Empowering Students and Educators: Crafting a Zero-Cost, Culturally Inclusive Textbook for Hawai‘i's Future

Welcome to the third part of our series highlighting the work of the 2024 WOW Award winners! Check out the first and second parts of our series. Today’s guest authors join us from the University of Hawai’i System to tell us all about the Anatomy and Physiology OER Project. Thank you for all of the outstanding work helping students feel more connected to their institutions and for sharing how your team created and used the great resources.

Enjoy the read and enjoy your day,

Lindsey Downs, WCET

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Imagine your students browsing an expensive textbook they are required to purchase for class. Do your students see themselves represented on the pages? It’s important that students feel like they belong in their classes. Thankfully, open educational resources (OER) exist, or can be created, that address belonging, dignity, and justice while removing potentially formidable costs for access to education.

The University of Hawai‘i System is an indigenous-serving institution with seven community colleges and three universities–consistently ranked as among the most diverse in the nation–with nearly 50,0000 students on campuses throughout our islands.

Annually, over 4,000 students take our human anatomy and physiology (A&P) courses, paying around $200 for just one of their many textbooks, so we knew a zero-cost textbook that reflects their culture would instill a sense of belonging and have a significant cost benefit for them.

Student Centered Open Resource Project

When we began our zero-cost textbook program, we knew it needed to be a student-centered process from the very beginning. Students were asked their opinions about their current textbooks and what they wanted in their ideal textbook.

We used Mural, a visional platform for collaboration, to organize our ideas. The student voice was integral to this process and is necessary moving forward. Students are being surveyed about their experiences with the textbook, and the results will guide us in creating the second edition.

We will also incorporate instructor feedback based on formal surveys and systematic collection of errata.

Connecting Our Teachers

We have nearly forty A&P instructors with backgrounds in biochemistry, cell and molecular biology, medicine, kinesiology, and neuroscience, among others. Most faculty had never even met each other in person, so this was an excellent opportunity for building pilina (relationship). We engaged in professional development activities, providing opportunities for instructors to discuss teaching with the textbook, increasing student success, and creating system-wide student learning outcomes. Our newly created pilina within our A&P instructional community is an enduring gift from this project.

Eleven A&P instructors dedicated themselves to the writing process led by Book Sprints’ wholehearted facilitator, Karina Piersig. Their motto is “From zero to book in five days,” so now you know why the word sprint is in the name! We all agreed this process is not to be undertaken without an expert facilitator. Our OER A&P textbook was one of the company’s largest ever in terms of original content. Book Sprints wrote a post in their blog with additional details about our sprint process. Originally planned as a five-day in-person event, our sprint was delayed one year and converted to entirely online due to, you guessed it, all that happened in 2020. At first, it seemed daunting to start the process through online sessions with nothing in-person. But we shared a common goal and got to know each other well through those online writing sessions. Fortunately, modern technology allows us to express ourselves fully. Our hope is that the team’s good intentions are reflected in our work.

A book sprint is precisely structured and complex, and (no surprise here) it moves at a rapid pace. To start, paired-up authors speedily draft a chapter in a timed session, then move through several stages of contributing to and editing each other’s chapters. Using this method, a single chapter ultimately has the voices and expertise of several authors. Our Book Sprints facilitator was friendly, dedicated, goal-oriented and, from the other side of the globe, guided us through two sprints–each lasting two weeks and spaced a year apart–     to complete a textbook that covers two semesters of content. As we diligently worked together, the feeling of oneness was a treasure. Textbook co-author, I-Chia Shih noted, “This was a challenging process but we pulled through because of everyone’s effort and continuous support from our administrators. When combining the interdisciplinary expertise of every author plus the existing A&P OER resources, the development of our textbook became a creative, open-minded, and achievable process.”

Building Connection to Hawaiian History and ‘Āina

We live on Native Hawaiian ‘āina (land) and want our students to build their connection to that ‘āina and Native Hawaiian ways of being; this was an essential value in our process. We are grateful for our Native Hawaiian advisor on the project, Ululani Kahikina, who helps ensure our content is genuine and authentic. Additionally, we are proud that several of our authors have extensive professional development on indigenous educational frameworks and ‘āina-based learning. This year, with Native Hawaiians from multiple campuses, we will expand the indigenous content of the book.

Hawaiʻi is a gathering place for a variety of cultures. We aimed to reflect that diversity in our textbook by representing the broader perspective of our student body. When students see themselves represented in the material, they are more likely to relate and engage with the content, advancing our aim for a harmonious and inclusive classroom. Including a wide range of cultural examples broadens students’ perspectives by helping to dispel stereotypes and misconceptions. This, in turn, will facilitate compassion between healthcare professionals and patients. In addition, textbook co-author Jason Kenji Higa explained, “We hope that by seeing themselves and others in the textbook, students will experience and express empathy, interest in learning about each other, and form a diverse social network during their academic journey.”

Creating Interactive Content for Students

Previously, our students shared how they enjoy interactive content in their online textbooks. To increase the interactivity of our content, LynleyShimat Lys, a doctoral student at the University of Hawai‘i, used H5P (an HTML content creation tool) to create drag-and-drop chapter summaries and interactive quizzes. To our students’ delight, Lissandra Baldan Jenkins, textbook co-author, expanded the H5P exercises. H5P offers a platform for designing interactive content, so Baldan Jenkins was able to craft learning activities that go beyond the traditional textbook format. She transformed static content into dynamic, engaging experiences that encourage active participation from learners. Innovation was key in the process, and she found it rewarding. Utilizing H5P’s wide array of interactive tools—crosswords, flashcards, videos, drag and drop—she made complex concepts more accessible, enhanced comprehension, and ensured that each activity aligned with the textbook’s learning objectives. Baldan Jenkins shared, “The process encouraged me to experiment with ways to engage students more deeply. The H5P activities enriched the textbook content, making learning more interactive, personalized, and effective.”

Gabriel Peckham, textbook co-author, advises future OER creators, “I had checked out a stack of my favorite textbooks but never needed to use them as writing the chapter drafts was much easier than expected. Following my lecture slides, I knew what I wanted to say.” He found that there is a tendency for repetition of words and concepts when writing as if lecturing, but it was easy to edit those for conciseness. The consulting editors did minimal trimming in this regard, perhaps due to dense scientific content, so Peckham advises, “For collaborative projects, don’t be shy editing each other’s content. Also, chapters drafted from an existing OER textbook were more challenging to proofread as it’s very difficult to rearrange large volumes of text. Best to begin from scratch.” Yet for some chapters of our book, the existing OpenStax OER A&P textbook provided the essential foundation.

Open images were added throughout, but mostly after proofreading. This necessitated rereading and editing narratives to match the images, which didn’t always match the image wishlist. For this reason, if your content is highly image-driven, Peckham strongly recommends doing the painstaking work of finding images first, then drafting your chapters around them. Looking back, he believes this could have saved us many hours of proofreading. Thankfully, we overcame these challenges and it was truly a rewarding experience. Though each book is unique, we hope our blog here helps you plan your next OER project!

We are grateful to WCET for honoring our project with the WOW award and we are committed to helping others serve their students, address equity, and build community among instructors through OER projects. You are welcome to reach out to us!

This blog was written by:

• Lissandra Baldan Jenkins, Assistant Professor of Biology, Hawai‘i Community College
• I-Chia Shih, Associate Professor of Physiology, Leeward Community College
• Jason Kenji Higa, Associate Professor of Physiology; Medical Pre-Clerkship Course Director, University of Hawai‘i
• Gabriel Peckham, Associate Professor of Physiology, Honolulu Community College
• Sheryl Shook, Associate Professor of Physiology, Kapi‘olani Community College

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