The Impact of Materials on Society: E-Textbook and Instructor Manual
Sophia Krzys Acord, Affordable Access for Student Success OER Learning Community Member 2021-2022
with Kevin S. Jones and Pamela S. Hupp
The Impact of Materials on Society (IMOS) is an interdisciplinary materials science and engineering + humanities course collaboration that began at the University of Florida (UF) in 2012 through a partnership with the Materials Research Society (MRS). The course brings together basic knowledge of the physical and processing properties of materials (including ceramics, clay, concrete, glass, metals, and polymers) with methodologies and case studies from the humanities to explore how human-material interactions have shaped the course of human societies across time, geographic space, and cultures. By creating a mutual exchange of social and scientific literacies, the course emphasizes collaborative group work as key to developing human values-centered engineering solutions to contemporary global challenges.
When creating the course a decade ago, locating pedagogical materials proved challenging. Popular-market books written by scientists share fascinating stories about the role of materials in the world. Books and journal articles in the humanities and social sciences give intricate details about the social life of materials in different communities. And scientific textbooks in materials science abound. But, all of these materials have costs to students or their institutional libraries, and few engage the translational work required to distill basic research concepts in both the humanities and materials science.
So, the course was built from the ground up by a team of UF faculty and members of the MRS Impact of Materials on Society Sub-Committee coordinated by Pamela Hupp and Kevin Jones. At UF, past and current faculty who have contributed to the course concept and content include: Kevin Jones (instructor-of-record), Sophia Acord (co-conspirator), Susan D. Gillespie, Kenneth Sassaman, Mary Ann Eaverly, Florin Curta, Sean Adams, Bonnie Effros, Marsha Bryant, Jennifer Andrew, Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo, E. Haven Hawley, Robert D’Amico, Terry Harpold, and Rori Bloom. A core group of these faculty developed PPT presentations, textbook chapters, and custom videos that were made available as PDFs to the students through an e-Learning platform in part through a grant-funded collaboration with Emma Brady and Tom Dana in the UF College of Education. Simultaneously, both student- and instructor-facing materials were made available to other instructors and universities by PDF download through the MRS website. The course began to grow in size to over 200 students each fall semester at UF, and through the work of the MRS became adapted by over 10 universities on 4 continents. And we as lead instructors and coordinators of the course began to drown in constant effort to keep all of these materials updated and accessible, a task made more complex by our desire to include multimedia, contemporary, and highly visual material.
Enter: the UF OER Faculty Learning Community! The OER FLC was launched just as we were trying to bundle a portion of these materials – materials case studies written by the humanities instructors – into some kind of formal product. Working with and learning from my colleagues in the OER FLC gave me specific insights into copyright, audience, accessibility, and student learning that were crucial to the final conceptualization, editing, and layout of the book. The FLC also helped us as authors and editors to think about the sustainability of the book – both in terms of using examples that would age with the text, but also ways to harness emerging publishing tools to plan for the book’s future as a collaborative and dynamic project. We send a particular THANK YOU to Perry Collins, who walked line by line through the text with us identifying opportunities for clarity and accessibility.
Where are we now? In December 2021, LibraryPress@UF announced the publication of The Impact of Materials on Society (IMOS), a free, full-length textbook for undergraduate students. The IMOS textbook is freely available online (https://ufl.pb.unizin.org/imos/) and may be purchased in hardback or paperback formats (https://upf.com/book.asp?id=9781944455149). Our LibraryPress@UF partners sent out exam copy requests to the IMOS network, and indexed the book in the Pressbooks Directory and MERLOT. The instructors and students benefit from having high-quality, free learning resources in the course that do not vanish when the students lose access to their e-Learning platform. And students have the option to read the text in digital form with embedded media, or in print with images aligned and high-resolution type. Both options are considerable improvements over our homemade PDFs.
Our next steps are focused on expanding instructor resources by organizing and building out this supplemental IMOS Instructor Guide (https://ufl.pb.unizin.org/imosinstructorguide/), creating an online community of instructors (IMOS-COURSE-L@lists.ufl.edu), and a small MOS WordPress website to welcome people to the book and course. Then, we plan to pause and celebrate with a launch party! Finally, we seek to build a contribution guide to invite new chapters and instructional materials to be added to the book by the instructor community to share the global, historical, and cultural diversity of human-material relationships.
We are excited about this plan, but of course there are challenges. Time is a big one. It is exciting to learn new publishing tools to create dynamic student resources, but it is also difficult to find time to do so amidst other commitments. Time can be found in part with funding, which this FLC made possible, but finding ongoing support for expanding the book will likely depend on securing external grants for iterations. But, thanks to the OER FLC, creativity and ideas are in great supply. We know where we can go, and must now scaffold to get there.
Looking back, I joined the FLC with much of the e-text content already created. It was a matter of adapting the content to the Pressbooks platform. On the one hand, this allows me to write this reflective essay including a link to a published book. On the other hand, we had preconceived the textbook with an analog product in mind, and thus did not take advantage of all of the Pressbooks plugins like automated Q&As, in-text activities, and visualizations. Future authors will have a lot of fun!
The FLC was a terrific team of co-learners and supporters. Thank you to Ferol Carytsas, Monika Oli, Han Xu, and Christine Voigt, as well as our co-leaders Micah Jenkins and Perry Collins. Thanks to all of the colleagues and experts who visited with us, shared resources, and problem-solved our very specific situations. Thank you all also for making this so fun – celebrating every milestone, even if making a first quiz. I particularly appreciated expanding my assumptions about the materiality of ‘pedagogical materials’, and identifying the limitations embedded in so many e-text genres. Auto-grading quizzes don’t read Chinese characters. Biology requires rich visualizations of cellular processes. English-language learners should have more to read than dialogues between “Bob” and “Jane.” And when UF is literally creating the nation’s first curriculum in Arts in Medicine, students can also be educators.
To close, the story of the FLC and IMOS is really a testament to our wonderful librarians and scholar-educators at UF. IMOS has benefitted from considerable financial support over the years, including from the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, University of Florida, and Materials Research Society. But, it is thanks to the LibraryPress@UF and this FLC team, their ability to gather and connect emerging considerations and opportunities in the digital space, and ultimately put ideas into action, that we actually have a book.