Tag: free

Using Pressbooks to create open course materials

Ari Crossby

Pressbooks is free online publishing software derived from Wordpress that you can use to create open educational content. While primarily a tool for creating open textbooks Pressbooks can be used for other purposes such as authoring support documentation, course guides or supplementary course materials in D2L/Brightspace or iWeb.

One of the advantages of Pressbooks is that it is very easy to use and it can output accessible content in a wide range of file formats. These include ePub (iBooks, Nook, Kobo etc.), PDF (for print/digital distribution), Mobi (Kindle) and the Open Document format. This means that students can easily read content on their mobile devices and there is an option for a web version of every book for reading in a browser. 

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The process of creating the book is straightforward and Pressbooks includes a number of templates to give your finished content a professional look. You can import from Microsoft Word or WordPress and the wizard-like interface includes colour-coded placeholders for things like learning objectives, exercises and key take-aways. As well as text you can easily add images, audio and embed video from sites like YouTube.

Pressbooks makes it easy to collaboratively author your content with colleagues, although only one person can work on a book at any one time. You can release the book under different licenses ranging from all rights reserved to public domain. BCcampus recommend using a CC BY (attribution) license if you would like to support open and accessible content and enable others to adapt your book.

To get started using Pressbooks Langara Faculty can sign up for an account using their Langara email address (note: must be in the format @langara.bc.ca). BCcampus will be hosting a training webinar on using Pressbooks on Tuesday January 24, 10 am. For more information on using Pressbooks talk to Julian Prior (Ed Tech) or Lindsay Tripp (Copyright Librarian).

Professional Development Opportunity: Team-based Learning Institute at VIU

Ari Crossby

On December 7th and 9th, Vancouver Island University’s (VIU) Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning is hosting a team=based learning institute for their faculty and making some spaces available for non-VIU faculty guests. The institute’s program takes you through the complete design process for transforming a course using the Michaelsen Team-Based Learning Model. This offering is primarily for faculty members who will implement a team-based course beginning in January 2017.

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A master list of 800 free classic eBooks

Ari Crossby

Read A Master List of 800 Free Classic eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices from open culture

You can see theirebook full list of 800 offerings here. They may lack the sensory pleasure of print, but the ability to carry an entire library of classic literature in your pocket has its advantages, to say the least. And if your travels include long drives, you’ll also want to check out our master list of Free Audio Books.

Socrative: A Free Alternative to iClicker and Top Hat

Ari Crossby

The following is a guest post from Fulton Tom and Bryan Breguet, Economics Department:

Many instructors are now using audience response systems such as iClicker or Top Hat to engage students in their classrooms. These user-friendly systems allow instructors to administer interactive activities such as quizzes and receive immediate student feedback. The caveat, however, is that they are far from being free. Both iClicker and Top Hat charge students a subscription fee. While the fee is not a big expense, it adds to the already rising cost of post-secondary educatOpen Education Resources - CC Licensedion. Should we really expect students to pay tuition fees and buy textbooks and then to pay a subscription fee so that they can take the quizzes? We believe that more instructors should be aware of Socrative.

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Creative Commons Workshop at KPU: A conversation with Paul Stacey

Ari Crossby

As part of Open Education week, I recently attended a workshop at Kwantlen Polytechnic University with Paul Stacey, Associate Director of Global Learning at the non-profit organization Creative Commons. Previously at SFU and BC Campus, Paul has been instrumental in driving the adoption of OER (Open Educational Resources) in the BC post-secondary sector.

Rather than give a traditional presentation, Paul adopted a more informal question and answer session with approximately thirty workshop participants. He started by explaining what Creative Commons licenses are and stressed they are still a form of copyright attached to a creative work. The difference between “all rights reserved” copyright and Creative Commons licenses is that under the latter the author stipulates a set of permissions so that others can use a creative work in certain ways under certain conditions. Unlike “all rights reserved” copyright, Creative Commons licenses are “some rights reserved:” they allow creativity while ensuring the author retains ownership rights over the work.

The licenses themselves are best thought of as being on a ‘permissiveness’ continuum from the most permissive and open (Public Domain marks and CC BY – Attribution) through to the least permissive (CC BY NC ND). Paul, along with organisations like JISC, advocates for the use of CC BY wherever possible. The different licenses themselves are explained very well on the Creative Commons website. There is also a great License Chooser Tool if you are unsure which license to use. Although earlier versions of CC licenses were country/region specific, the new version 4.0 can be applied globally regardless of geographical location.

CCpermissiveness

Paul went on to demonstrate some real-world examples of the licenses in practice. The Librivox Free Audiobook Collection provides free audio recordings of books in the public domain. Similarly German-Japanese pianist Kimiko Ishizaka’s interpretation of Bach’s Open Goldberg Variations has been made available under a CC0 (zero) Public Domain license, meaning that any use can be made of the work without even the need for attribution. CC BY (Attribution) licenses are used by the OpenStax Textbook project and CC BY SA (Attribution, Share-alike) is used by Wikipedia. The board game Cards Against Humanity uses CC BY NC SA, online journal The Conversation uses CC BY ND and an example of the least permissive CC BY NC ND license is provided by the Teach AIDS website.

Openly licensing educational content has many benefits. Paul mentioned some of the more obvious ones such as the cost-savings to students of faculty adopting an open textbook, or the higher quality resources resulting from a collaborative peer authoring and review process. Beyond this, however, it is important to remember the core values of education that open educational practices support. Sharing and building on the ideas of others is fundamental to public education, as are academic freedom and innovation in teaching practice. Open textbooks, for example, increase academic freedom by taking control away from publishers and putting the potential to re-purpose and re-mix directly in the hands of faculty and students. Think, for example, of the exciting opportunities that exist to adapt textbooks for local contexts and update the content more regularly than traditional textbooks. Or think of the pedagogical innovations that might occur when we invite students to co-produce a classroom text?

Finally, Paul covered some important considerations when starting out with OER and open textbooks at an institution. Make sure you adopt a bottom-up as well as top-down approach, i.e get both senior management and faculty/student buy-in. Have a look around to see what exists already – at Langara, for example, we already have faculty in Physics and Math using open textbooks with their students; we’re not starting from scratch. Think about how OER will be stored, curated and distributed/shared. And have a clear institutional strategy that involves as many internal stakeholders as possible, while taking advantage of the ever-expanding wealth of resources and networks that are available in the open education space.

Julian Prior (Educational Technology Advisor)