This week, we heard from Roland Stull, Director of the Geophysical Disaster Computational Fluid Dynamics Center and Professor of Atmospheric Science.
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What motivated you do adopt/adapt/create open educational resources in your work?A first and second edition of a textbook (Meteorology for Scientists and Engineers) that I had written a couple decades below were published and marketed by a traditional book publisher. Later, I had written a greatly expanded and updated 3rd edition to my textbook, but my publisher refused to print it.
After 4 years of negotiation, I finally got the copyright rights back for this work. After some soul searching, I realized that what mattered to me most was getting the knowledge to the greatest number of people. That was more important than earning royalty income. So I changed the title to “Practical Meteorology” and published it online via a Creative Commons license. My website does not have advertisements.
It worked, as measured with a web analytics program. During the past 3 and a half years, there have been over 29,000 users of the book from 160 countries (4,33 cities) worldwide who made over 108,000 downloads of my book chapters.
Can you tell us about the open education projects you have been working on?
Several years ago we created a course ATSC 113 Weather for Sailing, Flying and Snow Sports. Instead of using a textbook, we created visually rich course content online — visible for free to the whole world. Meanwhile, quizzes and grades are still hidden and protected within Canvas. This course is popular with students.
What benefits have you seen from using open educational resources in the classroom?
Large enrollments in ATSC 113.
Ability to use Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) in my ATSC 201 course that uses the Practical Meteorology book. JiTT is a flipped classroom method that requires that students pre-read the book before class.
But an advantage is that I can rapidly include updated info in my online book and webpages.
What was the biggest challenge you faced and how did you overcome it?
Getting the copyright rights back for the earlier editions of my textbook.
Do you have any advice for other faculty developing OER?
Don’t even consider publishing through a traditional book publisher. You will get screwed.
Is there anything else you’d like to add about OER at UBC?
As a control freak, I enjoyed total control over my online book. I used Adobe InDesign, and designed the page layout and typed the content myself. I drew 98% of all the figures myself (Adobe Illustrator), thereby avoiding copyright issues. I set all of the equations myself (MathType). I designed the web page (KompoZer) and uploaded it to the server myself (FileZilla). Bottom line: the process takes a lot of time, but is very rewarding.
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Thank you Roland for taking the time to participate!
