This textbook was developed by the “California Consortium for Equitable Change in Hispanic Serving Institutions OER” (CC ECHO), a project funded through the U.S. Department of Education’s Open Textbook Pilot program. CC ECHO is developing openly licensed resources for twenty high-impact general education courses utilizing a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion framework to enhance outcomes at Hispanic Serving Institutions.
Published on November 11, 2022Computer Organization Textbook – Case Study
The case study was written with Mark Kozel, an instructor at Allan Hancock College, and the author of Transistors to Assembly – a Bottom-up View of Computer Science. The textbook is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license and available in an online format on the Netlify.app cloud platform.
- Netlify App platform (opens in new window)
Overview
Computer Organization (CS 131) is taught at Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria, California as one of four courses a student may take toward the completion of an Associate of Arts degree in Computer Science along with their general education. As late as 2021, the required textbook for the course had a publication date of 2003. It cost students between $65 and $120 and only just over half of the chapters were used.
The CC ECHO grant provided instructor, Mark Kozel, the resources needed to develop a new textbook, “Transistors to Assembly – a Bottom-up View of Computer Science” on the Netlify digital platform. This new textbook ensures that students have free access to a text that is modern and adaptable to their needs, while also providing openly licensed materials for faculty teaching similar courses. The author is adding interactive quiz questions to enable students to test their understanding while reading the textbook.
Allan Hancock is one of four California community colleges leading the development of OER with a diversity, equity, and inclusion framework for Hispanic-serving institutions under the CC ECHO project. Located in northern Santa Barbara County, the mid-size college prides itself on serving the local community with over 98% of students residing locally. The college’s mission is focused on fostering an educational culture that values equity and diversity and engages students in an inclusive learning environment.
Textbook Description
The textbook was developed to align with the Computer Organization course (CS 131), also known as COMP 142 in California’s Course Identification (C-ID) Number system, which is an introduction to computer architecture and assembly language programming. Topics covered in the course include data representation and conversion, electronic circuits, assembly language programming, digital design, and basic processor architecture.
The author has organized the textbook into three major modules: introduction, foundation, and assembly language, and an additional section that includes extra digital resources such as videos and Wikipedia articles.
- The introduction starts with a section on the lack of diversity in the computer field and provides some organizations that are working to improve this. It also shares a brief evolution of computing devices from the abacus to today’s mobile phones and concludes with high-level concepts for understanding the evolution.
- The foundation module shares some of the key thought leaders in computer architecture. The different numeric and logic systems used for designing and controlling circuits are introduced before taking a deep dive into the various circuit types and general design tools and principles of modern computing devices.
- The final section focuses on the assembly language instruction set for the LC-3 device and a demonstration of how the instructions of a computer program are interpreted and executed.
Development Process
The author used a series of tools to develop his digital textbook including VuePress and Markdown, GitHub, and the Netlify platform. Initially, he installed the open-source VuePress product on his home computer to create the web pages for the textbook. The actual content of the textbook, including pages, text, images, and navigation settings were developed in the MarkDown Language, a simplified version of HTML, which VuePress uses to render the static web pages of the textbook.
The software development hosting site, GitHub, is utilized to host a project site for the textbook which synchronizes with the Vue Press project and the Netlify app, where the actual textbook resides for students. The GitHub project site synchronization allows the author to update the source web pages on his home computer which can then be automatically uploaded to GitHub for synchronization with the digital textbook that students interact with on the Netlify platform.
“When I push updates to GitHub, it passes updates to Netlify to re-generate the site. Within about 2 minutes the Netlify site displays the updates for students to see.”
Team
Author Mark Kozel is a graduate of Allan Hancock College which all four of his children have also attended. He earned his BS in Computer Science at California State Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo. Early in his career, he worked in IT both at a public school and a small business while also teaching part-time at Allan Hancock. He later transitioned into software engineering at a defense contractor managing space and missile operations, the industry in which he continues to work. Overall, Mark has been a part-time instructor at the college for nearly 30 years.
The author chose two peer reviewers, a professional from the technology sector and a computer science instructor from the college. The technical project leader performing the peer review preferred to make modifications directly in the VuePress/Markdown files. Creating a separate GitHub/Netlify project for reviews allowed the reviewer to see the results of their changes on Netlify quickly. The author was then able to approve suggested updates and use GitHub to fold those changes back into the production source pages. The faculty reviewer used the production Netlify application to review the textbook and shared their suggested modifications via email.
Students were also asked to report any errors or inconsistencies that they found particularly in the first semester of the new textbook. The names of students who participated were added to the Contributors Page of the textbook.
Challenges
A major challenge for the project stems from the textbook’s nature as a born-digital object: offline access. While COVID-19 has shown the value of providing digital resources to students, gaining access to these resources can be difficult for students without reliable internet access, which can further deepen existing inequities in education. Individual pages can easily be downloaded and printed if desired. A future enhancement may include the capability of generating a complete textbook in a printable form including alternatives to the interactive elements available in the digital format.
Outcomes
While the author was unable to find a pre-existing OER textbook that covered CS131’s objectives, some existing OER was located and incorporated into the new open text. By combining content written for CS131 with existing computer science OER, this project expands the lifespan of existing OER while sharing new content that can be remixed and reused by others.
One of the primary advantages of a born-digital document over a print document is the ability to embed elements that require students to stop and think about the important concepts and ideas that they are learning about. Pages can include embedded videos to expand on the information being presented, including videos by other creators who may come from backgrounds not traditionally associated with STEM or computer science. Furthermore, the digital text is easily searched facilitating both reviewing and updating of materials.
Early experiences providing access to draft content of the textbook alongside the traditional textbook brought unsolicited, mostly positive feedback from current CS131 students. One student reported that the new textbook had a much better scope and level of detail than what they were able to find in the traditional textbook. Students using the new textbook as their primary resource have appreciated the embedded true/false and multiple choice quiz questions.
Lessons Learned
One realization that came late in the process was to plan and design the textbook offline.
“I realized if I sat down at the computer to plan and design, I could easily get distracted by the technology (playing with fonts, colors, etc) and not attend to the content. Once I started with a clipboard and some coffee away from the computer, I was better focused on what I needed to do.”
Students are the ultimate test of any textbook’s value and usability so include them in your textbook review plan as early as possible.
“Given that I was creating the OER textbook while still teaching the course with the traditional textbook, I could have planned the development to allow sharing sections with students as an additional resource. I get great feedback from students, so the sooner they are involved, the better the product will be.”
Impact and Sustainability
The intent behind creating the textbook in its current digital form is to make it a living document. The online materials can be updated and distributed to students in minutes, ensuring that the textbook stays relevant and useful over the long term.
The textbook is being built using the VuePress static site generator, which uses the MIT free software license. The documentation and source code for the textbook will also be available in a GitHub repository to allow others to make copies of the document for their own use, reuse, and adaptation.
Because the textbook materials and the platform code are managed through GitHub separately, revisions will be easy to track while maintaining the content integrity. This also facilitates migrating textbook content to other platforms. Currently, the author is paying a small monthly fee to Netlify to host the textbook for students but is exploring other platform options that would not incur costs. At present, accessibility features like enlarging the text or changing it to high-contrast mode can all be accessed through a browser, but future work will explore other options to make the textbook more accessible in its digital and print forms.
The contents of this case study were developed under an Open Textbooks Pilot grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), U.S. Department of Education. However, those contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.