Students help bring open educational resources to life
The Open Interactive Textbooks project was launched in 2022 as a follow-up to the project OLMO (Open Leermaterialen in een Multidisciplinaire Opleiding) to create a collection of Open Educational Resources (OER) for the nanobiology bachelor’s programme, a joint-degree programme offered by TU Delft and Erasmus University Rotterdam. This collaboration between the nanobiology programme and the TU Delft Library involved teachers and students working together to create an integrated set of open textbooks. Open Interactive Textbooks is now planned to become a publishing service that is available to all teaching staff at TU Delft.
Team effort
In order to develop a set of tailored and high-quality education materials, the project brought together a group of teachers with both nanobiology and design students. They set out to find existing open educational materials that could be adopted and developed into something suitable for open publication. Third year nanobiology student Sára Bánovská was one of the students hired to work on the project. “I’m a person who really likes to work, and I was looking for a job doing something connected to education,” she said. “I want to be involved in education in the future; I want to be a professor and I also want to be a scientist.” So she was enthusiastic about the opportunity to work on something involving educational materials and at the same time have the flexibility to work around a hectic study schedule.
Student perspectives
Now in her second year on the project, Sára initially started by reviewing and updating materials used for a biochemistry course. The work involved thinking of ways to make lecture slides more structured, coming up with ideas for new graphics and serving as a communication link between different members of the team, but also making sure that these materials could be shared openly with the world. Recently, she has been involved in upgrading the exercise set for a physics course. “It’s a first-year course and a lot of students were struggling with it throughout the year,” she said. “Based on my own experiences, like something I have done in the lab, I try to think about what nice examples would be related to the topics and try to make sure that they are the right level of challenge.” It requires a lot of creative thinking, said Sára, and she feels a sense of responsibility to the students and teachers. This year she has also been working as a teaching assistant in the classroom and said the professor puts a lot of trust in her. “I think it’s a very valuable experience. I want to deliver and to meet the expectations,” she said. “The same thing goes for the educational materials. I triple check the exercises I create because I am fully aware of how much is at stake. I really appreciate the amount of trust TU Delft puts into us. And it is so valuable to be getting experience with something I want to do in the future.”
Benefits of open
As a student and a believer in accessible education, Sára says there are plenty of reasons why it makes sense to make educational resources open. For example, students are required to buy expensive textbooks for each course. “When you take into account how many courses you take per year, the costs really add up,” she said. “And it doesn’t make sense when most of these books are used only once. And that is in addition to the rising cost of housing and utilities in the Netherlands, as well as tuition. Very simply, education needs to be available to all people regardless of their economic background.” And she noted that it not only helps TU Delft students but gives people around the world free access to high quality educational materials.
I have learned a lot that will be useful to me in my future career. I think that projects like these can be a valuable learning experience for any student at TU Delft.
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Sára Bánovská
Lessons learned
On a personal level, Sára said she has learned some technical things that are useful for someone who wants to be a scientist. “For example, I wasn't skilled with LaTeX, which is a tool you need to create your documents. So, I was glad that this pushed me to make sure that I can at least manage the basics.” She also learned through the collaboration with the TU Delft Library about how things work in publishing, like how to handle issues of copyright for images. Although the project started with nanobiology, Sára noted that there has been a growing level of university-wide interest. “Some of these people already have their lecture notes and they just need a way to publish them, and this project can help,” she said. In response, they conducted a workshop to familiarise people with Jupyter, the open-source tool they use for digital publication. In fact, Open Interactive Textbooks project leader Idema has himself developed a script that converts text from LaTeX to the book format to simplify the workflow. Sára believes that there is still a lot of room to grow: “I think that it would be great if other universities could learn from this because it’s a very nice example for them as well to promote open education further. And for me personally it was a very insightful experience to work on this project, I have learned a lot that will be useful to me in my future career. I think that projects like these can be a valuable learning experience for any student at TU Delft.”
Bridging the gap
In the multidisciplinary nanobiology degree programme (both BSc and MSc), students learn to apply physical principles and techniques to biological and medical problems. The Open Interactive Textbooks project was originally called the OLMO project (`open leermaterialen voor een multidisciplinaire opleiding’/open learning materials for a multidisciplinary education programme), and was established to bridge the gap in the literature that teachers in the programme observed, as well as address a ‘language barrier’ between biology and physics. “The resources that are now used in the nanobiology programme are either unpublished resources that are personally designed by the teachers, or existing literature that is not specifically designed for the field of nanobiology,” wrote Associate Professor Timon Idema, project leader. “By designing and publishing specialised literature, we can bring the different disciplines of nanobiology together more easily.”
Open Education project
Read more about the Open Education project within the Open Science Programme and contact project lead Michiel de Jong for questions, ideas and suggestions.
