“Using a free textbook was a breath of fresh air. Pearson and others charging huge amounts for online versions of their textbooks is highway robbery, and I hope more courses use cheaper options like American Yawp.” HIST 2112 Student, Georgia Highlands College, Fall 2017
One of the biggest issues that students face at Georgia Highlands College, as well as at colleges and universities across the state of Georgia is the prohibitive cost of textbooks. The high cost of textbooks causes students to make choices that have an adverse impact on their academic performance. For instance, when faced with high textbook costs in multiple classes, students make desperate, and frequently futile, attempts to rent, share, borrow or check out textbooks from libraries. In many cases, these strategies often result in students not having access to key course materials at crucial times during the semester. Moreover, forcing students into a situation in which they have to choose between buying a textbook that they will likely only use for one semester and paying other necessary bills does not promote student learning, nor does it contribute to a fulfilling college experience.
The documents in this LibGuide are the result of a year-long project to bring free, high quality learning materials to Georgia Highlands College students enrolled in American History I (HIST 2111) and American History II (HIST 2112) courses.
The text for the American Yawp can be found here: The American Yawp website.
Resources for each chapter, which can be found in this LibGuide, include the following:
All resources were either created by our instructors or already available under a Creative Commons license
In this LibGuide, you will find instructional resources designed to facilitate use of The American Yawp (a free and online, collaboratively built, open American history textbook) in college classrooms. According to The American Yawp website, this open educational resource is designed to be “unchecked by profit motives or business models and free from for-profit educational organizations [and therefore] by scholars, for scholars. All contributors—experienced college-level instructors—volunteer their expertise to help democratize the American past for twenty-first century classrooms.”
The scholars participating in the ALG grant aimed to find ways of making this text useful in HIST 2111 and 2112, the two courses that make up the American History sequence in the University System of Georgia. Course redesign (spring, summer 2017) was guided by four primary influences:
The course was piloted by 6 instructors (2 full-time, 4 part-time) during the fall semester of 2017. The redesigned course text and resources were taught across 4 physical campuses (plus 3 online sections) and used by more than 350 students. Students and instructors were asked to provide feedback on their experience with the resources, providing quantitative and qualitative data that was used to improve the quality of the resources offered.
We are opening these resources to other HIST 2111 & 2112 instructors, in hopes that more students can benefit from these open educational resources.