by: Walter Butler, Acquisitions Librarian, Pasadena City College, CA
This was BCcampus’ 5th Annual Open Textbook Summit, and it was my first time attending. The two-day event was filled with collaborative experiences, insightful sessions, and plenty of opportunities for side-bar conversations to dig deeper into issues and topics. There were so many sessions to choose from, and if there was anything negative to say about this summit, it would be that I was not able to sit in on everything that I wanted – sacrifices had to be made. So, as I perused their schedule, I noticed there were a lot of various threads one could choose to follow – marketing, student support, management – I decided to hone in on “creation” as my personal theme. It’s an issue that I’m grappling with at my campus: how to best support faculty that wish to remix and generate their own open textbooks. Fortunately, this summit provided a lot of insight and options on how to move forward with such efforts.
In addition to the informative sessions, both days featured amazing keynote speakers: Ryan Merkley from Creative Commons led the charge on the first day and set the tone of the summit to one of sharing, giving, and gratitude while highlighting progress within the Creative Commons community, including their beta CC search. There were two guest artists in the front frantically trying to capture thoughts and ideas on blackboards as he spoke. They produced some incredible images! On the second day we heard from the Executive Director of Aboriginal Initiatives and Partnerships at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT), Kory Wilson. She brought forward considerations on how to uphold values attached to open pedagogy while respectfully approaching indigenous knowledge aligning to the Indigenous 4 R’s: Respect, Relevance, Reciprocity, and Responsibility.
BCcampus will be posting slides from the Summit – so, be sure to check out their site for further information. Below are some highlights from the sessions that I was able to attend.
So much creation going on!
- UW Madison: Steel Wagstaff provided a great overview of how UW Madison has been managing
Artwork from Ryan Merkley’s Keynote Speech by Walter Butler OER activities, targeting open pedagogy to assist adoption and creation. Pressbooks is their platform choice and establishing a strong community practice of monthly meetings has seen positive results.
- Rebus Community: Although Rebus also recommends Pressbooks, they will not blink if another platform is used for creation. Hugh McGuire informed us that there are 12 projects (at the time of the summit, at least) that they have running. Currently, they are strategizing long-term sustainability of content.
- Libretexts: If you haven’t checked out libretexts.org, they are doing amazing things with their open textbooks. Delmar Larson walked us through this multi-institutional collaborative goals as they continue to build and produce OER texts on their own platform, which is able to pull student behavior to further guide its development. You can explore at libretexts.org.
- Markdown: Cody Taylor from University of Oklahoma presented Markdown as a possible way to streamline creating OER textbooks by setting up a source file using Markdown that then can be easily converted to other file formats. Markdown uses a minimalistic syntax and can be generated in any text editor. Learn more at commonmakr.org/help/tutorial or try out his file converter (once you have a Markdown file) at: mdc.codytaylor.cc.
- Pressbooks: Hugh McGuire outlined activities, plans and goals that Pressbooks is working on, but also wanted to know what is needed from the community that is currently using Pressbooks for OER. This engaging conversation led to questions about accessibility, access/file formats, and general usability features.
- Wikipedia Book Creator Tool: If you haven’t tried using Wikipedia’s book creator tool, it is a very easy-to-use feature where you are able to take Wikipedia content and generate a book as a PDF file. Steve Foerster guided us through the process and noted that this tool is more like a hammer when approaching creation.
- SPARC: I was able to sit-in on two sessions lead by SPARC’s team, one of which, was a more interactive workshop where we discussed in groups efforts involving student advocacy at our campuses. SPARC also highlighted their Connect OER Project – a way for campuses to easily share and find out about OER efforts from each other, which they are planning to open to all institutions in September (currently, it is only available to SPARC members).