Books Without Borders

If you have ever tried to tie your course competencies to specific pages and paragraphs in a required textbook, you know it is not a quick task. Once you have accomplished the task, it becomes even more difficult to motivate students when you ask them to read the first three paragraphs on page 12 and the last paragraph on page 14. This poster session is based on my solution to this cumbersome problem.

The poster session will demonstrate:

1. How to engage students by taking their focus off a required textbook and redirecting them to explore the course competencies.
2. How I grouped the course competencies into wiki pages and guided students to use social media to research topics and collaborate to produce their own class text.
3. How to find and share open educational resources through creative commons, which allows user to select which copy rights they want to retain and which rights they want to waive.
4. How I used open educational resources as well as works I created to provide the basic information for each wiki.

This design technique creates a community of inquiry around the competencies, which is independent of any specific text book. Students are motivated to demonstrate mastery by producing their own presentations, blogs, videos or tutorials which they can license under creative commons and share with the world.