As part of Open Education Week at the University of Calgary, Richard Zach and Aaron Thomas-Bolduc gave a presentation to introduce the concept of OERs, where to find them, and how to make them. Lots of love sent to BCCampus’ Open Textbook initiative and Pressbooks.

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This transcript was automatically generated by YuJa.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Taylor Institute learning technologies podcast Today’s episode is a recording of a workshop provided by Richard Zach and Aaron Thomas Balduq from the University of Calgary’s Department of Philosophy as Part of Open Education Week They talk a little bit about what open education resources are How to find them how to make them and then go on to give examples on how to actually edit? What we are textbooks in real time So, I’m going to start here and tell you a bit about what open educational resources are, why we might use them, why you might want to make your own. We’re going to focus mostly on textbooks, because that’s where Richard and my experience mostly lies. After I talk about that, I’m going to pass the mic to Richard, who’s going to tell you where you might find OER, that you might want to adopt for your classes, and how you might put together an open textbook yourself, or completely write one from scratch, if you want. And he’ll wrap that up with a short demonstration of how to remix a textbook using press books, which is a common platform for creating OER. So, first of all, OER stands for Open Educational Resources. The sorts of educational resources that we’re thinking of are things like syllabi, your lecture notes and your handouts, classes, tests, quizzes, group work activities, also videos and podcasts, and of course textbooks. books. So I taught a logic class using this book. I also made some podcasts, or some screencasts, rather, to go along with it. Eventually, all of those materials will be released once I have time to do some editing. So what then makes a resource like that open is that you’re, if you’re taking something from somewhere else, you can keep it and you can reuse it in your course, in future courses, but you can also make changes to it. 

So convert it to your own needs. Could be small changes like changing the spelling from British English to Canadian English or major changes like using half of one text book and half of another. And that would then fall under sort of remixing, which we have here is you can take bits and pieces from lots of different open resources and put them together yourself to tailor it to exactly what you want to do. 

And finally, and crucially, you can redistribute these open educational resources that you’ve created or that you’ve found so that other instructors at your university or elsewhere can use them and remix them and revise them for their own courses. So how do we ensure that we’re allowed to do this? Generally use Creative Commons licenses. So this is a way of establishing a particular copyright paradigm that’s recognized internationally. 

So obviously some things are in public domain. In Canada that’s 50 years after the death of an author. You have to be careful with this because the time frame varies quite significantly in different countries. 

But you can also, if you create something yourself, release it as public domain yourself. 

as public domain yourself. More commonly when we create OER, we use slightly more restrictive licenses. The preferred license in this community is called the CC by or the attribution license. So it allows people to basically do whatever they like with something you’ve created, as long as they give you credit for creating the original thing. It’s nice to get credit for work you’ve done, some of this can take a lot of time and a lot of effort, but it doesn’t restrict otherwise what they can do with those resources. You can restrict that slightly more by saying that anybody who uses something you’ve shared and created has to, can only share it with the same license. This is also fairly common and still a very open license. To that, we can add a condition that things can’t be used for commercial purposes. This isn’t really a big worry most of the time. Companies trying to make money from educational resources aren’t going to make money on things that can be found for free elsewhere, right? And Creative Commons also has no derivatives license. That’s generally not considered an open license anymore because it doesn’t allow anyone to change the resource that you’ve shared. So I won’t go through this, but this is sort of how the different licenses interact. And if you have questions about how these licenses work, this will help us later. So why might you want to adopt or create an open textbook? 

So why might you want to adopt or create an open textbook? Well, the obvious reason is the cost. So they said we created a textbook for the Logic One course here. 

This is it. The most common book in use in Canada, as far as I know, is The Logic Book, which costs about $150. This book was free for my students to download or $12 and change for a printed version from the bookstore. So I’ve listed there as well philosophy of science book that’s very common in survey courses, which again runs $100 or more. That’s a lot of money, and that stacks up very quickly. And those textbook costs tend to affect underrepresented students more. So first-time students, poorer students. And it’s been shown that using open textbooks increases enrollment and helps students finish their programs more quickly. Partly because they feel more comfortable taking more courses because they’re not worried about paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars for all these textbooks. There are other reasons you might want to adopt OER. You can adapt them freely. You can do what you like with them. You can change things around. You’re not forced to use new editions of books being released by textbook producers every couple of years so that they can keep making profits. And if you’ve ever been in this situation, either in a class or as an instructor, where you sort of, well, we need, you know, chapters one, two, and seven from this book and chapter three and nine from this book, well, if you’re using OER, you can take those chapters from those open resources and make them into one coherent book that fits exactly your needs for your course. And open educational resources also add pedagogical value to your course. You can have your students add new material or create new material, whether it’s examples for your textbook or problem sets or videos or podcasts even. They can then be used for later classes or by other instructors in other settings. And having students engage that way, I found anyway, so we were using, I taught this class, I was using this book for the first time, so there were some typos in it. And the students seemed very pleased to find little mistakes in my book. and so I encourage some of them to read more closely as well. Anecdotal, but seem to be the case. They seem happy about this. Students also don’t have to worry about, you know, somebody buys a textbook and three of you are sharing it and who has which textbook on which day and who has to work with whom on what assignment because the textbook is free. 

So, like I mentioned before, you can include exactly what you need, both in your textbook and your other resources, and you can make sure that all of the resources for your class are accessible. 

I’ll say a bit more about that now. 

So, traditional textbooks, you’re just going to have the one format, maybe it’ll be available as a PDF or more likely an e-book, but that will probably have to be purchased separately. 

If you’re using OER, you can have your materials available in a number of formats so students can choose what works best for them. 

You can also do things like ensure that your PDFs are optimized for screen readers for students with visual disabilities. Optimize your fonts and spacing and things for dyslexic students. 

So we’re currently working on an edition of this book that’s particularly optimized for dyslexic students, but that can be a different addition than the ones for other students, so students can choose which version is best for them. 

You can also use hyperlinks both within the book and to other resources that you’ve created. 

It’s nice to just have that ease of going back and forth between things. 

And you can provide transcripts and other things depending on what other resources you’re using without having to worry about a copyright. 

So we pass it on to Richard who’s going to tell you a bit about where you can find books and how to make them. 

Yeah so the now you know what they are and get some reasons why you might want to use them, adopt them, promote them, make them. 

There’s one main problem with with open educational resources, especially open textbooks, is that when you use a commercial textbook, the commercial publisher comes to your door and tries to sell you things. Or at least it’s very easy to find what the textbooks are in your area of expertise. You probably have used them yourself as an undergraduate or as a graduate student when you first taught them. So if you want to switch to an open textbook, for instance, it’s comparatively harder to find out where they are. So that’s what I’m going to talk a little bit about, where you go to find these things. So the best places to find open textbooks is a number of repositories, which I will mention some of them and show you. But of course, lots of these things are sort of labors of love of individual faculty members who just put the textbook that they wrote, or the lecture notes, or the course handouts and so on on their own website and then you know maybe it’ll have to be something that you find out from either from them directly or through social networks you might ask on Facebook or on Twitter or something does anyone know of a free textbook for the class that I’m going to teach next next term that sort of thing for non textbook OERs so things that you might use for in making your PowerPoint presentations or assign in addition to the reading for your students or maybe videos or things like that. Many of the, many of the usual places where you find content, YouTube for videos, Flickr for images, Wikipedia of course, will have, will have in the search You can, for instance, in YouTube, you can search for videos on a particular topic, but you will be able to restrict it to, say, only creative content or only public domain. And then, of course, you always have the option of making your own, and I’m also going to talk about that a little bit. And please, of course, interrupt me if there’s anything that you want me to explain more or elaborate on or so on. So first of all, some repositories. So we brought in a bunch of free open textbooks that are available. There are a number of initiatives that are well-funded and that are underwritten by either universities or university consortia to produce textbooks for commonly offered courses. So the first one is OpenStacks, and I think it’s one of the ones that have been around for the longest time. And if you look at an open textbook from OpenStax, that looks like a regular textbook. But PDF of this is free. You can read it online for free, and it doesn’t cost $250. Another one, which is perhaps more relevant to us, is BC Campus Open Ed. So BC Campus is obviously the British Columbia higher or education, the provincial body that deals with all of that. And they have an open education initiative that also produces open textbooks. And their approach is a little bit different. So instead of basically hiring and paying people to write textbooks for particular courses, they’ve encouraged faculty, especially especially in British Columbia, to author textbooks or to take textbooks that other people have offered and made available under an open license and change it, adopt them to the Canadian context. So for instance, we got Canadian history textbooks but we also have psychology textbooks in a Canadian edition and I’m not sure exactly what the research methods in psychology, where that came from, but they for instance they used some of the open sex textbooks and then turned them into Canadian editions. 

All the things that they have produced and also things that they vetted, so the initiative is not just to author and and to vet them according to some criteria. So many of the things in this repository will tell you not just where you can find the textbook, but also who’s using it, so who’s adopted it, that’s sort of an indicator of quality. It will have some reviews from faculty members, usually at British Columbia universities. And sometimes it will even have a seal of approval that it has been reviewed for accessibility and meets the standards BC Campus Standards for, being accessible open resource. So it’s available in different formats, for instance, it’s optimized for screen readers, the electronic formats, the pictures will have alternative texts that someone with a the screen reader will read out the description to them rather than just having a picture there that doesn’t have an alternative description. There’s some other repositories. So for instance, the OER Commons is basically a big search engine for open educational resources, not just textbooks. And the Open Textbook Library is also sort of an aggregator of various different sources where you might find open textbooks. textbooks. 

There are some disciplines that have, yes sir, yes, I’m not sure. 

I know that Manitoba and Ontario, they just use BC’s system. 

So there’s an Ecampus Ontario search engine for open textbooks. It’s the same as BC’s. It’s just rebranded. I think we were going to do the same thing. 

And in the original OER funding pilot, when you produced something that was funded by Alberta, you had to provide it in a format and they would give it to BC to include it in the search engine. 

So some disciplines have gone and for some disciplines There’s a specialized initiative, so for instance, the NOBA project provides open educational resources and textbooks for psychology. Libra texts is also one of the first open educational OER initiatives out of UC Davis. This is especially for chemistry, and in fact, I think Mondrawa University uses it for their chemistry courses, and they’ve now expanded their model. So the model is basically, it’s like a Wikipedia. So all the individual parts of the textbooks are basically Wikipedia pages. And they’ve used a lot of the kind of approach, pedagogical approach that Aaron mentioned, namely engage students in producing material for future classes. So it’s grown very big, and it’s also grown very fast. And now they’ve sort of expanded into other disciplines as well. But it’s mainly historically, at least it’s been focused on chemistry. And they also sort of not just have the individual pieces sort of modular so that you can rearrange them and sort of use them as you see fit, but also many of the things that they provide are provided for different levels, right? so you might have an anorganic chemistry, something or other, for first-year students, for an interclass, but then also for advanced undergraduate students, and then the same material in even more depth for a graduate course, for instance. Mathematics, the American Institute for Mathematics has also a list of open math textbooks that they’ve reviewed and sort of provide links to and reviews off and so on but if you’re right so of course there are the usual places that you could look you could ask a librarian you could ask Google so so these are just some of the some of the places where you could go and look now most of these most of these places provide you with the with the textbooks in some kind of electronic format and sometimes you might want or usually some students at they still prefer printed things. So then there’s a question of how do you get a printed copy of that PDF that you found on the internet. So if you’re looking at an open text that’s produced by some of these initiatives, so for instance, the BC Open ones, you can just go to the website where you find the book, and there’s a link to order it online. And you can work with, for instance, our bookstore. So our bookstore has, in the past, for instance, for the ones that we’ve made. So what we’ve done is there’s a service that Amazon offers where you just upload the PDF and they make it into a nice paperback copy that’s still relatively cheap. So I think this one was $12, this one was $9. And you just have to talk to the virtual manager and they will just order 20 of them and sell them to your students, or you can just point your students to Amazon or to other print-on-demand services. There’s, of course, difficulties with that, right? So for instance, one of them is that you can’t really, the bookstore, I don’t know if the bookstore will buy them back, probably not, right? Because they can’t return it to the publisher, but for $9, it’s probably not such a big deal. And, of course, you can also use other venues for producing them. You can just go to bound and copied, for instance, to take the PDF and turn it into a course reader kind of bound version. But actually, if you send it to Amazon and have it printed, other than the shipping costs, it’s probably cheaper than to go to binary copy and have it duplicated there. So that’s for printed textbooks. How do you make it available to your students? You can share it simply by link. But the beauty of the OARs is that one of the first R, the retain and the redistribute, gives you the right to just take the thing and put it on D2L if you want to. You can email it to your students. You can go and get it printed without paying anyone royalties or without getting copyright clearance because the license says as long as it has the attribution and as long as it has the link to the original source, it’s okay to do with it as you please. So that’s really one of the important things about when you pick something like a textbook, that you pick an open one and not just a free one, because if it’s just free, whoever offers it now for free might decide later that they’re not going to host it on their website anymore. And now you’ve built a course around a textbook that is no longer available, but that can can happen with an open textbook, because as soon as it’s available under an open license, you have the right to retain it in perpetuity and also redistribute it in perpetuity, even if the original author decides later that, you know, I don’t want to make it available anymore. So, you can adopt it and make it available to your students. You can remix it. you can rearrange the content, you can add content, you can change content, you can fix mistakes in it that you couldn’t fix if it was just a free PDF or if it were a commercial textbook. Of course, when you do that, you always have to be careful to use, for instance, if you add things, right? So you can obviously add things that you’ve written yourself or pictures that you’ve taken yourself for diagrams that you’ve drawn yourself, but if you take them from somewhere else, then it becomes a question of, do you have the right to use this? Do you have the right to redistribute it as part of your course material? And you have to make sure that you use only things that are also available under licenses that are compatible with the thing that you’re doing. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, that was my sign. So I’m sorry to suggest in a moment, but so I don’t know if this would affect other people, but centuries, one reason that I felt compelled to use a commercial anthology is that they have really good annotations. And so, how would I deal with that? Because I know I can get a lot of the checks from Project Gutenberg, et cetera, but it won’t come with the annotations, and it seems like pretty onerous. And also, I’d be probably, like, I know I’m not allowed to steal the annotation from Norton, which is what I want to do. So, yeah, what would you recommend, Dirk? Well, so I guess the first thing that you can do is just think about it as a sort of a long-term project to, you know, you’re going to start with the project Gutenberg thing, so copy it from the public domain, and then just sort of commit, you know, every time you teach it, you’ll maybe make some more handouts on the things, and every time you’ve made the handouts, maybe then you’ll actually put them into the system. But that seems also like the kind of thing that you could involve your students in. Everyone take a stanza of this poem, and then go and look and see what the references are, or things like that. One of the cool things at BC campus, because they might already have a textbook, but they’ll have a new student that’s going to have it. How do you make them? So this, again, of course is always a long-term project. If you want to write one yourself, let me point you to the textbook self-publishing guide that BC Open has also put out. We don’t have a copy of it here because I think it just came out. So it’s the new edition. So obviously, writing a textbook or collecting primary sources and editing and annotating them is a major undertaking and if you don’t put it out with a commercial publisher maybe you don’t get credit for a promotion and so on but it is definitely something that you can get money for first of all right so you can possibly get a grant for it for instance but it’s also something that you can as we just discussed right involve your students in and you can think of it as a like not a like I’m gonna write a textbook in the next year but just sort of something that you start doing and you build over time and every year it’ll be there might be one more chapter or one more set of problem sets or one one more set of questions that you can use for for your test bank and so on and eventually you’ll have enough stuff to actually send it to Amazon and not be embarrassed and actually call it a book, right? So I teach another logic course this term and I’ve done that. 

So these are now about a hundred and fifty pages. It’ll probably be a thing like that, a paper-bound copy at the end of the term. But it’s also something that other people of course, right, so once it’s not the thing that you need to keep control over because eventually you want to send it to the publisher and you want to have your name on it and you want to get all the royalties for it, right, so once that pressure is not there, right, then you can take contributions from other people. 

You can collaborate. It makes it much more of a collaborative effort. So for instance, the first textbook that we that I did this one, actually started as sets of lecture notes from three friends of mine, that I sort of edited into one coherent whole, made sure that all the notation and terminology was the same, added more detail and so on. And five Five years later, it’s something that looks like a commercially published text with all the problems, the problems and the chapter summaries, and doesn’t have an index yet, but maybe it’ll have an index soon. And for these kinds of things, there’s also initiatives. So BC Campus, of course, does some of these things targeted, right? So they will say, we need a textbook for a particular first year class and get a couple of profs together from various universities and then sort of get them to work together on a book. But there’s also a more distributed initiative called the Rebus Foundation. One of their goals is to also produce open textbooks for various disciplines. And this is more of a, you know, everyone who wants to volunteer for it, you can write a chapter. That can be your contribution. You can edit or review a chapter. and can serve as an editor or as a reviewer or just project managing, finding texts that can be included and so on. How do you share them? That’s another thing. If you do this kind of thing, it will be something that you will have to worry about. But if you go through a publisher, the publisher will do everything for you. We’ll distribute it. We’ll make it available, sell it, advertise it, and so on. So you’ll have to do some of these things probably yourself. The first thing to do is to pick a license that you put on it, because otherwise it won’t be an open textbook. It will just be a free textbook. And then you have to make it available somewhere. Usually the place to do that is your own website or an institutional repository but of course there’s other preprint servers for instance for various disciplines so a mathematician might make it, might put it on our key for a philosopher would put it on full papers and so on. When you do that make sure that you also include the editable formats because one of the important advantages of open textbooks is that you have the right to edit them, but if you only provide the PDF, for instance, even though you have the right to change it, it’s very hard to do that. You first have to convert it into something that you can edit and then redo it into a PDF. So when you share it and you intend it to be used by other people, make sure that you share it in the right formats, and then make it discoverable. So I mentioned these search engines for open educational resources at the beginning. and these are systems that usually take submissions. So even the BC Campus open text book repository, you can send them, if you have something that you think is of the right quality, you can send it to them and they will review it and then they will approve it and put it in. And some other search engines, they will just make sure that the link isn’t broken and then put it in and your OER will be discoverable from then on. So this, of course, there’s also a number of places that you can go to and look for help or to get involved in proselytizing for the importance of OER, for instance. So in Alberta, we have the Alberta OER Community which is sort of a network of teachers, authors, librarians, learning center people to work together and provide sort of feedback and help each other and organize things like this. Then there’s the Rebus community that I already mentioned and if you want to, if you need money or research assistant for this kind of thing, then of course keep your eyes open for grant opportunities like the OER pilot. And I think that was it for sort of the theory stuff. Any questions so far before I sort of show you things? Yeah. I was just wondering what sort of recognition it is because for faculty they can write a textbook as you said, and they can get royalties for the merit points. I put it on the annual report. 

I got merit for it, I think. But yeah, I don’t get royalties. As a grad student, it’s a great thing having my teaching dossier that I helped create this textbook and redesign this course to use newer methods and open materials. But it’s in their movements to sort of make this more of a central thing for things like tenure and promotion, but it’s early days. So I have two more or three more slides. So this is sort of the authoring tools. Obviously probably all of you know Google Docs, right? So if you’re going to do something and you’re going to write something and collaborate with other people, you need some kind of way of doing that. Sending back and forth text files or Word documents is a bad idea. So you probably want to have some mechanism for doing this. Google Docs is sort of the low tech version. The system that BC Open uses and that Veebus community uses is called Pressbooks. In fact, I think the person who founded Pressbooks now heads the Rebus community, so let me show you what that looks like. 

There, okay, so Pressbooks is a plug-in for WordPress, so WordPress is one of the most popular blog and content management systems, so it’s a plug-in in the sense that they use all these sort of infrastructure that WordPress offers, like edit like online editors and and mechanisms for rearranging things on a website but it’s then also has a book publishing backend so to speak so it basically press books use this in press books you can design a book the way that you would design a website and then push a button and get a PDF that looks like a book or push a button and get a MOBI file that you can upload to Kindle and then people can download it to their Kindle or Kobo or iPad and so on in some electronic format. And so one good thing is that it’s really user-friendly and it has this sort of publishing aspect to it. It does a lot of things. The other thing is that the textbooks, many textbooks that exist, in particular the ones that are being done in British Columbia, they all use that format. So for instance, if you want to find a textbook, this is the search engine from BC OpenText. So for instance, I was going to use an English textbook for Faye, but now Faye is not here anymore. So for instance, English literature, Victorians and Moderns. So that’s an anthology. You can look at it here. It comes in two volumes. It’s very pretty. So, if you find a text in the repository, it will tell you obviously what’s in it. It will tell you who it’s by, if it’s been reviewed, so for instance, this one has two reviews already, and it will be provided in many different formats. So, for instance, you can read the book on the BC Open website itself. And that’s the kind of thing that Pressbooks does. It provides a website for the book with a table of contents, with navigation features, links, will display all the images in a nice way and so on. So this one, for instance, is for this particular book. Here’s the table of contents. All right. So you got Browning, Tennyson, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Wolf, and so on. So someone has gone to all this trouble and converted all of these things from which are all in the public domain. So gone to Project Gutenberg, downloaded everything, and turned it into a nice book, written biographies of the authors, put in annotations, and so on. So suppose you’re an English prof and you want to use that, But you notice that your favorite author isn’t in here. Let’s say there is no Charlotte Bronte. And you think that would ordinarily rule out this book as a textbook for your course because you can’t bring yourself to teach an interesting English literature without doing that. So what you’ll do is you will download the right format here and then we’ll go to where dashboard. 

to where dashboard. So you will just say tools import already downloaded it I I hope it’s here somewhere. There it is. In WordPress format, upload file, begin import. I hope this works. And there it is. So we’ll select everything and import it. It might take a while, but there is a, So this Pressbooks is also, like their business model is, this is a self-publishing platform. So you can sort of upgrade to a version of Pressbooks where the PDFs that you download won’t have a watermark on it. So you can self-publish your books here and have them produced in versions that you can then upload to Amazon, for instance, and then sell for a profit there. But there’s also an educational version. The entire thing is actually open source. And I think we’re planning, right, Darcy? We’re planning to have a version. We’re hoping. And so Pressbooks is a plug-in for WordPress. There’s a plug-in for Pressbooks for textbook publishing, for open textbook publishing. One of the things it does is you don’t Pressbooks itself will have a list of all your available open textbooks, and you just say, I want to clone this one, and then you will have your own version of that textbook, and you can start editing it and so on. If you’re really tech savvy and have server space, you can also install it yourself because it’s free and open. Not recommended most of the time, but it is possible. I’ve been trying, I’ve almost got it working myself, but. So that’s a big book. Let me, while we look at this, let me also show you the Rebus community. So these are the people who are doing new textbooks. So, for instance, here are some of the active open textbook projects. The format is basically someone will volunteer, will be volunteer to do a textbook on X, and they will be in charge of recruiting people, planning the writing of that thing. So what are the chapters going to be? Who do we recruit? Individual chapters will then have a person assigned to spearhead the development of that chapter. There will be a timeline in the end. The idea is to have an open textbook like that. So for instance, here’s an open textbook introduction to philosophy? 

introduction to philosophy? Yeah, so Christina Hendrix at UBC has decided to put together this open introduction to philosophy textbook. It’s going to be massively long when it’s done, but each chapter is being run by a different person, different philosopher, and then each section of that chapter is written by a different person, or potentially a different person. I’ve not had time to contribute anything, but I’m signed up to edit the logic and metaphysics sections when they’re written in to consult on those because I have expertise in those areas. So I can help out in that way without committing myself to actually writing a chapter of a textbook while I’m trying to write my dissertation. Good. 

So this is what happens when it’s done there. Everything is in here. 

Let’s click that. 

Okay so here’s my own version of that textbook. Everything that was in the original one is now also here. Looks a little different because the theme for for press books is different from the theme for BC Open textbooks. 

for press books is different from the theme for BC Open textbooks. But everything is in here and if I wanted to change something, say for instance I wanted to reorganize things or delete things, I would just go into the organization and say I don’t know like I’m not going to use Browning so we’re gonna just not show him in the online version of the book but I want to add something so I want to add a chapter on Bronte okay I don’t know how to do that thing on my thing, right? 

thing on my thing, right? So for instance, you maybe add a new chapter and what you want to do in that chapter, let’s say you want to put in a Charlotte Bronte, a poem, let’s All right, so there, let’s take my Mentos, my Charlotte Bronte, this is text, all right, so I got my Charlotte Bronte, my Charlotte Bronte poem, would be nice to have a picture, so I don’t know, let’s go to the National Portrait Gallery, this is a classic, let’s to use this one, okay. So National Portrait Gallery doesn’t like it if you use your, if you use their things just without permission, but they’re very nice about educational uses, and it’ll tell you that you’re allowed to use this under a Creative Commons license. As long as you do two things, namely you use a low resolution version and you agree to the terms, but then they’re okay with it. Download it. 

There it is. Extract. There we go. So in my chapter, I’m going to add a picture, upload a file, and we’re going to make sure that we follow the rules. So this is under the Creative Commons, attribution non-commercial no-derivatives license. So it’s not technically an open license because they don’t allow us to make any changes, but they’re okay if we include it in something and say that it’s used according to this license. So we’re going to do that. We will link to the picture, copy link address, comments, attribution, non-commercial, non-derivative of 3.0 license link. This is not the best way of attributing a Creative Commons licensed piece of work, but that’s sort of the bare bones thing, right? So you have to say, what’s the title? Where is it from? Who’s the author? What’s the license that you’re using it under? But that’s basically, that’s more or less all you need to cover, that’s all you need to do in order to not be in violation of a copyright or a license. All right, so now we got our new chapter. Create. So you didn’t have to click it? No, because it’s public domain, right? So that means anyone can use it for whatever. I mean, I guess it’s nice to say thank you to Project Gutenberg who scanned all of this and made it so easy. If you’re making a textbook you can just have that sort of at the beginning or the end those these things were from Project Gutenberg, these things were from this other repository. And now here it is. 

That is a chapter in this book. It should show up in the table of contents. Yeah, so I probably should move it under the Victorian era first, but yeah, so you sort of see what how this goes and how relatively easy it is or it’s basically just editing a website. I think we’re out of time, more or less, so. Do you want to just mention that there are a couple of other ways of doing this? Other ways of? Making books. Oh, other ways of making books. Well, there are a number of other things. So this is not what we use, for instance, to do it, because we have a lot of formulas. There’s a typesetting program called LaTeX that mathematicians like to use, which is what we did. Many of the open math textbooks, for instance, use something called pretext that’s also relatively new. And in order to facilitate the collaboration, we basically just use an off-the-shelf software system called GitHub to keep track of revisions that various people are doing. Libertex, as I mentioned, concentrates on chemistry, but there’s not a lot in the humanities section, but if you wanted to populate the humanities sections with open books on history and literature and so on, I’m sure they would be happy to, I want to. I think those are the only things that I wanted to say. I think that was about it. It’s worth mentioning, again, the two textbooks on open textbooks that BC Campus OpenEd has made. 

Richard talked about the self-publishing guide. 

self-publishing guide. There’s also an accessibility toolkit, so I mentioned that this allows you to make sure that your resources courses are accessible for all your students and this book sort of guides you through all of the considerations you might want to have when you’re making your, if you’re creating things for the first time you have these in the forefront of your mind so that you can, as many students as possible can use your resources. And before I forget, all of the people who are working on these kinds of things on campus, who are originally funded from the province or funded through the pilot project that the Taylor Institute is running now, there will be a showcase tomorrow between two and five out here, so you can look over there, right? 

So you can go back tomorrow and look at all the things that people on campus are doing. More questions? Just about out of time, but I imagine we can stick around for a few minutes if you have extra questions. And thanks for coming.