The Noba Project and Open Science

by Robert Diener

The Noba Project is an open psychology education initiative of the Diener Education Fund. Noba was envisioned as an open and free substitute to traditional intro-to-psychology materials that cost anywhere from $100 to $200 for a single book.

The primary goals of Noba are:

• To reduce financial burden on students by providing access to free educational content
• To provide instructors with a platform to customize educational content to better suit their curriculum
• To present free, high-quality material written by a collection of experts and authorities in the field of psychology

The Noba Project consists of a website (www.nobaproject.com) where instructors, students, or independent learners can find a large and growing collection of learning modules written by well-known instructors and researchers. The website allows users to mix and match those modules into any order they like and publish a custom textbook that is preserved in each user's personal “Library” on the Noba website and that can be downloaded and distributed in PDF format as well.

Noba has also curated the various modules into a number of “Ready-Made” textbooks that instructors can use as-is or edit to suit their needs. One example is the Noba book “Discover Psychology”, which was built to match the scope and sequence of standard Intro-to-Psychology courses. All Noba materials are licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA license. Users can freely use, redistribute, re-mix, and re-purpose the Noba content.

The Diener Education Fund is co-founded by Drs. Ed and Carol Diener. Ed is the Joseph Smiley Distinguished Professor of Psychology (Emeritus) at the University of Illinois. Carol Diener is the former director of the Mental Health Worker and the Juvenile Justice Programs at the University of Illinois. Both Ed and Carol are award-winning university teachers.

Is there a role for undergraduates and graduate students to contribute?

We love students and want to engage them. This is why we created the Noba Video Award. Each year we award 10 thousand dollars for high quality short videos related to a specific Noba content area. Last year it was "memory" and we received more than 50 submissions from around the world. This year our topic is "social influence" and we hope to receive even more submissions. We believe that this presents an opportunity for students to engage in their learning in a more creative and active way. We also display top videos and integrate winning videos into our actual content modules. We also invite graduate and undergraduate students to write guest newsletter and blog posts for us. This is an opportunity for students to have their voice heard by their peers around the world.

Another way we’ve included grad students is that when Noba first started, at the beginning of the writing process we asked our well-known authors if they had deserving graduate students that they wanted to work with and many of them were very receptive to that suggestion. A good number of our modules have graduate students as second authors. It meant a lot to us to be able to help give these younger researchers a chance to be involved in the writing and publication process. In the future as we produce new modules for Noba we'll encourage the same kind of collaboration.

How often are the modules updated/edited?

Because of our digital format we are able to make updates large and small as needed. On the smaller side we make regular updates to modules including new links that may recently have become available, or dropping in new examples where we think they might be helpful. We invite feedback from our users and we often get small recommendations for illustrations, figures, subtopics, etc. We try to make these types of revisions very quickly.

The idea of making larger changes that keep pace with the research is a very difficult issue. The truth is most textbooks provide a broad overview and simply do not have room to dive deeply in new developments. Traditionally, textbook publishers have dealt with this by updating pop culture references, graphics, and adding brief mentions of newer research. Again, because of our digital format, we are lucky to be able to make major revisions in multiple ways. First, we can create whole new modules without concern for overall book length or publishing costs. For example, we have a whole module on the “Biochemistry of Love." This is a niche topic that draws heavily from contemporary research and yet we can easily include it. We also make major changes by writing whole new modules that represent content at the 100/200 or the 300/400 level. For example, David Lubinski wrote a very advanced module on "Intellectual abilities, Interest, and Mastery." This will be particularly interesting to students who want more challenge, sophistication, and depth. For more introductory level material, on the other hand, we have a basic unit on "Intelligence" that is comparable to what you would find in traditional intro psych textbooks.

With regards to updating our editorial strategy is this: if we receive feedback about suggestions for small changes we try to revise immediately. If there are exciting breakthroughs we try to make mention of these emerging studies or new directions within our existing modules. Finally, for areas for which there is a cascade of new findings we entertain the idea of creating all new modules.

What subfields of psychology is NOBA interested in exploring next?

This is an excellent question. If our resources were unlimited we would build out complete collections for clinical, developmental, biological, statistical and social psychology. In reality, we have to make careful decisions about what we invest in. We don't want to develop too much new material without first evaluating the strength of our current material. Ideas we have discussed recently include: developing more interactive learning for the modules we currently have, developing more material regarding actual careers in psychology, and developing more in-depth material in cognitive/neuroscience and social/personality.

One of the most exciting developments for us was the realization that no matter how good the content is many instructors will be slow to adopt it because they need a suite of materials to help them teach it. As a result we invested heavily in creating power point presentations, test bank items, and a comprehensive instructor manual. All available free of charge, of course!

To what extent can Noba contribute to open science/teaching in other countries? The major textbooks we get tend to have european/international editions where at least the anecdotes are adjusted so that non-american students could relate to them better.

We are aware that we Americans can be-- well-- American centric in our views. We have attempted to side step that problem by using examples that are more global in nature, reporting measurements using the metric system, and inviting non-American authors to help with everything from our test bank items to our modules. At the same time some of our authors have probably used examples that in some cases are more recognizable to North American students.

What we would love to see happen is for users outside the US to create new versions of Noba content to better suit their local context and then put that material back into the Creative Commons for others to use and perhaps build on again. That was one of the most important reasons for choosing an open CC license for Noba that allows derivatives. It would be impossible for us to customize Noba to suit the most specific needs of users everywhere. But local instructors do know what will work best for their students and are free to take Noba as the foundation and then iterate to make a better learning experience that reflects their local situation. And we encourage instructors in the US to do this as well. We trust instructors to make good choices about ways to add on to Noba to benefit their students wherever they are.

In the end, Noba can be thought of as more than a text-book substitute. It represents a trend toward open educational resources. While the primary aim of Noba is to save students money and remove obstacles to education there is a secondary aim as well. By using the virtues of the digital medium and by paying attention to the latest research on teaching and learning we have the opportunity to fundamentally reimagine what instructional materials are.