Open Educational Resources

You may be interested in creating your own OER for many reasons:

• The content you need does not already exist
• To expand access for students
• To reduce costs for students
• To augment materials you are already using
• To enhance your regular course content
• To enable you to continuously update your course materials and content
• To enable you to share your content and collaborate with other instructors

Source: oer.psu.edu/benefits-of-using-oer

Of course there's OER on creating OER!  Check out some of these guides, checklists, and other resources to help you get started.

• The OER Starter Kit
• The OER Starter Kit Workbook
• Authoring Open Textbooks
• The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks
• BC Campus Open Education Self-Publishing Guide
• Guide to Developing Open Textbooks
• Ryerson Open Textbook Authoring Guide

Source: guides.lib.utexas.edu & ryerson.ca

You will want to take into account effective instructional design when creating your OER.  Use repetition, frameworks, meaningful names, hierarchies, and careful presentation of new elements to help students absorb information from your textbook or resource.  Take a look at these five rules of textbook development by BC Campus.

Sources: BC Campus & UOregon

As an instructor, you may have reviewed all the existing OER and open textbooks and not been able to find one that meets your needs.  If you are committed to using open textbooks in your teaching, the next step may be to create your own open textbook.  

Before you get started, you may be interested in reading this essay by Tony Bates, Writing an online, open textbook: Is it worth it?

Your 4-Step Plan

Once you've decided to create your own textbook, you may want to develop a work flow for how you'll approach the project.

For example:

 

Step 1: Plan

Draft Your Project Plan

Before you delve into creating your new open textbook, invest a little time at the start preparing your game plan.  This will pay dividends later.  Consider:

1.  Your project team members, and also identify the project lead (the person who will keep everyone else on track)

2.  Draft a project plan.  See example template.

3.  Identify and familiarize yourself with the range of across campus support units who may be able to help you at various points during your project (Library Liasons, CITE, etc.)

 

Understand and Define Your Audience

There are many factors to consider when thinking about the intended audience for your textbook.  Aside from the readers' content needs for your particular course, you'll need to consider their year of study, the prerequisite knowledge that you're assuming, as well as programmatic contextual variables.  In addition, you might also consider your intentions for the way readers will engage with the content.  Here are some questions for your consideration:

• In what year of study are your intended readers?
• What level of background knowledge is required?
• How do you intend your students to to use your textbook?
• What is the primary purpose for the textbook?

Your intended readers as well as the orientation you would like them to take content can have a tremendous impact on the way you choose to structure the content of your textbook.

 

Create an Outline of Your Textbook

TIP: The way that you select and organize your content will determine how useful the book will be as an instructional tool, both for yourself and others who may wish to adapt it later.

• Identify keywords based on your course objectives or student learning outcomes
• Decide on a consistent organizational structure for your textbook e.g. chapter topics and within that, sections or parts
• Next, consider the elements of each chapter, for example:
  • Opening (front matter): Table of contents, copyright page, introduction, preface, etc.
  • Body: Integrated pedagogical devices e.g. summary tables, graphs, study and review questions
  • Features: case studies, profiles, models, etc.
  • Closers (back matter): conclusion, summaries, reference lists, lists of definitions, version history, etc.

 

Step 2: Create

When creating new content for your textbook to address specific learning outcomes or other pedagogical elements of your course, you may not have to start from scratch.  Start by exploring openly licensed content, and if possible, adapt it to meet your needs.

For a list of OER repositories to browse for content, click here.

 

Step 3: Publish/Distribute

Now that you have created your new open educational resource, you are ready to publish and distribute it to your learners.

 

Peer Review

Effective peer review ensures the quality and integrity of your open textbook.  The creation and seamless publication and distribution of open textbooks, created by educators themselves, are designed to provide flexibility in the use of learning resources tailored to specific learning outcomes and support learner-centred approaches to teaching and learning.

If you do not have in-house expertise for professional copy-editing and layout of your publication, you can:

• Reach out to other subject matter experts in you discipline
• Engage a freelancer to perform those functions for you

 

License Your Open Textbook for Re-Use

Apply a Creative Commons license to re-distribute your OER.  These copyright licenses provide a simple, standardized way for you to give others permission to share and use your creative work - on conditions of your choice.

New open textbooks created at MHC should ideally be released with a CC BY 4.0 International License.

A page called "About the Book" should be added to the front matter including the following sentence about licensing:

This open textbook has been published openly using a Creative Commons license...

Information about licensing should also be added to the book information section of Pressbooks.  This information will then appear as the footer on each page of the online version.

 

Distribute and Share Your Open Textbook

Here are a few of the options available to you at MHC:

• Publish your textbook using MHC's instance of the Pressbooks authoring platform (a collaboration with Open Education Alberta via the University of Alberta Libraries)
• Host your OER on MHC's in-house repository, Campus eBookstore
• Host your OER on other repositories such as MERLOT and OASIS
• Upload it to Blackboard, MHC's learning management system
• Ask the Library to catalogue your book and share that link with your students

Printing Services

Let your students know that there is the option to have a printed copy of their open textbook.  They are free to download the PDF and take it to the Mailroom/Duplicating centre at MHC.  Inform the printer that the work licensed under a Creative Commons license, and can be freely copied in whole for a non-commercial educational purpose.

If you prefer teaching from printed copies of a textbook, you can order copies for students to purchase through the MHC Bookstore.  The cost of the textbook is determined by the length of the book and type of binding.  You can request a quote before printing.

 

Step 4: Sustainability and Impact

An important step in the textbook creation and adaption process is to ensure your new OER is kept up-to-date and that you build in mechanisms to assess the impact on your teaching and learning.

Here are some tips on managing versions of your textbook as well as assessing its impact on student learing.

 

Keep it Current: Version History

Once you have published your open textbook, you should determine a schedule for subsequent revisions to ensure the content remains relevant and up-to-date and to verify that external links remain live.

Revisions Checklist

• Are any cultural specific references still accurate and applicable?
• Have the theories or approaches evolved?
• Do you need to update or insert new media or links to other resources?
• Has your audience or education level changed?
• Do you need to expand the content to include new information?

 

Assess the Impact of Your Textbook

A key outcome of your project should include an impact assessment plan describing how use of your new open textbook impacted both your teaching and the student learning experience.  Impact measures can include:

• Impact on your teaching: evaluate your own experience of teaching with your textbook.  Ask yourself - did the textbook make your course easier to teach?
• Cost savings for students: calculate the estimated savings for students compared with purchasing a commercial textbook
• Student uptake: estimate the number of students who will engage with your textbook via your/others' course syllabi
• Evaluate usage data for open content: e.g. number of downloads, views, etc.
• Re-use by others: gather evidence that your openly licensed content has been re-used and re-mixed by others (if permitted via your chosen license
• Gather student, co-author and instructional testimonials: in-their-own-words use-cases describing experience with using your textbook can be powerful

 

Create Your Own Textbook in 4 Steps by Queens University is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 International License

 

 

Unless otherwise noted, content on MHC's OER website is licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License