2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Traditional proprietary textbooks for undergraduate students often cost hundreds of dollars and create barriers to learning by restricting which and how many courses students take and forcing students to decide whether or not they purchase their textbooks (Florida Virtual Campus, 2019; Senack and Donoghue, 2016). Having low-cost or free alternatives for course textbooks helps give all students access to learning materials and can lower barriers such as affordability and retention (Colvard et al., 2018). Such alternatives to traditional textbooks are considered Open Educational Resources (OER). OER can be comparable in quality to traditional textbooks (Hilton, 2016), and given the proper context, they have been shown to lower the number of D, F, and Withdrawal letter grades, or DFW rates, in classrooms (Colvard et al., 2018). This evidence, showing the potential for OER to improve student learning outcomes, informed our intention to bring students into the process of designing OER.

This paper describes the design and implementation of our model for the collaborative development of OER that intentionally integrates undergraduate student perspectives. Situated in a U.S. Department of Education grant-funded interdisciplinary, cross-college project creating OER in the form of three robotics textbooks. We focus on the work of the Collaborative Design Team, comprised of undergraduate students from project partner institutions, a graduate Research Assistant, and a faculty member from engineering education. Specifically, we share the process of elevating and incorporating undergraduate student voices into the design of OER content authored by graduate students with subject matter knowledge in Robotics. We discuss our process for reviewing each chapter of the OER textbook, including readings to prompt student thought and reflection, and how we leverage the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Guidelines (CAST, 2018) for examining the chapters for learner-centeredness. We highlight the benefits of including students in creating learning materials, such as how students know what works in teaching and learning and what falls short. As such, incorporating student feedback can infuse materials with learner-centered elements and provide opportunities to improve how textbook-based OER presents information, perspectives, and ways of thinking about the subject matter in ways that traditional textbooks often lack.