Are you considering creating an open textbook for a course? Ideal for online and traditional learning environments, open educational resources allow for faculty innovation while increasing student access and cost savings. There are many online tools available to guide the process and research support and curricular technology staff can assist in all steps of the project.
Your open textbook can be hosted on the Connecticut College Digital Commons website and searchable in many online libraries such as OER Commons, MERLOT and the Mason OER Metafinder.
Professor Derek Turner’s open textbook, Form and Content: An Introduction to Formal Logic, was published with a Creative Commons license that allows the public to use the book for free with attribution of the author. His book has been downloaded from Digital Commons 541 times to locations all over the world. A snapshot of the readership distribution is below.
There are many ways the open education community can help with the production of open educational resources. Below are some of the options available.
Peer review: Help for the peer review process is available on the Rebus Community platform for open content development. For your open textbook project, start by creating an account and requesting a dedicated discussion space and post a call for participation in the Contributor Marketplace,
Open licenses: Choose a Creative Commons license that suits your needs. Options run from CC0 which immediately adds the work to the public domain or the more restrictive CC BY-NC-ND which controls sharing and creation of derivative works.
Write new content or import and edit: Pressbooks offers a robust editing and hosting platform for creating open textbooks. Integrate accessible math notation, include audio and visual content, add H5P interactive content and create an online social annotation space with Hypothesis.
Create open textbooks with students: Create OER with students using LibreTexts, an online platform for the construction, customization, and dissemination of open educational resources. LibreTexts.org uses “libraries” to organize content into broad categories including math, biology and humanities.
For more information email Ariela McCaffrey, Assistant Director of Research Support, amccaffr@conncoll.edu.
Form and Content: An Introduction to Formal Logic readership report from Digital Commons.
