Congratulations to Columbus State Community College for earning a 2021-22 Campus Technology Impact Award in the Teaching and Learning Category for their digital OER, the Composition Reading Bank (CRB). They were the only two-year college to receive the award this year. The CRB is an openly-licensed (CC BY-NC-SA) online anthology that replaces the publisher-created anthology textbook for Composition I and II and is saving their students $200,000 per semester.
The English Department faculty started the CRB project in fall 2018 under CSCC’s grant-funded Open Educational Resources (OER) initiative. Rachel Brooks-Pannell, Shawn Casey, Rebecca Fleming, Nick Lakostik, and the college’s electronic resources librarian, Hydy Cates, developed a repository of over 240 links to freely-available texts that replaces a traditional reader for Composition courses. The site was launched in summer 2019 for other English faculty to explore and provide feedback prior to adopting it in the fall semester. Initial surveys indicated that 93% of instructors and 97% of students classified their overall experience as positive.
A LibGuides framework is used to organize the texts by thematic tabs, and within each tab, texts are alphabetized by the authors’ last names. The English Department continues to update the CRB, adding new texts, new sections, and making improvements. Unlike traditional Composition anthologies, the CRB won’t get stale, and the open license allows other institutions to adapt it to their specific needs. Compared to the anthology that was used before, the CRB increased the number of readings for instructors to choose from by more than 58%.
We recently spoke to project lead Nick Lakostik, associate professor of English, to hear more about the CRB and what sets it apart from other online Composition OER.
Accessibility
While creating the CRB, the team was committed to ensuring it would be accessible to all users. Key criteria include that text-based articles are compatible with screen readers, videos have accurate captioning, and audio texts have an available transcript. Mobile phone accessibility to the CRB is also confirmed. Texts that don’t meet that criteria are removed if a workaround can’t be found. When proposed articles were found to be inaccessible, permission was sought to reproduce the materials.
Some video and audio materials had captions or a transcript, but this doesn’t necessarily make them accessible. For example, many TED Talks on YouTube are auto captioned, but the caption quality is sometimes so poor as to make them unusable. Again, reaching out to copyright holders sometimes allowed CSCC to host the videos and add captions themselves. One video, The Man in the Red Bandana, was available on Vimeo, but lacked captions. Nick Lakostik got permission from the producer who had posted it to copy it and add captions.
Attention to Copyright
The CRB team went to great lengths to make sure the copyright of all materials listed adhere to copyright restrictions. Materials are not hosted on CSCC.edu unless they are in the public domain, have an open license, or permission for use has been granted by the creators, as it was with “The Man with the Red Bandana.” Anything that is not freely available to the public is not listed. Another issue with linking to copyrighted materials is that sites like The Atlantic or The New York Times, often have monthly article viewing limits. While some of these articles were initially published in the CRB, they were later moved to their own section, Limited Access – Composition Reading Bank.
Usability
In addition to links to materials, there are also short descriptions of the materials, tags, and pop-up teacher notes. Composing these was the largest time commitment in creating the CRB, and that is probably why most LibGuides don’t include all three of these things. For example, “The Man in the Red Bandana,” which is listed in the Society & Culture section, the description says, “This video is a profile of 9/11 hero, Welles Crowther. It originally aired on ESPN’s Outside the Lines in 2011 and went on to win the Outstanding Long Feature Sports Emmy. (Third-Person Perspective; Narrative; Profile).” The pop-up teacher’s note says that “This video can be used to show students key elements of a profile.”
Race and Ethnicity
One section of the CRB that was not included in the original launch was the Race & Ethnicity tab. In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests, the English Department’s Antiracist Pedagogy group created this new tab. It started with 20 new links and later a dozen more links from other sections of the CRB were also included.
The Future
Unlike a traditional publisher anthology or even some OER textbooks, the Composition Reading Bank is an ongoing project. The English Department is continually updating content, retesting links, and improving usability based on faculty and student feedback.
- The Composition Reading Bank is available at https://library.cscc.edu/compreadingbank
- Getting Started – Open Educational Resources (OER) – Library at Columbus State Community College
- View all 2021 winners of the Campus Technology Impact Awards at https://campustechnology.com/impact
By Liz Yata, Manager of Communities of Practice, Open Education Global