OERs: Right for Community Colleges (2) Things I Like about The American Yawp

I began teaching American History at Amarillo College in the Fall of 2018. Not long after that, I adopted The American Yawp as the textbook for the two-semester survey. There were several reasons behind that decision.

First, as I mentioned in the previous post, The AY is an online OER. It's freely available to anyone with a connection to the Internet.

Second, the textbook was written by credentialed American historians. So it's a legitimate survey, a worthy synthesis of what we know about America's past.

Third, after this resource became widely-used, Stanford University Press saw fit to print the secondary (textbook) material in two separate volumes. Chapters 1-15 of The AY correspond to the "first half" (up to 1877) of American history. Chapters 16-30 correspond to the "second half" (since 1877). The two printed volumes match up with that division. Again, they include all of what the historian-authors of this textbook wrote. So, if a student prefers or needs to read print on paper, the print edition is available at a reasonable cost. 

However, what the print volumes do not include are the primary sources featured in every chapter of the book. Those are available only in the online edition. To illustrate, the print edition contains all of the text that's visible when you access the online edition of Chapter 1.  But, the top of the chapter table of contents, note that section VI. is titled "Primary Sources." Clicking on that link takes the reader to a list of nine primary sources keyed to the subject matter of Chapter 1. Here's the link to the Chapter 1 Primary Sources. None of these appear in the online edition. So, when an instructor assigns some of the primary sources, those can be read only in the online edition.

OERs: Right for Community Colleges (1)

OER stands for Open Educational Resource. An OER is any educational resource that is either (a) in the public domain or (b) licensed in a way that makes it permissible for anyone to use. In other words, it's free.

In January of next year, Dr. Eric Fauss, a history professor and one of my colleagues at Amarillo College, and I will be teaching other faculty at AC about "How to Adapt an OER Textbook to Your Class."

The idea for the session grew out of our practice of using an OER in teaching American History at AC. Specifically, we use a free, online textbook called The American Yawp. (The title was inspired by a line from Walt Whitman's poem "Song of Myself"--"I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world").

Something we want to bring out in our session is that one of the best things about OERs is the price. A 2018 article in The Atlantic magazine featuring AC and its president took note of something that Eric and I witness routinely: at this school "poverty intrudes into the classroom every day."

Back in the early 1980s, a few months after I graduated from high school, I experienced one of those American college-going rites of passage: sticker shock at the bookstore. As young and dumb as I was, I understood all about tuition. You had to pay to go to college. But I had no idea the textbooks for my classes would be so expensive. What made it relatively painless for me was that my parents and my scholarship could cover the cost.

But what about students who aren't as fortunate as I was? For them, the prices of textbooks can be a serious problem. Every member of the AC faculty has heard about any number of students who began a semester without a required course book. Student loans or grant money had not yet arrived. In other cases, no money was on its way, and the student simply couldn't afford the book.

Because it is an online OER, The American Yawp eliminates those kinds of problems. No paying. And no waiting for it to arrive.