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• Pedagogical research and the learning sciences suggest strategies for designing classes and courses in ways that can improve student learning.• Teaching Naked Techniques provides a step-by step g...

This chapter concludes the volume by offering a brief manual regarding how to perform educational research within course settings with a specific emphasis on studying Reacting to the Past. Intended as a primer rather than a comprehensive educational research manual, the chapter reviews protocols and strategies that are easy to employ while also resulting in meaningful findings. The authors provide useful guidelines and recommendations for disseminating findings for readers interested in engaging in the scholarship of teaching and learning on RTTP and beyond.

The volume co-editors chronicle the pedagogical theories and educational research into active learning that create a compelling argument for the RTTP approach. Beyond the current research trends and emerging patterns of instructional innovation in American higher education, the work of Piaget, Bruner, and Vygotsky are discussed, as well as the role of feedback in the learning process. The authors chronicle relevant research regarding active learning calling on the most recent meta-analyses of active learning research and the scholarship on game-based active learning. Ultimately, an examination of RTTP’s history and design to capitalize on what social constructivism recommends and on what previous active learning research suggests is provided. That little research has been performed to date that specifically explores various impact metrics fostered by RTTP establishes the need for this volume and sets the stage for the eight studies that follow.

As public funding for higher education decreases and the cost to students to attend college increases, universities are searching for strategies that save students money while also increasing their chances for success. Using free online textbooks is one such strategy, and the OpenStax College initiative at Rice University is one of the most widely recognized producers of such materials. Through a mixed method approach, this article examines the student and faculty experiences of adopting and using an OpenStax textbook. With 1,299 student participants, it was found that students greatly value the quality, attributes, and the cost of the OpenStax Biology textbook, though minor concerns were raised about its online format. Faculty adoption of a free textbook provides unique opportunities for course redesign and improvement, and the approach employed in this course transformation context resulted in clearly articulated learning outcomes, a fully realized structure in the course’s learning management system, and improvements to instructional practice. The student, faculty, and course benefits of this study offer a compelling argument for the adoption of high quality open education resources (OER) in public higher education contexts.