The Open Access Success Story of EdTechBooks: An Interview with Royce Kimmons

EdTechBooks, developed by Prof. Dr. Royce Kimmons from Brigham Young University, is an innovative open-access platform designed to make educational resources more accessible, customizable, and collaborative for educators, students, and researchers worldwide. Created as an alternative to traditional textbook publishing, EdTechBooks provides a diverse library of high-quality, openly licensed books.

Many researchers from the School of Education at Brigham Young University are themselves authors on the platform and have contributed award-winning publications on topics ranging from educational technology and pedagogy to instructional design and teacher education.

The platform encourages authors to create and share content freely, allowing users to adapt resources to fit their unique teaching contexts and student needs.

Together with my students I have been using EdTechBooks to publish the results of open pedagogy courses (AI in Education) and book sprints.

This semester, I am working with students from the Asian University for Women on a collaborative publication about creativity and design thinking. Together, they brainstormed the questions for this interview.

You created a free platform for free textbooks. To what extend did this innovation bring about change? When did you realize this would be a huge success? Can you name one outcome that you didn’t anticipate?

I’ve been surprised many times by good things I wasn’t anticipating. Most of these have been relatively small, such as a student emailing me with a thank you note or a professor I had never met telling me they’re using a book in their course. For most of the initial books (and the platform itself), I was designing primarily with my own students in mind. So, it’s been amazing to see learners across the world use these resources. I was very surprised when use outside of my institution exceeded use within my institution, and I was surprised again when use outside the U.S. exceeded use within the U.S. Currently, we provide resources to about 200,000 learners every month and 2 million learners a year.

So, I’ve been really pleased with our growth and the service we’ve been able to provide people throughout the world, and I think in many ways we have brought about change in small pockets. Our department, for instance, pretty much has a full z-degree for both MS and PhD, and I know many others have moved much closer to that as a result of these efforts, but higher education in general is pretty hard to change. So, I think we still have quite a bit of work to do to move other departments and faculty outside the bubble of “open education” to engaging in more open practices like these.

How do you ensure that the platform is user-friendly and accessible to educators and learners with diverse needs?

At the outset, I was trying to merge the best of accessible and usable design practices with open practices, and so that has been an intentional design decision and priority from day one. As it’s evolved, I’ve tried to keep connected with the actual users to see what’s working, what’s not, and what can improve. This has involved both informal (folks just emailing me when they notice an issue) and formal research and development efforts (conducting research studies and A/B testing on new iterations of the system). My own learning design students have also played a pivotal role in this as they have helped me brainstorm and design solutions to problems that arise.

I’ve also tried to approach requests for changes and issues with a “yes, and” mentality. I just don’t like telling people “no,” especially if they are competent professionals who are trying to do good in the world. So, if someone approaches me and asks for a feature or brings up an issue, I’ll try to work to make that happen rather than to just have a knee-jerk “no, it doesn’t do that” response. This has been both a blessing and a curse, as it has helped improve the system over time but also has made the path much longer, winding, and difficult.

How inclusive are the books on EdTechBooks? How can authors make books accessible for the marginalized community as well as for people with disabilities?

In the design of the system, I try to set a reasonable standard for baseline design inclusivity that all authors must abide by in order to post anything. However, this is a bit of a double-edged sword because if you put too many rigid inclusivity requirements in a design tool, it can force would-be users out by making their work too difficult. Ironically, demanding authors to abide by rigid inclusivity requirements may be a bit of an exclusionary practice to authors who just want to share their knowledge with the world without having to become accessibility experts in the process.

So, there are some non-negotiables when it comes to inclusivity, such as requiring all content to be in HTML rather than an embedded PDF, and there are other things that the platform can gently prompt or support authors to do that move them in the direction of more inclusive design, such as properly tagging headings, adding alt tags to images, and so forth. The system is also developed with a mobile-first mindset, meaning that we optimize all content to work on a mobile device prior to thinking about laptops and desktops. A simple example of this is that all content is forced into a single-column layout. Many authors are frustrated by this at first, because they want a textbook with columns, but by forcing a single-column, we ensure that learners on mobile devices (which constitute about one-third of all our users) will have the same experience as learners with larger devices.

On top of that, I also try to layer a variety of inclusivity features that are hidden to the authors. Things like automated generation of multiple file formats, automated text-to-speech, search engine optimization, and semantic HTML are things that I can enforce at the platform level to a certain extent without requiring the author to get into the technical weeds of inclusive design themselves. Ultimately, I want people to be able to contribute whatever they want to contribute and then if I can help make those contributions more inclusive without them even realizing it, then that’s great!

How is the quality of the free books controlled? What strategies do you use to decide which books remain published?

Quality assurance (QA) is a bit of a tricky thing to manage, because the requirements of a high-quality textbook would be different from those of a high-quality journal, or an edited research volume, or a monograph, or a study aid. Though there are some common QA requirements of all volumes that I enforce rigidly, an open publisher needs to be flexible to the contextual needs and aims of each volume. For instance, not everything needs to be peer reviewed, but some things do. If you want to do a class project with your students to create a resource for schools, should that have the same peer review requirements as the Journal of Applied Instructional Design? Certainly not.

So, my solution is to work directly with the editors of each volume to determine what QA requirements are appropriate for their volume and to make sure that the volume meets those expectations prior to publication. Then, I layer on top of that messaging to make it clear what those requirements were, such as by adding a “Peer Reviewed” badge to content that underwent double-blind review or an “Expert Author” badge to content that was authored by someone with a PhD in the field.

Frankly, I also just do a lot of nitty-gritty technical improvements myself on authors’ books that they may not even be aware of. There are all kinds of things that often need to happen with the HTML that authors just don’t know need to happen, but once a volume is close to publishing, my students and I will spend a few hours to do things that others wouldn’t even notice were a problem (or that would take the uninitiated days to complete). So, QA involves a lot of layered work from a lot of people, but one of the nice things about openness is that we can keep working on improving the quality even after a resource is published. This makes QA more of an ongoing attitude than a one-time waterfall process that we check off and then move on from.

In your work, you’ve sought to close socioeconomic divides through open education and transformative technology. How can EdTechBooks address the digital divide in disadvantaged communities? What role can EdTech books play in improving access to quality education in under-resourced schools in the Global South, fostering long-term systemic change?

There are two types of digital divides—access and participation—and both need to be addressed to achieve long-term systemic change. Strategically, though, access must be addressed first before you can address participation. (You can’t train someone to make YouTube videos if they don’t have access to YouTube.) So, the first step is simply to provide resources and tools to everyone throughout the world with as few barriers as possible. That’s why I’ve made it so that people don’t even need to login to access content and have developed the technology to be as fast and lightweight as possible and have also made all of the content available for download to accommodate learners who have limited or sporadic internet access.

With that baseline in place, we can then focus on supporting people throughout the world to more actively serve as authors, remixers, and editors of content, rather than just consumers. This is the area that needs ongoing attention, in terms of community outreach, training, support, and encouragement; but it’s exciting to see that we’re increasingly enjoying a greater diversity of authorship. There are a variety of ways that we can intentionally support this, such as by making remixing technically easy and soliciting and supporting authorship from scholars in underserved or underrepresented areas. This has also been a major research area we’ve been focusing on, specifically in better understanding barriers to localization of content, systemic barriers to adoption (e.g., tenure and promotion), and so forth. Ultimately, we need to build our tools in such a way that support these efforts, but the solution is not a technical one. The solution has to be a social solution because inequitable access to learning is a social problem.

How do you envision EdTechBooks contributing to students’ learning in ways that not only enhance their academic skills but also foster creativity and critical thinking?

As the project has evolved, I have needed to stand firm in the position that EdTech Books is a content provider, not a LMS or course delivery system. Yes, our content can be easily embedded into systems that are used to shape the learner experience, but we only focus on the content aspect of that experience. To achieve higher-order learning goals like creativity and critical thinking requires thoughtful use of content and resources by the instructor. One very clear example of how instructors can use EdTech Books in this way is to employ open pedagogy as a means for students to engage in learning that not just uses OER but actually creates and improves them. Many instructors have centered instructional activities around OER creation, which the platform is intended to help support. By doing this, learners can engage in creativity and critical thinking while also producing OER themselves to promote social good.

As an academic, what strategies did you use to publish papers while also engaging with informal online content creation? How can emerging scholars do both effectively?

This is challenging and is, I believe, the greatest barrier to large-scale and long-term openness work. If scholarly institutions are not willing to rethink scholarship to include the scholarship of application and the scholarship of teaching and learning, then faculty will never have the time and permission necessary to do this work (especially pre-tenure). For this reason, I have sadly counselled some early-career scholars not to do any of this type of work prior to tenure. The way I have navigated this, personally, has been to excel at scholarship in a traditional sense first and then to pivot to this work as soon as I felt confident enough that I would receive tenure. The obvious problem with this approach is that it means that we have to work even harder to do social good and that many who are not privileged to be in a tenured position will never have the freedom to do so. So, there has to be a short-term solution, which I think is to simply go the traditional scholarly route and treat openness as an add-on when we can, but we also need to push our institutions to move in a direction that values this kind of work as legitimate scholarship, deserving of tenure and promotion. If we don’t, then openness will continue to be a nice idea, but I fear it will fail to influence truly impactful and long-term change.

What is the most significant challenge you’ve faced in developing and maintaining EdTechBooks, and how have you overcome it?

From the outset, I approached this project with a poverty and bootstrap mentality, meaning that I was focused on making it cheap, independent, and grassroots. The challenge is that it’s just a ton of work, and as a labor of love for all involved, we have to make sure that the love motivating us is not smothered by the amount of labor required. This is an ongoing challenge.

It’s also further complicated when our efforts are sometimes met with misunderstanding or even hostility. What inspires me, and I think many of the authors I’ve talked to, is the way I see my work having a positive impact in people’s lives, but what frustrates me more than anything is when people are overly demanding or downright rude while you are already sacrificing your time, talents, and expertise to help them. At times when interacting with some folks in the community, it has felt like “I’ve spent thousands of hours building a beautiful guest room that I’m allowing you to live in rent-free, but instead of saying thanks, you’re just yelling at me for not heating the towels the way the hotel down the street does.” Such interactions are honestly rare, but they do happen, and the challenge has been to overcome human nature that focuses on the negative and leads us to feel slighted when someone takes our carefully crafted gift and spits on it.

I hope I don’t seem too thin-skinned here, but I have had enough of these interactions that it has given me reason to pause and consider how entitled we feel to the technologies that we use. Because we have access to so many “free” tools that really aren’t free but that make a profit from harvesting and selling our personal information and then use these profits to hire hundreds of programmers to keep us happily using the service (e.g., Google, Facebook), we seem to sometimes view all tools as our servants that should have as their primary aim to please us. And if we think of tools as our servants, then we also often think of the people who create or support them as our servants, too. When that same mentality is projected onto labors of love like this that are not profiting from our use but that are purely altruistic and are operating on a limited budget, we might introduce toxicity to the relationship by applying our norms of behavior and attitudes from other relationships here as well. And, if you’re on the receiving end of that toxicity, it’s hard sometimes to keep the vision and continue to give of yourself. Doing this kind of work requires us to develop and exercise far more patience, grace, and selflessness than is the norm. In saying this, I’m not trying to claim that I exemplify these things; instead, I’m acknowledging that I’m not as patient, gracious, or selfless as I thought I was coming into this, but we all need to further develop those characteristics to make this whole openness thing work!

What advice would you give to educators or entrepreneurs who want to create new ideas and tools in the EdTech field?

Go for it! Just jump in and start sharing your knowledge. Once you get to the point that you want your work indexed and published, then reach out to me and we can go through the process to make it happen!

You have just completed a substantive update of the platform. What role, if any, does generative AI play in your development process? Do you currently use it for generating code or creating user documentation?

“Update” is certainly an understatement; the changes to the site that showed up earlier this year were a full recode from the ground up. I probably wrote 50,000+ new lines of code. In going through that process, I did use AI to help with the coding, but I generally found the tools I was using were not helpful for creating polished code but rather only helped to point me in the right direction. So, though AI continues to help me with coding, very little of the codebase is AI-generated.

AI’s use in the platform moving forward is far more exciting than this, though. Currently, I use AI to generate high-quality text-to-speech and to generate initial glossary definitions, but I have many more plans in the future. I’m most excited about AI and its relationship to OER as a means for continuous improvement, such as by providing automatic summaries, translations, readability leveling, accessibility checking, learner check generations, and so forth. Expect to see more of these kinds of features rolling out over the next few years.

What learning technologies, platforms or products that you are currently excited about?

I reprogrammed the new site as a single page app (SPA) using a NodeJS backend and a custom Bootstrap-themed JQuery/JavaScript frontend. I think these are pretty great languages and libraries for building our own learning tools and embedding a variety of others (e.g., Hypothes.is, H5P). AI adds all new possibilities in this regard that I’m explaining and exploring in a few papers I’m writing now, and the constant improvement of cloud-based technologies (we use AWS) means that we will increasingly be able to provide these tools to more and more people throughout the world.

What feedback mechanisms have you implemented to continuously improve user experience on EdTech Books, and how do these insights shape the new features or developments you are planning for the platform in the coming years?

Since the beginning, we’ve had a 5-star rating and comment system attached to all content that readers can use to give feedback. Over the years, this has yielded over 30,000 ratings, which I and authors use to identify content that needs work. For a time, I deeply explored A/B testing features in the site with some mixed results, but now most improvement efforts are informal (i.e., doing things in the background to add supplements or improve content) or rely on email notifications (someone telling me there’s a bug, telling an author about a typo, etc.). I also have a regular meeting with course designers at BYU-Idaho where they share issues they’re facing, and I have also had students do projects where they focus on identifying and addressing design problems with the platform. In the future, I’d like to move back to doing more A/B testing across the site (e.g., fine tuning overall formatting and display elements to optimize usage and learning), but this will take focused design and development work that will likely take lower priority than adding features that we already know we want.