Written by Kathleen DeLaurenti, Director, Arthur Friedheim Music Library, Peabody Institute of Music
As educators, we think deeply about pedagogical approaches to help our students achieve their learning goals. In many university courses, this includes careful selection of textbooks.
Traditionally, we’ve turned to high quality texts published by our peers. We try to select the best resources available, but that alignment is often imperfect. That can lead to student frustration over the expense of textbooks that we abandon throughout a semester when they diverge from our teaching methods. In fact, student frustration is so high that over a decade, research has shown that 65% of students don’t buy course materials in any given course.
However, support and investment for open textbooks has also grown in the last decade. Faculty like the ability to customize and remix materials to develop the perfect textbook and every student has access to their course materials—at no cost—on day one. In some cases, it also provides an opportunity to fill a gap where no textbooks might exist at all.
At the Peabody Institute, the Arthur Friedheim Library and our colleagues in Learning Innovation have teamed up with Peabody LAUNCHPad to address exactly that gap in learning materials for students. As LAUNCHPad director Zane Forshee says:
One of the curious things about being an artist is that you spend a tremendous amount of time learning how to master your craft over the course of your creative life. At the same time the part that has flummoxed me and many other artists that I know is how to build a sustainable life as a creative person. There’s a gap….a REALLY, REALLY big gap for artists to navigate.
Over the past few years, I’ve been fortunate enough to develop courses in the Breakthrough Curriculum to address these gaps. My team and I created the LAUNCHPad office with a vision to support students and alumni. I wondered: What would happen if we opened this up beyond the walls of Peabody? What if we shared the tools and approaches that have helped hundreds of artists create projects, find funding, and advocate for their work?
Dr. Forshee’s motivation to extend the impact of these learning materials beyond the classroom created the central impetus to develop the LAUNCHPad Open Textbook Series.
With the publication of The Path to Funding: The Artist’s Guide to Building Your Audience, Generating Income, and Realizing Career Sustainability and Unlocking the Digital Age: The Musician’s Guide to Research, Copyright, and Publishing, this series attempts to not only provide a better learning experience to our students at Peabody, but to share that work more broadly to support artists who may not have had these learning gaps addressed in their formal education.
Partnership was foundational to the success of these titles. Learning Innovation leads the project management for each title, helping authors organize and strategically create a writing and editorial plan for each project. They also provide support for including the voices from guest experts, developing illustrations, and leveraging the Pressbooks platform to create dynamic, accessible, and engaging online texts.
The library provides support on copyright, research, and other publishing aspects of each project. These include everything from securing ISBNs (and soon DOIs!) to citation management and discovery. To date, our first two titles have been viewed more than 12,000 times with four course adoptions outside of the Peabody Institute. With the full support of the Peabody Institute’s executive leadership team and Dean Fred Bronstein, there are two additional titles being planned in this model.
For myself, taking on the project of writing an open textbook helped me hone my pedagogical approach in the course and I’m seeing students engage more deeply in the concepts we grapple with this semester. I’m also excited by the opportunity of giving students anywhere around the world the access to engage with the ideas and skills around creating, consuming, and disseminating knowledge.
To learn more about Open Textbooks at Peabody, contact Kathleen DeLaurenti, kdelaurenti@jhu.edu