Pat has been a determined and steadfast supporter of her students and has actively looked for ways to make her classes more accessible and at minimal cost to the student. According to her Chair Patrick Montgomery, the WeBWorK system she uses provides free access to students to learn through online homework problems, but it needs a knowledgeable support person to make this work.  Pat has been that person and her knowledge and expertise is appreciated by her students and colleagues.
Pat is one of our amazing Open Education Recognition Award recipients from March 2024. She has been at Camosun since 1999, starting in the Physics Department and later moving to Math and Statistics. “I’ve taught technology and the engineering Bridge students, and for awhile, I taught upgrading for students wanting to go into technology who didn’t quite qualify yet. But these days I primarily teach logic and statistics to the information technology students.”
Pat has created and customized course materials for her information technology students for a long time, because she has struggled to find good textbooks, open or otherwise, for her courses. “I wrote my own textbook for the first half of the logic and statistics course. My students motivated me to create online resources, because they’re computing students, are good with different interfaces, and can troubleshoot if something goes wrong.” But Pat was also aware that the cost of traditional textbooks has been a barrier for students for years. “For some students, textbook cost is a real problem. And because so many students are anxious about math and not sure if they will be able to finish a math course, they are often reluctant to invest in a textbook, leading to a terrible cycle where they don’t have the textbook to do the homework, which makes them even more vulnerable.” But by providing students with free course resources online, Pat has found that they have fewer barriers to doing just a little math. “And because I also post my class notes after every lecture, students aren’t worried about missing something meaning another source of anxiety is gone.”
I asked Pat if she could share a bit about how we went about writing her own textbook. “When I took over this course, we were revising it at the same time, and I was looking for material that would support the students but couldn’t find anything. So, for one whole term I lectured for two hours then went back to my office and wrote down everything I’d said. Then the next day, I’d do it again until I’d I built up a set of course materials – I didn’t sit down to write a textbook but put together the course materials over time. Then later I edited it, polished it, added exercises and answers, but it will be a work in progress until the day I retire.”
Pat also uses an online homework system called WebWorK. “WebWorK was built by the Mathematical Association of America funded by the National Science Foundation of the United States. We have our own server for WebWorK at Camosun, so students don’t have to worry about privacy issues, and it’s free for them. WebWorK was developed by mathematicians and has problem library with over 30,000 problems in it,” so while you can create your own problems, there is enough there to get you started. Logging in to WebWorK for students is simple: they go to the website, log in, and find their problems for the course. What is most important for Pat is that “the mathematical notation is rendered properly. Unlike D2L which struggles with mathematical notation, WebWorK allows you to type all kinds of things into the answer box. You can type in x squared plus three. You can type in sine x. You can type in square roots, and it will render mathematically. And while the interface is a little bit clunky, the cost to students is zero.”
WebWorK homework counts for 5% of students’ final marks, but they soon learn the true value of completing homework – the feedback they receive which helps them do better on class exams. “There are ten assignments, each worth 0.5%. It’s meant to be low stress and students can email me if they have questions about a problem they are working on. Highly motivated bridge students complete anything that they will boost their grade, whereas other students pick and choose what they work on. I want them to address the content instead of binge study so prefer if they go in weekly. But there’s no pressure.”
Pat has still not found a great open textbook solution for the statistics part of her course. “It’s not satisfactory, but I use excerpts from different textbooks under Fair Dealing, trying to find textbooks that work well with each other.” But one challenge Pat notes is that when you try to scan these PDFs for optical character recognition (OCR) for accessibility, none of the math equations scan properly. She also is aware of existing open statistics textbooks, but Pat finds their level and wordiness challenging for her students. “Most students these days are not diligent textbook users and students who read textbooks are either the A+ students or students who really need the additional support of a textbook. For me, a textbook should be targeted at those students who need simple, plain language with the basic concepts reinforced and not a lot of extra material.”
I asked Pat why providing students with free course materials is important. “The top three worst courses that I ever took did not have textbooks or course resources – it was either the classroom lecture notes or nothing and if the lecture didn’t make sense to you, there was nowhere to go. To me, that’s not education. And while the classroom environment works for me for learning, some students don’t find lectures useful, so we need to provide a variety of options for students to engage with the course material. Some students will read the lecture materials, then the textbook, and only then try homework problems, but some students go straight to the homework and only when they can’t do the homework do they go back and read the textbook. In addition, many of my students have to work, and have families. I try to be mindful that my students are not me.”
And then I wondered, what do students think? Pat said, “generally, they are happy. Providing them with free resources on day one sets the tone for the class, especially for students who have had negative experiences with education in the past, although sometimes it is difficult to convince them that there is no catch. If they check at the bookstore and see that there is no textbook for the course, they will email me and when I send them the link to my website, they can access all the material before the first day of class.”
Pat ended our conversation with a thought about our role as educators today. “Our students face too many barriers making it difficult for them to engage in education. If you can remove any of them, it’s a step in the right direction.”