constitute sitting down to a blank screen and typing a manuscript from scratch. Rather, you can find and make use of existing open content and remix it to fit particular course goals and objectives.
You will likely find the open authoring process a supportive and positive academic endeavor. As