Grant program: Open Educational Resources Grant Program

Grant recipient: Juan Pablo Alperin, Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology

Project team: Sophie MacKenzie, research assistant

Timeframe: June 2019 to August 2020

Funding: $5,000

Course addressed: PUB 802 – Technology and the Evolving Forms of Publishing

Description: This project proposes to create an open textbook for an expanded version of the Masters of Publishing course PUB 802 – Technology and the Evolving Forms of Publishing. Over the five years that I have taught this course, it has expanded beyond the field of Publishing and into the field of Science Technology and Society (STS). This broader focus touches on topics of online business models, privacy, data tracking, and the surveillance economy—issues of great salience in public discussions today. To support greater engagement with these topics, this project will extend the course syllabus into an open textbook—with short essays, curated readings, lesson plans, and assignments. More specifically, this project seeks to create a Rebus Community project to connect with other educators to collaborate on the design, structure, and content of a textbook that builds on the existing course structure, but expands it so that others—instructors, students, and members of the public—can guide themselves through a critical examination of how web technologies are affecting our lives in general and content industries in particular. While Rebus provides a platform, including a community forum and a textbook publishing system, this project will largely rely on the support of a research assistant for the development of relevant materials.

Knowledge sharing: This resource will be openly licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). The end product will be shared via the Rebus Platform and a PDF will be posted in SFU’s Summit repository.
The resource will describe and discuss strategies for making knowledge public that can be used as assignments. It will compile resources from the HASTAC community and other places on how open pedagogy practices can be used. As such, the proposed textbook will also be an open resource for instructors from any subject.