The Pennsylvania Alliance for Design of Open Textbooks (PA-ADOPT) is pleased to announce the immediate availability of our ninth free and open eTextbook: The Digital Storytelling Handbook by Dr. Jordan Schugar, Professor of English, and Dr. Chris Penny, Professor of Educational Foundations & Policy Studies, at West Chester University (WCU). Other contributors include Hannah Glatt, Learning Experience and eTextbook Designer, and Autumn Hudson, Tu Le, Sarah Mangano, and Victoria McQuiston, Graduate Students at WCU.
“The Digital Storytelling Handbook is designed to provide an introduction to digital storytelling and its multifaceted applications in the higher education classroom space. This eTextbook gives storytellers practical tools to help them think about different reasons for making digital stories and different ways to think about using and incorporating digital stories into teaching, learning, and living. In this eTextbook, readers will also learn how experiencing digital stories — as either the author or the audience — builds cultural competence and teaches us about humanity and the human experience. Co-authored with students, this eTextbook was written in the spirit of OER with the expectation that future readers and students have an opportunity to contribute a chapter, idea, approach, or methodology of the eTextbook’s basic content.”
Hudson, Le, Mangano, and McQuiston were all students in Dr. Penny’s EDT 530: Digital Media Production and Storytelling course during the Spring 2024 semester. In this course, students participated in the development of an Open Educational Resource (OER) utilizing an approach known as Open Pedagogy. As explained by the University of Texas at Arlington Libraries, it is “the practice of engaging with students as creators of information rather than simply consumers of it. It’s a form of experiential learning in which students demonstrate understanding through the act of creation. The products of open pedagogy are student created and openly licensed so that they may live outside of the classroom in a way that has an impact on the greater community.” This is the first PA-ADOPT eTextbook to utilize Open Pedagogy.
PA-ADOPT is made up of four participating institutions from the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education: Cheyney University, Kutztown University, Millersville University, and West Chester University. The PA-ADOPT project is aimed at addressing gaps in the open eTextbook marketplace, improving student learning, and mitigating rising student costs. It is funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Open Textbook Pilot Program, and the eTextbooks created by the consortium are released as Open Educational Resources (OERs).
All of PA-ADOPT’s faculty cohorts have been filled, but if you are a WCU faculty member who is interested in building their own OER eTextbook, please contact Marc Drumm, Senior Instructional Designer in the Teaching & Learning Center and Principal Investigator of PA-ADOPT, at mdrumm@wcupa.edu.
