Crowdsourcing the (Un)Textbook: Rethinking and Future Thinking the Role of the Textbook in Open Pedagogy

Abstract

In this paper, we adopt a critical lens to investigate educators' understanding of both traditional and alternative textbooks and examine how open pedagogy may call for a rethinking of textbooks and how they are used in a pedagogical setting. Within the context of open pedagogy, including open textbooks, we conducted workshops that involved faculty, instructional designers, educational developers, and academic administrators during three conferences in 2019: OER19 Conference held in Galway, Ireland; the Cascadia Open Education Summit held in Vancouver, British Columbia; and the Educational Technology Users Group held in Kamloops, British Columbia. Based on data collected during these three interactive workshops, combined with personal reflections from the project instigators, we discuss emerging issues and tensions in the use of textbooks as pedagogical agents/artefacts in teaching and learning, and their relation to open pedagogy. Specifically, we consider what aspects of the use and design of textbook may be rethought in the context of open pedagogy as increasingly ubiquitous access to knowledge and open licensing of content and data become more widely available. This is achieved by prompting educators to describe the best and worst features of the traditional textbook format and reflect on what they might imagine as a potential future for the textbook as a resource to support open pedagogy.