How to use Body Physics
The Adoption Process
Adopt the entire book or simply use certain content or features to supplement your course materials. If you decide to adopt the book as a required text for your course, consider the following:
- Give plenty of advanced notice to your bookstore to prevent sticking them with expensive unused inventory.
- Work with your bookstore and independent/non-profit printers like Montezuma to provide low-cost print copies for students.
- Check that the textbook content aligns with the course outcomes for your course. The example course outcomes and the Learner Outcomes for each chapter should help with this check.
- Work with your library to get print copies on reserve.
- Provide a link to the book on your LMS. You might consider linking each assigned reading directly to that Unit in the book.
- Ask for feedback from students and record your own feedback to pass on to the author and help to improve the textbook. Send feedback to bodyphysicstext@gmail.com
Suggested Use of Design Features
Learner Outcomes
- The learner outcomes listed at the beginning and end of each unit provide instructor and student with an overview of what topics will be covered.
- They help the instructor to find section of the book that are applicable their specific course.
- They may help instructors design assessment methods that are specific and relevant while ensuring that course activities are outcome related.
- To aid instructors with adoption, the alignment of the learner outcomes for each unit with the example overall course outcomes is indicated by the number in [brackets] following each outcome.
Everyday Examples
- Everyday examples provide additional context to help students relate to new concepts; some are conceptual and some provide worked examples with answers.
- Everyday examples often make excellent topics for discussion in class or online and less complex instances can be used to inspire reading quiz questions.
Reinforcement Activities
- Reinforcement Activities provide with early-and-often feedback on concepts as they are covered. These activities have now been converted to web-based interactive using H5P in order to provide students with immediate feedback.
- Some Reinforcement Activities are tactile, some are qualitative questions, and some are quantitative.
- The reinforcement activities could be assigned in the place of traditional “homework” and most of class “lecture” time could be used for students to work on the end-of-unit Practice and Assessment problems in groups with instructor help. This hybrid-flipped classroom approach might increase time students spend interacting with the textbook outside of class and is especially useful for courses with under-prepared students.
- Reinforcement activities can be integrated into interactive lectures via polling and games.
Key Terms and Concepts
- The list of key terms and concepts found at the end of each unit can help students to review what they have learned and check their comprehension.
- The list may also help instructors decide which units of the book are applicable to their specific course.
- The list of key terms and concepts is useful to instructors in designing discussion topics, study guides, weekly quiz questions, and conceptual exam questions.
- We hope to eventually have key terms and concepts linked to explanations from external sources, encompassing a variety of media types.
Additional Features and Resources
- Practice and Assessment Exercises provide students with practice and instructors with an assessment tool. These problems could be assigned as standard homework problems or group problems in a “flipped classroom” or tutorial session. Please e-mail feedback and suggested improvements to bodyphysicstext@gmail.com
- Lab activities are designed to familiarize students with the scientific method and are aligned with learner outcomes. They are located together in a single unit for easy printing. I suggest viewing the labs in a browser and then highlighting, copying, and pasting the entire lab into a word processor to make any necessary changes to equipment and/or instructions, and then printing from the word processor. This will automatically improve print formatting and reduce the paper used in printing. You may want to consider working with your bookstore to provide a printed Lab Manual. After adapting and improving the labs, please share your improved versions with the OER community. You may always e-mail feedback and suggested improvements to bodyphysicstext@gmail.com
- Design-Build-Test projects allows students to incorporate their own experience and knowledge into creation of a model system based on the concepts covered in the book.
- Global glossary allows for quick reference to definitions of key terms and concepts
- Links to simulations from open sources such as Phet provide interactive experience with concepts in the moment or during review.
- Links to videos (more soon) from open sources such as Khan Academy provide supplementary explanation to help students with concepts in the moment or during review.
