Edited by Jason K. McDonald and Richard E. West, Brigham Young University
Initial publication: Summer, 2020
Link to this call: bit.ly/2WwtMm8
Aims and Scope
The purpose of this book is to introduce students to the basic skill set and knowledge base used by practicing instructional designers, assisting them to complete a basic instructional design project with minimal assistance. We also anticipate the book will serve as a foundation and resource for students during additional experiences that contribute towards the development of their design knowledge, skills, and designerly identity.
Our target audience is first semester graduate students as well as advanced undergraduates. The context of use will be in an introductory instructional design skills course, with an instructor to support students with additional learning activities. However, we anticipate the book will be additionally useful in F2F, blended, or fully online courses. We are not targeting this book towards self-study learning experiences. Given our audience and goals, conciseness, a lack of jargon, and an emphasis on supporting instructional design practice will be valued above other considerations.
This book will be open access, and thus free to use, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute (see Wiley, 2009), and will be distributed via EdTechBooks.org.
Why You Should Contribute To This Book
The value of this book will be both its open affordances and its broad perspective:
- It will be always current and up to date with new editions updated regularly.
- It will be open so each department can customize it to meet their needs, including customization to support both graduate and undergraduate education.
- It will be free so students will be able to own it. This will particularly make it beneficial for global marketability.
- It will be accessible for students to read in print, via mobile, or via the web, in addition to audio versions of most chapters.
- It will be written by a range of experts, each contributing toward topics based on their personal experiences, interest, or research expertise.
Process for Creating the Book and for Creating New Editions
Jason McDonald and Richard West will review submissions and serve as the book’s editors, with the help of graduate research assistants as editorial support and copy editors. It will be published using EdTechBooks.org (although of course, being open, any university can fork the book and revise it). This will allow the book to be downloaded as a PDF, ePub, MOBI (Kindle), or read online.
Because it is an open and online book, there is the option of chapters being contributed after initial publication. It is anticipated that at reasonable intervals after publication there will be enough new chapters (or updates to existing chapters) that the book will pass into a new “edition”. Students or scholars who contributed earlier chapters can still list on their vitas that they published in the “first edition” or second, etc. Authors of chapters will need to update their chapters for each new edition in order to stay in the most current edition.
To submit a proposal to author one of the chapters, please send a 1-2 page outline to either Jason McDonald (jason@byu.edu) or Rick West (rickwest@byu.edu), along with the list of collaborating authors for that chapter. Thank you!
Deadlines and Criteria for Inclusion
We are launching a preview version of the book with the chapters that are ready in Summer, 2020, with a goal of having the remaining chapters added to the book prior to the end of 2020.
Version 1.0 Timeline
- Outlines due - July 1, 2020
- First drafts due - August 31, 2020
- Revisions due - October, 2020
- Publication - December, 2020
Chapters should be clear, concise, and understandable to an educated, yet non-specialist, audience (beginning graduate students or advanced undergraduates). Authors should anticipate (a) giving an overview of each topic; (b) providing thought-provoking material to support group discussion or personal reflection; and (c) including practical suggestions for how students can get started with, or otherwise apply, the topic in practice. But they should also anticipate that chapters will be used in a variety of ways and so should not be overly prescriptive in the application ideas they offer.
While each chapter should provide a compelling argument, these are not research reports. Proper citations (in APA) format should be included to support unique claims, but authors do not need to provide citations for common practices. Additional resources (links, references, multimedia, learning checks/activities, graphics) are also welcome, and when possible should link to other open resources.
Chapters should be carefully edited by the author to be considered. Chapters that are in need of serious editing will be returned to the author. The author is responsible for ensuring that the material is not previously published under copyright, and is thus available for a CC-BY publication license. There is an option for authors to choose an alternative CC license as well if they would prefer. Many authors have found they can reuse and update previously published material. Some ideas for reusing past material could be papers exploring ideas for practice that have not accepted by a journal (since many journals seek only empirical work), published articles for which the authors have paid the open access fee, or materials that authors use in their own teaching (and for which they have intellectual property rights).
Most chapters should be approximately 2,500 words. Chapters in the section Designing Instructional Activities should be between 1,500 - 1,800 words.
Table of Contents
You can see a list of the version 0.5 chapters at the book's table of contents here. The following are other anticipated chapters for the book.
Chapters Currently Being Written
- What is instructional design? (Ellen Wagner)
- Research for design (Dan Winder)
- Agile design processes (Theresa Cullen)