Adopting Open Textbooks

Adopting Open Textbook Online Workshop 

Week 1: What is Open? What is an Open Textbook? - Audio Recording (MP3)

Week 1: What is Open? What is an Open Textbook? - Audio Recording + Slides (MP4)

In this article, part of the Educause Game Changers series, Dr. Cable Green of Creative Commons and Dr. David Wiley, Shuttleworth Fellow discuss the rationale for openness in education.

This is an Educause primer that gives some details about Open Textbooks. While it's a bit dated, the information is still useful and will give you an idea of what we're talking about when we reference Open Textbooks. 

This TEDxKyoto talk was delivered by Dr. Dave Ernst. Dave is the Chief Information Officer in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota and leads the Open Textbook Catalogue hosted there. You can take a look at that catalogue at https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/

In this video, Nicole Allen, the OER Program Director at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (http://www.sparc.arl.org), formerly the Make Textbooks Affordable Campaign Director at the Student Public Interest Research Groups (http://www.studentpirgs.org), discusses the problems with current textbook paradigm and the promise of open textbooks. 

In the video, some of the leading thinkers behind Creative Commons describe how the organization is helping “save the world from failed sharing” through free tools that enable creators to easily make their work available to the public for legal sharing and remix.

This video is intended to help you choose compatible resources and choose a valid license for your work. Suppose you are developing an open educational resource (OER), and you want to use some other OER within yours. If you create a derivative work by adapting or combining works offered under Creative Common licenses, you must not only follow the terms of each of the licenses involved, but also choose a license for your work that is compatible with the other licenses.

Feel free to reuse, revise, remix, or redistribute these videos, which are licensed Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported, Copyright Florida Virtual Campus. Please contact info@theorangegrove.org to freely obtain the actual media files for editing/modification purposes. 

This video guides you through the steps of using the Creative Commons License Chooser. 

From the Creative Commons website, this page describes what creative licenses are and what they do. From there explore other pages under the "Licenses" tab for a complete overview. 

This is Joe Moxley's story about his experiences creating the Writing Commons. It started as a textbook published by Pearson. Joe received copyright back from Pearson, and then released it as an open textbook. 

The scenario - licenses matching activity can be found here: http://www.twiddla.com/1322756

However, it seems a little too easy to delete the content on that page, so here's a screen shot of what it looks like. 

The idea is to read the scenario, then match the license(s) by drawing a line. For some scenarios there are many possible responses. 

This Policy Development and Review Toolkit from OER Africa documents some very helpful thinking around making a move to more openness. In particular, the section which begins "Within this context, educational institutions would need to consider and answer the following questions" lists a number of important considerations. 

JISC article

What should you look for when choosing an open textbook for your course?

Sources of open textbooks

Open textbooks and digital textbooks are not the same.