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Reynolds Advising team with Dr. Karen Layou

Provenance: Karen Layou
Reuse: This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.

At Reynolds Community College where I teach, we have recently adopted a new advising model that requires students with fewer than 30 credits to seek academic advising from our Advising Services department. Given declining enrollments across the College that parallel national patterns, this gave me pause, as I know many students discover geology as a career path due to enrollment in an introductory geoscience class to fulfill a general education lab science requirement. I wanted to ensure that geoscience is getting a solid billing as a great science option by our professional advisors, so I recently held an open house in my geology lab for our professional advising team. The goals of the open house were to not only describe the physical and historical geology courses I teach at Reynolds, but also to showcase my teaching style, to highlight who should take geology classes and why, to discuss transfer pathways to various schools in our region, and to build bridges between advising services and STEM faculty. I prepared a few simple exercises that are similar to what I do in class (mineral identification, sand observations under the microscope, sea level change impacts on the Virginia coast using web resources, and of course, the stream table). I also provided handouts with key advising points and AGI/BLS career statistics. It was a great afternoon—I shared my love of geoscience, and we all shared advising tips across departments. When the advising team came in the room, I asked what they think of when I say "geology". Predictably, the response was "rocks". When asked the same question at the end of the day, the response was "everything is related to geology!" How exciting to see the shift in understanding! I encourage you all to reach out to colleagues across campus and think creatively as to how you can get more students into your geoscience courses.

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Advisors view stream dynamics

Provenance: Karen Layou
Reuse: This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.

To make geology and environmental geology more relevant for my students, I maintain a GeoNews web page featuring recent items of interest from reliable sources. When we begin a new topic in class, students will read, summarize, and share one article from GeoNews.

Others are free to use this site. Please let me know if you find it useful or if you have suggestions.

GeoNews Website: http://softpath.org/geonews.html

Student summary form template: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LFAi7Fp1L4zdFDSu1UlNtURIGvL7E-ijohODGs2cbKI/edit?usp=sharing

For students who will present to class, here is a Google Slides template:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1fZFUXHtf9OLu6FIAXsGr1bzlC5Du9UtjHOwX0pKk_yw/edit?usp=sharing

We recently published an introductory geology textbook (Focus on Geology by Kortz and Smay). As with all authors who publish books, we were dissatisfied with the options available, and we thought there should be something different. After extensive research and field-testing, we created something different—our textbook is based on research on how students learn geology. For example, the figures and text are integrated, the text is broken into bite-sized chunks, it minimizes the vocabulary words used, and, importantly, the book focuses on the key concepts and not the extraneous (but often interesting to us!) details. We broke away from how textbooks are traditionally written as in-depth, reference materials and created something new, designed specifically for introductory-level learning.

We initially had a publisher with whom we made it through the entire writing process, with many edits and external reviews. However, because the book was so different, the publisher made the decision that there would not be a large enough market for them to recoup their costs if they followed through with final development and publishing of the textbook. Therefore, they decided not to publish it, but let us retain our rights and vision for the book.

After a great deal of research and many conversations, we decided to move forward by self-publishing the book. Below we share some of our thoughts from the venture and tips from our journey. We share this in case other people are curious about self-publishing.

Self-publishing comes with many advantages, including:

• You retain the copyright and ownership over the material.
• You make all the decisions about what to include and how to include it.
• You can make revisions as you want to.
• You are not waiting for someone else (the editor, the reviewers, the compositor...).
• You can set your own price.
•  You can create a book for a small market.

However, self-publishing also has some disadvantages:

• You do not have editorial, art, and photo support.
• You must do your own formatting and layout.
• You market the book yourself.
• You must meet your own deadlines.
• You need to create your own supplemental materials.
• You need to educate yourself about self-publishing and ensure your book can be ordered by bookstores.

We are extremely happy we made the decision to self-publish. Here are some tips that we can give to others who might be interested in creating their own textbook and self-publishing it:

• Study the research on how text can most effectively help students learn, and create your book accordingly.
• Create a vision and stick to it, particularly when you make decisions about what to include and how to include it. Ask yourself, what are the goals and themes in the textbook; what is the purpose, and how is it different from what else is out there?
• Create a timeline with specific deadlines.
• Get feedback early. Ask knowledgeable colleagues to review for content, and ask novice learners to edit for consistency and clarity. It is essential to have more than one set of eyes on the drafts.
• Take many photos that you might want to include in the textbook. Search for photos on government agency websites (e.g. USGS, NASA, NPS, NOAA) because they are public domain, or use other photos that are public domain (pixabay.com and pexels.com are great resources). If you include people, make a conscious effort to portray a wide diversity of individuals.
• The textbook art created a particular challenge, since most freely available art did not fulfill our requirement of simple diagrams without extra details. To solve this issue, we created our own artwork, both digitally and by drawing. Luckily, our desire to keep it simple based on learning research matched with our skills as artists! In fact, we have had positive student feedback on the artwork, describing it as "accessible" and "clear."
• Learn about the technical requirements of the printer (e.g. paper size, margin requirements, format required for upload), and format your textbook accordingly from the beginning.
• Make other formatting decisions, such as color schemes, fonts, and recurring formatting themes at the beginning. Keep accessibility in mind.
• Decide if you want to do print-on-demand or a printing run because there are advantages and disadvantages of each. Print-on-demand tends to result in a higher end cost and more variability in print quality, but printing runs result in a large number of textbooks that need to be stored somewhere and shipped out when ordered. We decided to go with print-on-demand, using two different printers: Kindle Direct Publishing through Amazon (for books that are ordered on Amazon) and IngramSpark through Ingram Publishing Company (for books that are ordered elsewhere, such as through campus bookstores).
• Test the books in your own classroom and with your own bookstore to make sure everything works.
• Create a marketing plan and market your new textbook!

It has been quite a journey, from our initial vision of a textbook to the published end product that we use in our classrooms. It has been a long process, at times enjoyable and at times frustrating. However, we have an end product that we are excited about and our students love using. Our overall goal is to improve student learning of the geosciences, and we are achieving that in our classes and in the classes of other faculty who have already adopted our textbook.

We have also created a series of 42 short lecture videos to help teach introductory geology. They're low-tech, but they're short (mostly 3-7 minutes) and focus on key points for a variety of topics typically taught in intro geology. These videos use figures and terminology from our textbook, but we think that they would be useful to all instructors, even if they don't use that textbook. The videos are currently posted on Youtube, but they're not searchable, so please email me at kkortz@ccri.edu if you're interested in using them, and I'll send you the links.