2 What Should I Do Before I Look for an OER Textbook?

Start With Your Course, Not With a Textbook

It can be tempting to begin an OER project by searching for a textbook that looks similar to the one you already use.

Before you search, take some time to step away from the textbook and think about the course itself.

What are students supposed to learn? What will they need to do to demonstrate that learning? What opportunities will help them practice and develop their knowledge or skills? What information and resources will help them get there?

Answering these questions first can change the way you search for OER. Instead of looking for one textbook that determines the organization of your course, you can look for resources that support the learning experience you want to create.

Begin With Your Course Outline of Record (COR)

The COR is the course. The textbook is not the course.

Your Course Outline of Record establishes the essential components of the course. It provides the foundation from which you make decisions about what students will learn, how you will assess their learning, and how you will design the learning experience.^[1]

As you review your COR, pay particular attention to:

• Outcomes and objectives: what students should know or be able to do;
• Course content: the topics, concepts, skills, and knowledge the course must address;
• Methods of evaluation: how students may demonstrate their learning; and
• Required reading, writing, and other assignments: the types of learning experiences expected in the course.

Your COR establishes what the course needs to accomplish. You bring those requirements to life through the learning experience you design.

Identify What Students Need to Learn and Do

Once you understand the requirements of the COR, think about what successful completion of the course actually looks like for a student.

Rather than beginning with topics or textbook chapters, begin with learning:

• What should students know or be able to do when they complete the course?
• What major assignments, assessments, projects, performances, or other evidence will allow them to demonstrate that learning?
• What will students need to learn before they can successfully complete those assessments?
• What opportunities will they need to practice, receive feedback, and improve?

This is the basic idea behind backward design. Start with where students need to end up, determine how they will demonstrate that learning, and then design the learning experiences and resources that will help them get there.

Create a Simple Course Map

You do not need a course map to use OER, but creating one can make the decisions that follow much easier. A course map helps you see the relationship between what students need to learn, how they will demonstrate their learning, what they will do along the way, and what resources they will need.

You also do not need a complicated instructional design document. For each major unit or module, consider these four questions:

At this stage, keep the final question broad. Do not worry yet about whether the resource will be a textbook chapter, something you have already created, an existing OER, a video, an interactive activity, or something you will need to create.

Decide What Learning Materials Students Actually Need

Once you know what students need to learn, demonstrate, and practice, you can begin identifying the information and resources that will support them.

This is where starting with the course rather than the textbook makes a difference. A publisher’s textbook can easily become the structure of a course. If a textbook contains 16 chapters, for example, it can be tempting to build a 16-week course around those chapters simply because the structure is already there.

When you start with what your course actually needs, you may discover that:

• several textbook chapters contain more detail than students need;
• important concepts need to be introduced in a different order;
• students need additional practice before moving to the next concept;
• a topic missing from the textbook is important to your course; or
• some of the strongest learning materials may come from somewhere other than a textbook.

You can also distinguish between content that serves the learning experience and content that is simply available. As you consider what students may need, ask whether the content is:

• Essential: students need this information to meet the course outcomes or successfully complete an assessment;
• Helpful: it provides useful context, another explanation, enrichment, or additional practice; or
• Unnecessary: it may be interesting or traditionally included in a textbook, but it does not meaningfully support what students need to learn in this course.

This distinction will become especially useful when you begin evaluating, adapting, and remixing OER. An open textbook does not have to be used from cover to cover simply because someone else published it that way.

Use What You Already Know About Teaching the Course

Your current course can tell you a great deal about what students need. Think about the materials, explanations, activities, and examples you have added over time.

Perhaps you created an additional explanation because students struggled with a concept. Maybe you added a video because the textbook explanation was not enough. You may have developed your own examples because the publisher’s examples did not connect with your students, or reorganized material because the textbook sequence did not work well for the way students learn the content.

These choices are evidence of what you have learned from teaching the course.

You do not need to decide yet whether any of those materials should become part of your OER. For now, use what you have learned from creating them to help identify what your students need.

Consider Planning With Colleagues

If other faculty teach the same course, consider comparing how you have interpreted the COR and identified what students need. If you created a course map, you can compare your maps as part of that conversation.

You may discover shared content needs, common areas where students struggle, or different ways faculty help students reach the same course outcomes.

Working together can help identify what is essential while still preserving each faculty member’s individual approach to teaching. It may also reveal opportunities to share useful resources and reduce duplicated work.

Now You Know What to Look For

You do not need a finished course before you begin searching for OER. You simply need enough clarity to search with purpose.

Instead of asking only:

“Is there an OER textbook for my course?”

you can begin asking more useful questions:

• Is there an OER that already aligns well with most of what my course needs?
• Can I find strong OER chapters or sections for particular parts of my course?
• What have other faculty already created for these concepts?
• Where might my existing materials help meet a need?
• Where are the gaps that I may eventually need to fill?

If you created a course map, use it to guide your search. If you did not create a formal map, use your COR and the learning needs you identified in this chapter.

Either way, you now have something much more useful than a textbook shopping list: a clearer picture of the learning experience you are trying to support.

Now you can search for resources that fit that learning experience rather than trying to make your learning experience fit whatever textbook you happen to find.

Where Would You Like to Go Next?

Use the guide based on what you are ready to do next.