First Edition (REv. Fall 2022)
Dear Instructor,
Thank you for taking the time to consider adopting this book for your course. As you know, very few students are affluent enough to easily afford the expensive textbooks we assign them each semester. Especially in the context of laboratory manuals, it is unlikely that they will be able to resell these for any money; writing on pages, and worse, tearing them out, disqualifies them from being sold used.
As I wrote this laboratory manual, I focused on two guiding principles:
- Create a product that rivals the efforts of mainstream publishers
- Create a product that resonates with our students in terms of diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism.
In regards to the former, you will find hundreds of openly-licensed images in this lab manual. Many of these were heavily modified versions of the work of others. The intent is to follow the labeling heavy design of mainstream publisher lab manuals. The benefit of this is that this lab manual is not limited by your resources. Any institution can adopt this lab manual with ease. Likewise, I have developed ancillaries that you may find helpful. This includes files of scanned microscope slides, rotatable photos of anatomical models, and copies of images that were created specifically for this lab manual. For more information, see jlaandp.com. My hope is that all of this will make adoption of this OER lab manual easy. Through this, we can greatly help our students.
One of the benefits of OER is the ability to customize it to your needs. Part of my own exploration of OER has been crafting resources that reflect the diverse student body that I teach. We are all well aware of the fact that students do better when they feel part of the class. To accomplish this second principle, I have included call-outs called “Every-body is Different”. These tell stories and information relevant to a student body with high BIPOC enrollment. Of course, there are numerous other ways to increase diversity in the material. Images, for example, have been carefully chosen to represent a variety of races. The non-European history of anatomy is also addressed. Despite these efforts, my students are not your students. If you are utilizing a PDF version of this lab manual, I encourage you to visit jlaandp.com to download the editable word documents. You will then be able to craft your own lab manual that incorporates the cultures, histories, and diversity of your study body.
I hope that you find the contents of this lab manual useful for your teaching. It will also be exciting to see what branches spring out from sapling; I am sure the materials you will create will outdo what I have here.
Jason Librande