Chad Davis
November 1, 2022
Chad Davis, Ph.D., is Instructor and Recruitment Coordinator in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Oklahoma, his alma mater. He holds an electrical & mechanical professional engineering license in the state of Oklahoma and is also a licensed private pilot. His research focuses primarily in areas related to aviation, including the design and development of a new GPS ground based augmentation system, neural network control systems, automation, and data acquisition systems.
Dr. Davis is the author of multiple open educational resources, including the ebooks "DC Circuits," its sequels "AC Circuits" and "Electromechanical Systems," and "Measurement and Instrumentation," all of which are freely available in OU’s institutional repository, SHAREOK. He has received multiple Alternative Textbook Grants from OU Libraries, which support faculty in switching from commercial textbooks to no cost course materials. Dr. Davis authored his own textbooks for a sequence of courses (ENGR 2431, ENGR 2531, and ENGR 3431) in the electrical engineering program and has shared them with the scholarly community under an open license. This means other instructors can remix and reuse his work in their own classrooms. With a combined 175,000 views, Dr. Davis is the most popular OU author in SHAREOK.
How have your students benefited from your adoption/creation of open educational resources (OER)?
I have seen countless comments of appreciation in student evaluations and that positive feedback makes me glad I spent the time to do it. The amount of money I have saved the OU students to date is well over $100,000 and I feel pride in knowing that I played a part in helping them through college. It is also nice to know that if they ever need to refer back to something that I taught them they can go online and download the book to get a quick refresher.
Creating the book for the course also helped me solidify my knowledge in the subject and when I came to topics that were hard to explain I realized that those were likely the topics that students also struggle to understand. By adding extra explanations and examples to those difficult topics I have likely saved a multitude of students from unnecessarily struggling. After creating my first book I enjoyed the process so much that I ended up writing three more open access books.
How has utilizing OER helped you achieve your pedagogical goals?
Originally, I looked into creating an open access book because I couldn't find a single textbook that covered all of the topics that were included in the specialized course that I was teaching. I could either create my own book or have the students purchase multiple books. When I considered the prospect of requiring multiple books it reminded me of a time when I was a college student where I had to purchase multiple books for a course, and it put a heavy financial strain on me. After I began the process of creating the book, I realized that having a book that focused on exactly the topics I wanted to cover in the course would make the course much more effective and make teaching the course much easier.
There are also other schools that have reached out to me to use the books so the impact of the books will go far beyond what I ever expected when I first struggled with the decision of whether or not to write the books.
What challenges did you encounter while adopting/creating an OER?
The hardest part in the process was getting started and coming up with a plan for the book, but once I got started it was much easier than I ever imagined it would be. The biggest weakness I had was knowing how to find images that were free to use and how to cite them, but the Open Initiatives unit at OU Libraries helped me with that every step of the way.