BC Open Textbook Summit 2017

In this presentation, I plan to share how we've executed a grass-roots strategy over the past two years to build openly licensed textbooks with almost no institutional funding or support at a large North American public research university. By harnessing open software (like Pressbooks and other WordPress plugins) and the goodwill of content experts here, we've managed to obtain consortium-level Pressbooks hosting through Unizin, develop procedures that allow any interested party on campus to create an open text, and form a Pressbooks user's group, despite almost no institutional funding (~$3500 USD in grants from our university so far). I'll give a brief overview of a handful of the 50+ active projects in development here which demonstrates some of the additional plugins we've integrated to extend the interactive capabilities of Pressbooks (H5P and hypothes.is, among others) and invites the audience to interact with these books. I will also describe our future development wishlist/roadmap, including our desire to instrumentalize Pressbooks/H5P to generate useful learning analytics that respect learners' privacy and develop a working LTI integration that will allow our texts to send grade reports to LMSes. My hope is that this presentation will serve both as encouragement to others trying to further open education goals at their institutions with little to no funding and attract a group of peers with similar goals to collaborate on a shared development plan (particularly in regards to learning analytics and LTI development).

Steel Wagstaff, Instructional Technology Consultant, UW-Madison