This document discusses an open textbook collaboration between British Columbia and Manitoba. It provides information on open textbooks, including their benefits of being freely available online and their licensing under Creative Commons. Manitoba has launched an initiative to have faculty review and provide feedback on existing open textbooks. The goal is to increase access to post-secondary education by lowering costs through open textbooks.
1. Working Together for Students
Open Textbook Collaboration
BC and Manitoba
Campus Manitoba
University of Winnipeg
December 1, 2015
Photo: IMG_4590 by Tom Woodward CC-BY-NC
Presentation deck adapted from BCcampus Working Together for Students slides CC-BY license
2. Unless otherwise noted, this work is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution
License.
Feel free to use, modify or distribute any or all
of this presentation with attribution.
3. 1. Introduction
2. What are open textbooks?
3. Manitoba initiative (website demo)
4. Questions
4. Access to higher education is at the heart of everything we do.
Manitoba’s post-secondary sector is committed to higher education - the creation, dissemination, and
preservation of knowledge. As such, our purpose is to expand access and connect students to the
opportunities that higher education offers.
TransferMB
Campus Manitoba
Virtual Help Desk (VHD) Navigators
7. “The cardinal lesson is that
prices rise unchecked if the
people who order the goods
aren’t paying the prices.”
The $250 Econ 101 Textbook, Craig Richardson, Wall Street Journal, Jan. 13, 2015
8. How students battled textbook publishers to a draw, Planet Money, NPR, Oct 9, 2014
9. How students battled textbook publishers to a draw, Planet Money, NPR, Oct 9, 2014
What is going on here?
10. Source: Fixing the Broken Textbook Market U.S. PIRG
Cover image: Center for Public Interest Research used under CC-BY 4.0 license
65% students
have not purchased a
textbook for a course
during their academic
career because
of price.
11. What are Open Textbooks?
A textbook licensed under an open
copyright license, and made available
online to be freely used by students,
teachers and members of the public.
They are available for free as online and
electronic versions, or as low-cost
printed versions, should students opt for
these.
November 30, 201511
12. The 5 R’s of Open
November 30, 2015
Adapted (color change) from Open Education: A “Simple” Introduction by David
Wiley released under CC-BY license
12
• Make and own copiesRetain
• Use in a wide range of waysReuse
• Adapt, modify, and improveRevise
• Combine two or moreRemix
• Share with othersRedistribute
13. November 30, 2015
Creative Commons logo by Creative Commons used under a CC-BY 3.0 License
CC license image from Copyright in Education & Internet in South African Law used under CC-BY 2.5 South Africa license
13
14. November 30, 201514
Faculty have full legal rights to
customize & contextualize open
textbooks to fit their pedagogical
needs.
15. Where do open textbooks come
from?
November 30, 201515
21. • $250 per review
• 25 reviews from Manitoba
• To qualify: teaching in the subject
area at an approved Manitoba
institution
• Reviews published alongside the
book in both Manitoba and BC sites
• Reviews done against standard
rubric – both qualitative and
quantitative
• Reviews are released with a CC-
BY-ND (No Derivative) licenses
• 3 months to do a review
• No print copies of books. Electronic
versions.
Open
Textbook
Reviews
27. Step 4: Display and payment
November 30, 201527
• Once submitted, displays 24 hours later on both sites
• Automatically triggers payment notification to BCcampus
• Contacted by BCcampus for mailing address and additional info
• Cheques issued and mailed by SFU
• 6-8 weeks
31. open.campusmanitoba.com
Dave Neale
Executive Director
Kathleen Fehr
Special Projects Coordinator
Trent Gill
Virtual Helpdesk Navigator
QUESTIONS
?
Webinar: Manitoba Open Textbook Initiative
Thursday, December 3, 1:30pm
Register:
open.campusmanitoba.com/webinar-registration
Notes de l'éditeur
We will have a question period at the end.
What we do
We’re a consortium of post-secondary institutions in Manitoba.
Our purpose is to expand access to higher education offers.
Here are the ways we do that:
eCampusManitoba.com (live)
Is a website that provides single access to the broad range of online courses hosted by our partner institutions.
Manitoba Open Textbook Initiative (live)
This is our main topic today so more on that in a bit
The goal of the Manitoba Open Textbook Initiative is to raise awareness of openly licensed textbooks (and open educational resources) in Manitoba.
TransferMB (to be launched in Spring 2016)
We will be launching a website that will facilitate student mobility between institutions by providing accessible information on post-secondary transfer credit on a course-by-course and block transfer level.
Student Advocate (live)
Mandated by the Government of Manitoba, the Student Advocate provides confidential advice to students who have questions and concerns about the assessment of transfer credit and the recognition of prior learning (RPL) at Manitoba’s universities and colleges.
Set Your Course (to be launched next week, Dec 15)
It’s a launching point for prospective post-secondary students
It will show them the various educational pathways and career opportunities that are available in Manitoba.
Virtual Help Desk (VHD) Navigators
Our services are all online to provide students information when and where they need it, but should they get stuck, we have our Virtual Help Desk Navigators
They are available through chat, email or phone to answer questions.
I’m here to talk about Open Textbooks but I wanted to show you that video to show you that textbooks are just one part of this world of Open Educational Resources.
As mentioned in the video, tuition costs are rising and textbooks are expensive.
The rise in textbooks are exponentially greater than consumer goods.
The reason for this… [next slide]
…Is, analysts say, because students are “captive consumers”
Which mean the consumer does not decide which product to buy, rather it is chosen for them, similar to how a doctor prescribes a given pharmaceutical.
So the rise in prices remain unchecked.
But the problem isn’t just about the cost.
There are pedagogical implications to high textbook costs.
In 2001, here’s the breakdown of textbooks bought, and we can see that students either bought them new or used.
In 2013, students have more choices. They rented, perhaps borrowed.
But although there were more alternatives, there seems to be a gap.
A study was done about this and it shows that students are not acquiring the textbooks at all.
In this study, 65% of students admitted that there was a point in their academic career that they didn’t buy a textbook for a course because of price.
So that poses a problem – when students start out or go through the course without the resources they need.
Other issues with textbooks are that they are :
Limited – textbooks are typically only available in print format, which limits how the content is accessed, stored, and used.
Fixed/One size fits all – they are produced for a very general audience; it does not necessarily accommodate unique experiences that students get in different classes with different instructors.
Restrictions on sharing and use – a textbook’s form of copyright quite simply limits the extent it can be used and shared as an educational aid.
These problems suggest there are better ways for students to get this information.
Anything that puts limits on how many and how much students can learn is an obstacle worth considering.
No solution is perfect, but there are opportunities to use learning resources that are equally effective and more easily acquired than traditional textbooks.
Hewlett Foundation definition of OER: “Teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and repurposing by others.”
The term was first adapted at a UNESCO Forum on the “Impact of Open Courseware on Global Learning.”
Although educators are becoming increasingly aware of open licenses and how they can affect education, it’s still considered a recent phenomenon. It has really only gained momentum recently, and there’s more work to be done in terms of awareness, adoption, and creation.
Open means open to all
Resemble commercial counterpart; different licenses
Many already exist
Quality is comparable
The R’s are the rights and characteristics that openly licensed content gives the users. Any resource that purports to have an open license must grant some or all of these rights. The copyrighted work grants the user free and continuous permission to use the content in all of these different ways.
It used to be 4 R’s, but “Retain” has been added.
Explain the R concepts, with examples.
Here’s a summary of the open licenses available through Creative Commons.
CC-BY: Attribution – This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution.
CC-BY-ND: Attribution No Derivatives – This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.
CC-BY-SA: Attribution Share Alike – This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.
CY-BY-NC: Attribution Non-Commercial – This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.
CC-BY-NC-SA: Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike - This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. Others can download and redistribute your work just like the by-nc-nd license, but they can also translate, make remixes, and produce new stories based on your work. All new work based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also be non-commercial in nature.
Intellectual Property Rights remain with the author. The author can defend any abusive or unauthorized use of their work. [Dave help me!]
OpenStax is the premier provider. They don’t have many but they are really high quality.
Because of the potential student savings and other benefits of open textbooks, we saw its potential to contribute to our purpose at Campus Manitoba: expanding access to higher education. So we wanted to raise awareness of Open Education Resources here in Manitoba. As we looked into it and did some research, we learned about the BC Open Textbook Project.
The BC Open Textbook project was launched in 2012.
The goal of the project is to create a collection of open textbooks aligned with the top 40 highest-enrolled subject areas in the province.
This year, they fulfilled that goal and found or created textbooks that align with all top 40 subjects, with multiple textbooks for many of the areas available in their collection.
Their open textbooks are openly licensed using a Creative Commons license, and are offered in various e-book formats free of charge, or print on demand books available at cost.
To date, here are their results.
19 out of the 23 institutions in BC have adopted at least one textbook in their collection.
[mention hand-outs]
We certainly did not want to reinvent the wheel, so we partnered up with them to initiate the MB Open Textbook Initiative.
You can say that we adapted their website - another example of a resource that has the CC-BY attribution license. We were able to take their website and redesign and remix.
The Manitoba Open Textbook Initiative was announced by Minister Allum on September 11, 2015. We partnered with BCcampus to develop our website and launched it on October 1, 2015. The website was developed in 3 weeks!
Our website encompasses all of BCcampus’ collection of textbooks and their peer reviews that are published alongside them. Anytime a book is added to the BC collection, it also gets added to the MB site. Currently there are 136 textbooks available.
Start Demo here of Find a Textbook and Adopt a Textbook.
After Demo of “Find Textbook” and “Adopt Textbook”, continue here.
We would like these resources to be peer-reviewed to assess the quality of open textbooks so faculty (and the public) can rely on them as educational resources.
Max 2 reviews per individual
BCcampus facilitates the reviews on our behalf. Once we receive the application form, they provide instructions and a unique link to complete your review online.
Once you get that link, you can download the book and begin your review.
You have 3 months to complete your review.
10 in progress at ACC. Textbooks being reviewed include:
Adult Literacy Fundamentals Mathematics 1, 3 and 4
Geographic Information System Basics
Project Management
Anatomy and Physiology
Principles of Marketing and; Introducing Marketing
Line C: Tools and Equipment Competency C-1: Describe Common Hand Tools and Their Uses
Line D: Organizational Skills Competency D-2: Apply Science Concepts to Trades Applications
Human Resources Management
2 in progress at RRC. Textbooks being reviewed include Biology and Analytical Chemistry 2.0
Translations
Adaptations (ie. adapt the BC Geography book for a Manitoba one)
Development of ancillary resources such as exams and tests