In Summer 2018, faculty and graduate assistants in the Human Nutrition, Food and Animal Sciences department created an open-access online textbook to replace one that hundreds of UH students were purchasing each semester, thus conserving money, time, and material resources.
Human Nutrition, by Marie Kainoa Fialkowski Revilla, Alan Titchenal, Cheryl Gibby, and Allison Calabrese, serves as an introduction to nutrition for undergraduate students. As the OER textbook for the FSHN 185 Science of Human Nutrition course, it covers basic concepts in human nutrition, key information about essential nutrients, basic nutritional assessment, and nutrition across the lifespan.
The textbook includes chapters borrowed and adapted from Flat World Knowledge and OpenStax OER textbooks, customized to resonate with local readers and meet UH’s Hawaiian, Asian, and Pacific Issues (HAP) focus requirement. It’s published on the UH Pressbooks OER (Open Educational Resources) platform.
Now CTAHR’s distance education coordinator Kellie Taguchi and grad assistant Ya-Yun Yang are collaborating with original author Marie Kainoa Fialkowski Revilla, grad student Noemi Caacbay, and undergraduate students Gemady Langfelder and Christina Gar Lai Young on Version 2.0. This version will be expanded to include additional interactive study activities for students to reinforce the concepts they have learned in the OER textbook as well as to provide accompanying resources for instructors wishing to adapt the OER textbook to their courses. It should be released in time for the Spring 2020 semester!
And here’s where you come in: Have any art, photography, or graphic design background? They’re now looking for submissions for a new cover image! Cover image submissions should reflect food, nutrition, and the beautiful Hawaiian community. They should be submitted by December 1 to Noemi at caacbayn@hawaii.edu.