Jeremy Rose, a senior lecturer at the University of Minnesota, sympathizes with students who, year after year, turn out their pockets to afford textbooks that are sometimes never used in the classroom.

Last year, Rose partnered with the University of Minnesota Libraries to publish an open-access textbook, “Communication in Practice,” that will be free and accessible online for everyone, and not just for college students.

“Everybody is a student of communication. Some of us study in school, we all study it in life,” Rose said. “Because everybody on Earth, in my view, is trying to figure out how the communication process works, it’s nice to put out a book that anybody on Earth can access.”

The Libraries has routinely published openly-licensed materials to supplement or replace commercial textbooks under the Libraries’ Partnership for Affordable Learning Materials (PALM) program.

“Communications in Practice,” however, was made possible thanks to Give to the Max fundraising efforts in 2023, which raised around $10,000 to replace outdated textbooks that were previously published under an open-license.

“I’m not sure we would’ve been able to create this textbook, if not for that Give to the Max effort. It was extremely important,” said Shane Nackerud, the Libraries’ director of Affordable Learning and Open Education.

The miracle of speech

Rose’s textbook will replace “Communications in the Real World,” originally distributed under a Creative Commons license by FlatWorld Knowledge in 2013 and republished by University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing in 2015. By Nackerud’s estimate, that republished textbook was the most popular open textbook in the world.

And while the Libraries found existing alternatives to replace other Flatworld textbooks, like for business and psychology, Nackerud and Micah Gjeltema, the open education and affordable content librarian, couldn’t find a satisfactory introductory communications textbook. So they reached out to the Department of Communication Studies and asked them to write a new textbook.

“Jeremy has been remarkably productive and remarkably swift on this project,” Gjeltema said. “He’s written an entire textbook in roughly a year, which we’re very appreciative of and pretty amazed by.”

Rose has been a professor at the U of M since 2001, teaching everything from persuasion theories to analysis of argument. He’s the “utility infielder,” as a former department chair described him, the guy you can stick in any position. But it’s his first time writing a textbook, which he initially found intimidating.

“When they showed me the page views of the previous book I thought, ‘Wow, if I get even a small chunk of that audience, this will be the largest audience I’ve ever reached,’” Rose said. “So that was very frightening.”

But once he began writing last March, the pressure eased off. Rose derived a bulk of the textbook from lectures he’s given over his 35-year-long career and covers a wide range of topics that he’s taught for just as long.

The textbook has 19 chapters – instead of the standard 15 – including chapters on ethics, persuasion, logic and reasoning, and public speaking. But there are a few topics Rose hasn’t taught a full course on, like nonverbal communication, intercultural communication, and new communication technologies. For those cases, he interviewed experts who research and teach those subjects.

The writing portion was the “fun part” for Rose, and it shows in his writing style. The majority of textbooks, he explained, are written for instructors and tend to summarize research. That can be useful, but why not write for an undergraduate audience?

Rose knows what undergraduate students find meaningful, what teaching methods and materials work for them, and what they ultimately care about. The foundation of his book comes directly from his students’ feedback.

“They want to know, what’s the good stuff? How can I use this?” he said. “My job is to convey concepts that are useful to this particular audience.”

“Jeremy writes in a very conversational tone. This book closely resembles attending an engaging lecture with an enthusiastic professor,” Gjeltema said. “There’s a lot of conversational and personal elements that will make things seem more approachable and relatable to students. We’re hopeful that Jeremy’s voice will create a really engaging textbook.”

‘Can you hear me now?’

The Libraries team publsihed “Communication in Practice” this March, giving instructors plenty of time to adopt it into their syllabi and lesson plans for the upcoming summer and fall semester.

Working with Libraries’ staff was “great,” Rose said. For years, he and his colleagues have been looking for workarounds to avoid pushing expensive textbooks onto their already cost-burdened students, and the Libraries are the perfect partner for providing free, open-access materials.

And as a first-time author, he expected a firm mandate on how the textbook should look and feel, pushback on his writing decisions, but now at the end of the project, he’s only ever received support.

“They trusted me so much. For a person who’s never written a textbook before, I didn’t expect that level of trust,” he said.

Rose is excited to publish a free textbook for students and instructors across the world to access. He won’t receive royalties but just having the name recognition is enough. And the same is true for the Libraries.

“Part of this motivation for the project has been to maintain the University of Minnesota’s standing as one of the leading universities working within open education, providing these textbooks not only to our students, of course, but to students and instructors across the country,” Gjeltema said.

Open-access textbooks like “Communication in Practice” are especially invaluable for community colleges. This textbook could also be helpful for secondary, high school, middle school, and potentially elementary school students. And seeing a University of Minnesota label on the front cover could encourage prospective students to attend the U of M.

“Our obligation to steward these materials responsibly is a larger national and potentially international obligation that we’re trying to handle,” Gjeltema said.