By Whitney Zimmerman (Capella University) and Michelle Dennis (Capella University)
Information
This poster describes the process of customizing an open educational resource (OER) textbook for an online undergraduate statistics course for psychology majors. The goal of this project was to eliminate the costs of instructional materials and improve alignment between the textbook, course learning objectives, and course assessments. We created a customized version of Navarro et al.'s (2019) Learning Statistics with JASP. Customizations included updating JASP instructions, updating screenshots, simplifying formulas, adding additional examples, and removing advanced topics that were outside the scope of our specific course. The authors made a LaTeX file of the textbook publicly available, along with all datasets used in the textbook. Because most faculty and staff were not familiar with LaTeX, we converted the textbook to a Word document to make future updates easier. The project was implemented at an online, private, for-profit university serving primarily adult learners. This course is required for all students in our Bachelor of Science in Psychology and Bachelor of Science in Psychology Pre-Counseling and Therapy programs. Class sizes for this course are typically around 40. The customized OER textbook replaced a commercial textbook. Combined with the use of the open-access application JASP, this eliminated all course material costs. The success of the project was evaluated by examining student performance, collecting faculty feedback via an online survey, and reviewing student feedback from end-of-term surveys.