so welcome to Virginia Tech's Open Education Week
. This is our first faculty focused event. Um
, students are also welcome professor of future professors as
well. And I wanted to before we get started
, just go through our schedule, uh, and
tell you about a few things. Um, that
you should know. So this session is rather long
. We have a couple hours together if you choose
to stay that long. Um and we hope that
folks, some folks will come in part way through
. But I've divided this section this session into two
parts, the first being about finding and sharing openly
licensed resources and the second being about offering and adapting
. We realized that people are in many different places
regarding whether you're trying to, uh, share things
that you already created. If you're trying to find
things that already exist, if you are authoring or
you're trying to adapt something that that is already available
to you. So we will do essentially a lightning
round of demos. This is designed to be very
helpful for people who are exploring lots of different platforms
. That's what we've heard from our faculty is tell
us where to put things um, how can we
share them? What are some tools that are available
to us? The first question that we we want
to talk about. So why share? Why not
do something else? Why not work with somebody else
who can put our concept, your content online or
in a book format or in some other formats?
Well, there are lots of reasons. Part of
what we do with educators is we share with students
. Sharing really improves student access. It improves student
success. Um, it reduces student that if you
are at a four year institution, your students 28%
of your students are using financial aid to pay for
their textbooks and learning resources. If you are at
a community college, 50% of your students are using
financial aid to pay for learning materials. I was
asked yesterday why the disparity? Why, Why?
Because four year education is so much more expensive wires
. So many more students are community colleges borrowing money
for learning resources. And this really speaks to sort
of the financial divide in our country and to students
who, um, really chance, um, can't
afford oftentimes, these types of resources that are assigned
to them. So why is it that students can't
afford? Well, if you were in university in
the mid to late nineties, as I was,
you'll see that the cost of college textbooks, which
is the upper blue line, is much lower than
it is now. So if you are a student
or you have a niece or a nephew or a
child or grandchild in college right now, you probably
already know this. But for those who don't,
the cost of learning resources is really skyrocketed. And
this is faster than the cost of medical care,
the cost of new home prices as well as the
rate of inflation currently about four times the rate of
inflation. And our students are smart. They're responding
to this, and even though we say okay,
they should. They should probably be spending five or
$600 a semester. Some research that I did last
spring indicated they were spending about$325 a semester.
Students are doing a lot of things to avoid paying
full price, yes, but students are paying a
whole lot less than that because they are choosing to
go without their sharing their signing copies online, uh
, doing all sorts of other things to really make
it work. But I guess the long and short
of it is that education really is about our investment
in our students in the future. Our students today
for the future. It's about sharing. Um,
it's about what the long run is in the scholars
and the citizens that we are building. So with
that in mind, um, we tend to use
creative Commons licenses to tell people we want you to
be able to copy this. We want you to
be able to revise it. We want you to
be able to reuse it with attribution and we don't
want to charge you anything for it. Um,
this is really the ethos of this movement. So
as we go on, we're going to look at
some platforms. But first, any questions, anything
that you would like clarified, um and right,
So we're going to look at seven different platforms.
This matrix describes roughly 12 to 15 other platforms that
might be of interest to you. They all do
very different things on them. You can some of
them you can build, you can adapt some of
them are places where you can host materials. Others
are places where you can upload length and you can
share things that you've created. Most of them are
things you don't have to install. Although there are
a few and all of them are things that are
free. They don't have any cost to you.
So take a look at this. Um, perhaps
a little bit later on. And but we will
be looking at some of these. So I'm going
to invite my colleague Jenny Pennebaker, who is our
health and life sciences coordinator here at the university library
. Jenny is going to demo for us a couple
of different sites. And so welcome, Jenny.
And good morning. Um, all right, if
I keep clearing my throat ng seem to have allergies
all the time. But at any rate, um
, I enjoy creating different materials for the workshops and
sessions that I work with others on and, um
, provide myself. And when those things seem to
work, well, then I like to share them
because I know I've benefited from, um think that
others have shared with me. So a couple of
ways I've done that is so these are just a
couple examples. Um, one is through our institutional
repository, which is the tech works. Have any
of you, Um how did you have to look
around the tech works before? Like a couple.
Okay, so, um, you can Google v
. Tech works, and you should get to it
. You can get to it that way. Um
, or you can go to V. Tech works
that lived at VT dot e d u. So
a great thing about you check works and in general
, institutional repositories, So places within, um,
usually a higher education institution or non profit organisation,
Um, is that these are places where people in
those communities can, um, host information so they
can upload information, and they can include a description
to it. And then repositories like this include,
um permanent u r l So that you know,
the link is not going to break later on,
and they're committed to preserving the materials that you deposit
there. So you can put something in there and
know that someone is looking after it. They're not
just gonna go away in five years and say,
Well, it's no longer there. Um, so
these are benefits The other thing is that institutional repositories
, by and large, are open to public access
. So this is something you want to share with
anyone. This is a good place to put it
. Um, there's no paywall barrier, no account
. You need to sign in to be able to
get to the materials and view them. Um,
and then it also lets you add whatever kind of
license or copyright, um, statement that you have
the rights to add and would like to do so
. So it is. It does support creative Commons
licenses, Um, which I need to just mentioned
and which are commonly used for open educational materials.
Um, since it already has that built in,
uh, it's something that people can see within here
. So as an example, um, I know
that one thing in here is on, um,
an open access activity for a graduate. Um,
psychology course. So, um, I played around
with some different ways of sharing things. Uh,
this is probably one of the more documented examples.
Um, sometimes I might share things and just include
a brief description. Um, in this case,
uh, I was trying this out with a colleague
. Leslie Matthews, who's at the art and Architecture
Library, and we were experimenting with Okay, what
would you know? Really? Let someone take this
and have all the information they could need, um
, to know how it was presented, what context
that was in and all that, so Oh,
yeah, yeah. Thank you. I forgot to
that. It's kind of that better. Okay,
um, so in this case, we were,
um, we wanted to provide both accessible, um
, formats. So that's why you'll see something that
looks like there's double there. Are there in,
um, we included everything as a pdf or text
format. Um, depending so that it would be
more, um, except people would be able to
open it regardless of whether they happen to have Microsoft
office or, you know, regardless of their operating
system, most people can use PDS. Um,
and then we did include the original documents in word
so that if someone did have that, they could
access the original files to edit them. Um,
which makes it easier for editing since pdf, you
know, can be a challenge that way. And
then we included, um, a general, uh
, description. So I'm saying we because We both
, uh, put together this sort of template.
Um, Leslie is not on here because her example
is a different one. So, um, I
will try to dig that up and send it to
Anita to include later on in, um, the
links for this presentation. But, um, so
this we included a read me document that basically tells
, um, would tell the person looking at this
who our audience was at the time what my time
frame was when I taught this class, um,
possible learning objectives that could be accomplished with these materials
and what would be included, that kind of thing
. And then the materials are all here. So
the next benefit of this, um oh, wait
and so right. You've got the license down here
that shows how you can use it. So this
is a CC by license. Anyone can take this
change it entirely, do whatever they want with it
. Um, as long as it is attributed,
um, via that life. So, um,
to connect. Is it okay to go to the
next one? You're okay. So to connect that
with this next resource, um, or next platform
. Do you have on that hand out that,
um, I need to give out. And I
meant to bring up here both of these. I
think, um um, you have the v Tech
boards down here showing some of this advantages and then
a little higher up. You have merlot showing some
of the disadvantages here. One thing it's not noted
that you can build adapt. You kind of can
build content there. It just as a not as
flexible as one might like it to be. So
it's not like a strong point for that, but
there's a little bit of options there. But,
um, I'm mentioning this now as a direct connection
to the Tech works, because merlot is one of
the first places that was one of the first platform
that was developed to share open educational material. Um
, and it's developed over time. Um, they
have a lot of things they've put into it,
um, including getting people to peer review materials.
Um, there's a place where people can just give
a customer review or, like, you know,
user review. So there's also that, but they
do have people signed up to give full reviews as
editors and then in connection with the tech works,
the way more low works best is just to directly
link to things. So it's not a hosting platform
. You won't put actual file on this platform.
So what you want is to have your information hosted
somewhere. And then if you're gonna list it in
merlot, um, which is great to do.
You can submit material here. Then, um,
you want to be able to link to it.
And that's where having it, for example, in
an institutional repository. That's a great connection. You
know, that link is going to be stable.
You know that if anyone gets to that location,
they'll also know from the license or copyright how to
use it, and they'll have a description there as
well. So, Lindy, log in here real
quick and just show it. That looks like please
, I actually no, I don't believe you do
. Um, so you can just search here any
, and this one isn't listening here. I'm just
searching psychology because that's the first thing I'm thinking of
it, but yeah, anyone can search merlot,
totally open to search. Um, but to actually
submit things, then then you would want to plug
in and you would want to create an account.
And the nice thing about merlot is that they do
track your contributions. You'll see how minimal my contributions
have been to the community. Aside from searching it
and using things I find there, Um, but
you can see at any time from my merlot.
So once you log in, you get you know
, your own custom and a view to this.
Um and then you've got your profile and right here
, my merlot submission. So if you sign up
with them to become a peer reviewer, for example
, it would track the peer reviews you submit.
Um, so that would be something you could you
know, For example, include a service, if
that is something that you keep track of for your
the things you do towards your position or community.
Um, and then it also attracts things you submit
. And so this example I'll go to this example
here, you can submit things here that aren't yours
. So if you know of a really great open
educational resource and you don't think it's listed somewhere where
people find it or it's just not listed and were
low, you can submit it. So this is
not something I created. I just submitted this because
I think it's a really great resource. And in
doing so, I was able to list, you
know, information about it. All the authors that
showed I listed their license that they stayed on that
site. And then, um, it links out
to the material separately so you can see more low
. Um, kind of fulfills the people looking for
this kind of thing. It's a great platform for
that. People know it for open educational resources and
has a lot of ways to sort of validate those
resources or and create collections for yourself or for others
. And, um, it goes right along with
the creative Commons, licensing that a lot of people
use. Um, and there's a great place to
list things that you host elsewhere. So does it
be, um, to the top things that I've
used? And if you have any questions about that
, and that's probably like the speediest to wherever Through
to resources. But I hope those give you a
couple of things to try out. Thank you.
Mhm. Thank you, Jenny. Okay, so
I'm going to demo two more this is the lightning
lightning round. We're trying to keep it interesting and
, um, show you lots of things that you
can use. So our next our next two are
the open textbook library. The open textbook library lives
at the University of Minnesota. It is a project
of the open textbook network and the Center for Open
Education at University of Minnesota. It contains over 350
openly licensed books. Um, these are fully downloadable
books in many different subject areas, ranging from accounting
to art to finance to engineering. Each of the
books has, uh, information about their author has
information about how to get the book information about the
license, and some of them, many of them
actually have reviews. So the open textbook network,
who is a supporter of the open textbook library commissions
faculty to review, um, books to, um
ascertain what kind of value they have. So these
are all faculty reviews. They're fairly straightforward in terms
of the kind of content that is analyzed here.
So looking at, uh, errors relevance. Um
, how easy is this material to use? What's
the organization like the consistent? Is it clear?
Um, can I divide it into parts if I
need to. How comprehensive is is a particular work
. So for each work you'll see a red button
, it might say, PdF, it might say
HTML. It might say Moby or press books or
lots of, um, lots of different things you
can took on the Pdf. And again, this
is a link. Um, so you are going
to the home for this book wherever the person has
put it, and you can an introduction to financial
accounting because of the license that is on this book
. And I apologize if I'm making you dizzy.
Um, because of the license that's on this book
, you are able to take this work, put
it on your own site. You don't have to
worry about potential broken links. You can adapt it
. Uh, that's a little easier said than done
, but we'll talk a little bit more about that
, and you can make it fit with your course
learning objectives, um, or use portions of it
that that might fit well for you. So if
you're wondering, how do I find the source material
for this item? You would click on the publisher
link. This is going to take you to the
place where, um there's more information about who created
this book. Um, so we could look for
on this particular site, we can look for supplements
. We can look for online assessments. We can
see other books that this particular group has created.
Uh, all of these books come from faculty authors
. They come from many different institutions. They come
from professional societies that create these kinds of works,
and they are varied in terms of their their purpose
there, um, length there, almost almost everything
. Uh, so we have several materials that are
in here, and we think this is a really
exciting and a growing collection. So if you end
up offering something that is fully downloadable that has an
open license on it that, uh, fit with
the scope of this particular project, you can submit
your book or link to your book, or you
could submit a, um, some information as Jenny
mentioned for somebody else's work. So I do this
regularly when I find items that people have. The
faculty have created that look like they would be of
great value to a larger community, So it's really
a defining tool. It's not a place to author
. Um, okay, so if you are wondering
and we'll talk more about this a bit later,
but I just want to point out, if you're
saying, Hey, I would really like to modify
something that's in here. I'm clicking on the link
for Center for Open Education in the middle of my
screen and what I'm going to look for is a
u R L for several of the guides that are
available through the open textbook network. So these are
actually available to anyone they happen to be under the
membership link. Member Resources. There are three guides
Right now. There's a brand new guide offering open
textbooks guide. There's a guy to research on open
educational resources adoption. How do you measure impact?
How do you make a case for doing more of
this work if it's something that you need to make
a case for? Uh and then there's a third
guide, and I was involved with this one,
uh, called modifying an open checkbook. This is
really a a tool for navigating technical complexity. When
you end up with a PdF, how on earth
do you edit? Edit it If you're a novice
, you're not a publisher. What do you need
to think about before you actually start? Uh,
should you do this? How much work is it
going to be? Um, what kind of technology
do you need to to you know, to do
this? So these are three guides that are that
I've I've found to be very helpful. So this
is the open textbook library again from University of Minnesota
. Okay, uh, and then the I'm going
to demo a second one, and this is and
we are common. We are Commons is appearing in
the first half of our program as well as the
second half. Oh, your comments is a place
to both link materials that are that you have created
or that others have created that have an open license
on them. And it is a place to build
. And I've asked Lisa P treatise and many Boland
from the who, uh, are deeply involved with
this project to speak at 11 o'clock there. One
is in California, so it's very early. Um
, but I thought I would do a really quick
demo. So those of you who are just interested
in finance chair would have a bird's eye view of
this resource. Uh, so in the right hand
corner, you see, discover, create connect.
This platform is meant to be social. It is
meant to connect people and to connect people to creating
and adapting and revising resources. If we just want
to discover we might look for our favorite are the
topic that we're Do I and I am okay,
a topic that we are trying to find. So
thermodynamics is the topic I've chosen, and I'm going
to select my educational level as, uh, college
and upper division. One thing to know about this
resource is that it's not just books. It is
far, far beyond books, and there are things
in here that are maybe free but that don't have
an open license. So be aware of of your
license when you are looking for when you were finding
things. So I've done a search on thermodynamics.
I have limited to upper upper division in college and
I have 20 different results. I can view these
in a number of different ways. Um, so
it can be you in a much, much smaller
list. Uh, and I can go back to
the picture of you if I want to see what
this resources. So let's take a look at,
um this third one at statistical mechanics, this page
is an entry from MIT. It, uh,
is in the subject area of statistics and probability,
and I'm gonna just click here and look at the
resource. So this is pulling me basically into a
frame. I'm still at the OU our common sight
. But I am viewing the material here, which
happens to be from MIT Open courseware project. And
I can look around and see various features that this
site offers so we can look at the syllabus for
this course I can look at lecture notes. Um
, m I t open courseware has provided problem sets
and some assignments and as well as project assignments.
And if I really want to, I can download
the course materials. I am not sure what format
this is in. If you want to talk about
that later, I'm happy to talk with you about
it. So this is one thing that you might
find, and we are comments. If this isn't
quite what you're looking for, we'll go back to
our our list of materials and we can find out
what else what else is here. Thermodynamics is a
book created by a now Virginia Tech faculty member.
This book lives in on a library server, and
it was created at through the Through Oklahoma University of
Oklahoma's open education initiative several years ago. So there
are many different ways of displaying content, and depending
on the platform, it might not be fully downloadable
. It might be something that you have to read
online. Um, but the surf, some basic
ways of of finding content. So if you find
if there are content items that you want to share
, you would need to register with your contact information
. There's no cost. Um, you need to
log in and you can see that, um,
I have a profile here. It will tell me
, um what group? Simon, how many resources
I've uploaded? Um, I can edit my profile
. I can add my picture. Um and it
tells me all of the things that I've contributed.
I can also create some groups. So I have
added, But I have created a group for a
book that colleagues in the Pamplin College of Business um
, worked on our open textbook fundamentals of business.
We get regular inquiries from people asking, Do you
have a test bank? Do you have slides?
Do you have? Do you have? Do you
have? And, uh, so I very recently
created this group so that we can share those things
and we can ask other people who are using the
book to also share those resources. So, um
okay. Any questions about these two before we move
to our next speaker? Thank you for being on
our field trip. Okay. Our next speaker is
my colleague, Kayla McNabb. Kayla is the teaching
and learning engagement consultant here at the university libraries.
She's an extraordinary teacher. Uh, she also is
a doctoral student in instructional design. So Kayla is
going to tell us about the Odyssey learning object repository
Monita. Hello, everyone. Um, we are
This is kind of a sneak preview. The honesty
learning project is kind of going to be rolled out
in full force in the fall, so there are
not quite as many things in the repository right now
. There will be whenever we're in full watch mode
, but it's been a really good place for us
to start sharing it and letting people know that it's
something that's coming, that we really hope it's gonna
be a good resource for our campus and anyone doing
teaching anywhere in the world. Um, so for
this first kind of part, I'm going to focus
on the finding and adapting content part of the program
, and let's click it and get right into it
. So this is our homepage? Um, we
like I said, we're gonna launch in the fall
of 2017. Um, and this is kind of
beta mode. It's a repository for learning objects that
have been created and is maintained by the university library
here at Virginia Tech. So that is, if
we go to our about page very simple. It's
for these sort of dynamic and growing resources from Virginia
Tech. Um, right now, a lot of
the things that have been created have been created for
specific courses, Um, through the library. Um
, but that will expand as our repository expands as
well. I'll show you a couple of different ways
that you can access things and find things that will
be useful for your classes. So the first thing
is right now browsing is easy to do because there
are so few objects. Um, right. So
you can browse based on the objects themselves or collections
that they're put into. Um, so for all
of the learning objects, Sorry, I'm not a
Mac person. I'm trying to scroll the wrong land
here. Um, you can see that there is
a title and then a brief subject for all of
the items and the same sort of thing in collections
, if we create a set of learning objects for
a specific course, Um, for example, we
worked with the School of Public and International Affairs and
made several learning objects for one of the courses over
there. Um, those are all in this one
collection. Um, we do a lot of teaching
for English 11 06 So they also have a resource
collection already. Um, as we move forward,
it will be much easier to search things using our
search function. So if you click there, then
you get the advanced search, and you can just
type in a keyword if you know something that you're
interested in for your class, or you can narrow
these down. Um, by any of them.
We use the Dublin core metadata. If anyone's familiar
with, um, doing that sort of, uh
, metadata collection, you can use any of those
or, um, different limiters on your search.
So I'm going to do a search for keywords.
I'm not going to put in any of the other
options, So we've got several videos that we've already
made that are about keywords, and I'll look at
Look at this developing keywords video. So the way
that this is set up, you can see kind
of the preview of the first frame of the video
. If it's a video, you can see a
preview of the pdf. If it's something like that
, and then below that, you can get all
of the information where you can access a direct link
to the MP four file. So if you just
want that video file and you want to embed it
in something else, that's fine. Or if you
want to link to it in YouTube, if you
don't want to host that video yourself, all that
information is here. Also, any rights that the
creators have, um, copyrights and that sort of
thing that the creators have limited, Um this is
C. C. By and for the most part
, that is our default. We want things that
are in this repository to be as open as possible
. Uh, some of the things that are created
, um, kind of in conjunction with faculty and
other departments. We negotiate that with those faculty members
, so they're providing the subject matter expertise for a
learning object. Then we want them to be comfortable
with how openly it's going to be shared. Um
, so it may be that they want it,
uh, there to be no derivatives, or they
may want it to be, um, not commercial
. Yeah, that sort of thing. But at
the very least, um, we would like just
some sort of attribution. But we really want this
to be as accessible to people within and outside the
university as possible. Yeah. So one thing that
that kind of connects to that. I also wanted
to mention, um, while I have attention,
uh, is we are creating things for this learning
object repository in conjunction with those faculty members outside of
the library. Often, um, some with inside
within the library, but also a lot outside the
library and to do that. We have the,
um, learning design studio. So that is a
space where faculty member can faculty members, graduate students
staff can create learning objects that could then be shared
on a lot of these platforms that we're talking about
today, Um, and made as openly available as
you are interested in, um, show that you
are. Oh, just as a point of reference
. Learning design studio is also being launched full scale
in the fall and is in kind of beta mode
right now. And we've worked with several faculty members
. Um, but it is a place within the
university libraries that we are dedicated to making these sorts
of learning objects and learning experiences that can be shared
, um, with faculty, staff, students and
beyond. Go back to that. There. Any
questions coming? Uh huh. All right. Thank
you very much. What's helpful to you with regard
to the platform? Are these new? Are these
things that you've seen before? Yes. Sanders.
Right. Good. Okay. So the comment for
those of you on online was that having access to
learning objects that are shared by colleagues and by others
is really valuable. The question is, would Is
there a template If someone wants to customize something that's
in the learning object repository? Um, Kayla,
do you want to answer that? And I'm going
to run and get mix for you. Well,
uh, currently in, uh, the honesty learning
project sites. We have those. We don't have
the component files for things like videos. Yet,
um, we would like to offer things kind of
in whatever. The most basic format is that we
can so that they're easy to edit, uh,
for things that are more text based. We try
to offer both PDFs and word document or text file
or something that's going to be easier for them to
edit. But we don't have kind of strict templates
yet. Um, we would like to offer some
templates for things even just, um, kind of
best practices for presentation layouts that can kind of convey
well in video, things like that, Um,
and we're working to put together a rubric so that
people would be able to work from that rubric as
they create their own objects or adapt things that are
currently in the repository. Or they find that other
repositories or places online. Yeah. Yes, Yeah
, Mhm. We are in the process of getting
, um, kind of older videos, captions.
All of the videos that we've made recently should have
captioning. Um, we make all of them from
scripts, so we already have the text. That's
really good. You know what? We have done
? The issue That, uh, it's my understanding
we ran into before my time, um was that
some of those repositories were more difficult to access.
Then they really wanted, um, or more difficult
to search, um, or to add things to
and have them the, um, kind of as
contained as they can be in the repository that we've
created. Um And I mean, our repository is
built on a mecca. So it's, uh,
kind of The framework is very similar to a lot
of repositories for a lot of other purposes. Um
, not typically learning objects. Um, but to
be able to have a place where we could kind
of create this community and it be kind of an
output for the Odyssey Learning project, which is a
bit of a broader idea, is really why we
wanted to have a kind of a forward facing component
of that, uh And that grew out of the
needs assessment that, um, the Learning Services Group
, now the teaching and learning engagement group in the
library performed over the last year and a half.
Two years, Um, where we ran into a
lot of these questions that people either wanted to find
learning objects or wanted to find things like videos.
And we're having trouble. Or they wanted to share
things that they had created, and they didn't know
how or where to do it. There's also somewhat
of a difference between a repository for archival works that
cannot be changed, and those that are intended to
be changed as well as maybe, are more interactive
than something like a PdF. So we can't upload
, execute herbal files to be tech work. I
mean, we could, but you can't use them
. So there are some limitations of some of the
laughter that we haven't know how scale our handle,
execute a bles, or if you can manipulate things
within, use it as a hosting platform. But
there, you know there's some differences there to write
what she's hearing about. Yeah, there, there
, there thing. Uh, the question is,
what's the difference between a learning object and a resource
. Everything a learning object is specifically designed for learning
. Uh, it's designed for classroom use or for
teaching and learning. It may have a pedagogical framework
in it. Besides, uh, something that is
a flat file that's meant for reading or for dissemination
of finding a good question, there really isn't a
different. It's in the purposefulness of how something is
built. I would say that is actually a component
of my research for my dissertation and its hotly contested
Um, but I see those as kind of a
Venn diagram. Learning objects are things, um,
and they are resources, often particularly open educational resources
can be learning objects right and multiple learning objects,
or what you put together to make a learning experience
. So learning experience being a module in a class
. So those learning objects, maybe a worksheet and
a discussion board, uh, kind of framework and
video and an interactive module that you made through articulate
storyline or something like that. So those would be
the individual learning objects that you're putting together to create
some sort of experience is going to execute your learning
outcomes. Where did you learn the learner is the
one experiencing. A lot of that is, um
, doing parts hopefully actively engaging as they read or
watch, Um, but definitely doing in the assessment
portions when you have an interactive quiz or something like
that, or if you have some sort of framework
document or worksheet that they're going to be using as
they go through the experience or in response to the
experience you hit on a really good point that learning
is not just a consuming activity of of consuming content
, of processing content that learning can and should involve
creating and building. We will talk a little bit
about how, UM, some of that is happening
and adopt and adapt. And that's really the beauty
of open educational resources and Creative Commons works is that
you could actually have. You are students could improve
them, could mix them and and remix them into
new and different things. Things with the different application
. We've seen that with some faculty who are using
one of the the platforms over leaf to have their
students build textbooks built, not textbooks, build books
as part of their assessments. As part of their
learning process, he essentially demonstrate their knowledge of the
subject material. So which platform would you recommend for
the following youth? So adaptive learning is recommended for
us and in mathematics. We currently have resources for
individual courses, so somebody would point to supplementary text
or to a video to support a technique. But
ideally, we want something for the entire department that
we can just point students to a platform and look
for resources. So you're asking about a collection of
activities? Probably. There are a few different ways
to approach that question. One is to look at
something like Carnegie Mellon's online Learning Initiative. So the
open Learning Initiative features many different then different topics.
One of our speakers this afternoon we'll talk about her
use of this platform. So we do have a
faculty member who is using, um, interesting.
I see no very little mass in here. Um
, she's using this type of system, too.
Enable students, um, to get rapid feedback on
the work that they're doing. So I was expecting
that there would be a lot more mathematics in here
than there is logic and proof. Perhaps we could
start there, so this may be something that you
would want to look into, and apparently there is
a maintenance fee. Um, this is one thing
to to look at to consider. Okay, Is
are their fees for some of the add on kinds
of things. Yeah, there are a few other
things you could do if you are interested. And
I know that Kilos is looking into some of this
kind of work. If you're interested in finding content
that you could put into a platform, using openly
licensed content is definitely something you would want to look
at. So I would start with some of the
more well known mathematics books that are definitely licensed with
Creative Commons License open stacks is is one where they
have many mathematics books at different levels. The content
is electronic. It's in many different formats. It
may be there would definitely be some work in populating
system with this kind of content. But in terms
of writing or getting permission, you can use whatever
stare as long as you attribute, um and then
thirdly, I would check with your professional societies.
Um, I would check with the American Mathematical Association
of check with with the other math associations, both
on the community college level and on a research level
to see what kinds of other resources are available.
So and we can talk more offline and I'll take
take some time to look for you. Also,
As you know, Khan Academy of Resources may be
a third, and if anyone online wants to offer
suggestions, you're welcome to to jump in and offer
suggestions. So we see a lot of expansion both
in the STEM and arts and Humanities field within Khan
Academy. If you are not familiar with Khan Academy
, what you should know is that there are many
kinds of videos. Activities that can be assigned to
students or students can do on their own are some
are paste. Some are more of a one time
interaction. But because of the license of these materials
, these are really things you could incorporate into your
person. Yeah, um, beyond that, I'm
stumped at the moment. We need to do a
little bit more looking around. Yeah, so I
see it that we we know where the resources is
that we have bettered that we want to make accessible
, right? So But what is the platform that
we presented to the student. So if a student
is doing homework and is struggling to have a specific
site where they can go and look that we support
the presentation of and identify okay, this is a
good place to look. How do you want?
Make that uniform? I would I would enter into
a conversation about integration of this content into our learning
management system. Or if you have a platform that
your students are otherwise familiar with in which they could
do this kind of work, there's There are two
different minds regarding how transparent a classroom should be.
And if you hear a open content, how you
should share it with the world or if you should
keep it locked in the learning management system, Um
, that's really a That's a departmental and a fact
decision. Um, there is some value in saying
, Hey, I curated this wonderful set of course
materials, and I want to share it, even
if there are references to things that everybody can't get
into. You see the example of the M I
T open course where where you do have links to
buy the sun. Amazon links to things that are
not open but someone can get a general sense of
how the overall courses packaged and the types of materials
that are included in it is that the platform M
I t uses? Probably not, But being able
to share that with other people so they can see
. Oh, that's how someone else teaches this concept
. Or that's how the Kurds in the structures These
are very valuable. Yeah. Any other questions?
Uh, and if not, let's take a break
and we'll be back at 11. 2, Um
, catch up with our next set of speakers and
folks in the room. Coffee if they wish.
Okay. Thank you. We'll be back at 11
. We are back. We're still recording. You
can tweet to open education week, Um, talk
in the chat, and, uh, we're just
gonna switch the, um the times for over Leaf
vs. We are comments. So as background,
um, have the chart. Um, I would
love to hear your thoughts on any of them.
Any of this. You're welcome to share this as
well. And, um, we'll hear from Ryan
loony now. So Hi, everybody. Um,
as Anita said, I'm Ryan Lenny and the client
services manager with over leaf and my contact info is
on the bottom of this slide, and I'll show
it again in case you need to get in touch
with me. And I'm here to tell you about
how to author and adapt using uber leaf look.
So today I'm going to go over. What over
Leaf is for those of you who may not be
familiar with our products and also over sudden latex basic
, since overly helps you use latex, I'll give
a few stats about over leaf at Virginia Tech,
and then I'll transition into a demo of how to
find an upload content that you want to adapt.
Also, how to offer content from scratch on over
leaf. And then hopefully we'll have time for a
little bit of Q and A at the end.
So over leaf deals with late check. And for
those of you who are familiar with Logitech, Logitech
allows you to write your document in plain texts with
tags that describe its structure and meaning. So it's
not dissimilar to HTML or XML that uses tagging to
tell a program how to deal with that text that's
been written late check processes that text and those commands
to produce the beautifully formatted document, and you can
see you start out with this code on the left
and you end up with these nice itemized lists or
an image or an equation that's over here on the
right. Here are just a few tips and tricks
about latex, but commands start with a backslash,
and arguments are in currently braces that tell latex how
to make that text to behave. And how does
latex do that? Well, Latex uses a lot
of files that talk to each other. There's a
main file. There's a class file and a style
file. There may be image files. There may
be a bibliography, and there may be all kinds
of other files. So if you're collaborating on latex
, typically until very recently, the way you did
that was everybody had their own version of latex,
which is open source software on their computer, and
it would be downloaded and live on your hard drive
. And you would download files to your hard drive
and your latex would compile those files and, um
, produce your document for you. And, um
, what over Leaf does is it flips that and
it um makes one version of that document in the
cloud accessible to all. So that's overly for relief
, allows you to collaborate and edit only tech documents
in the cloud without having to install anything locally.
And, um, over. Leaf also does a
few other nice things other than just compiling latex documents
. It also gives you access control so you can
control who can see and edit your projects. There
are some other services that are integrated in UM,
such as reference manager services, um, things like
plot li as well and then version history tracking so
you can see who made what changes, and you
can revert back to previous versions if you need to
, and I'll shoot out to a demo in a
minute. But this is just the teaser of what
you'll see. There's an editor on the left,
and then your pipe set compiled GDF on the right
. Mhm now at Virginia Tech for the people who
are in the room, there are, as of
uh, Sunday, there are 1116 confirmed users collaborating
on almost 7000 projects, and there's an average of
1.5 collaborators per project and as many as 140 collaborators
per project. So that's a That's a fun statistic
that, uh, maximum number of collaborators to watch
that wouldn't go up. And if you are a
member of the Virginia Tech community, you do have
access to a free over leaf pro account, and
you can go to this. You are at the
top of the screen over leaf dot com slash au
slash v. Tech and you can claim your free
over leaf Pro account by validating your Virginia Tech email
address. So that's a little bit of background about
what over Leaf does. And I'm gonna go into
a live demo now, and what I'm going to
show you is how to, um, find files
and download them, upload those files over leaf and
modify them, or how to locate a suitable template
that's already on over leaf and put your own content
into that book templates. And then either method that
you choose how to edit and how to share those
documents. Mhm. Good. So let me go
over to a browser here, so I think I
saw this earlier this morning. You did talk about
the open textbook libraries and um yesterday I went to
the open textbooks library, and I found this open
logic project book. Um, and it turns out
that had been made using latex. There's nothing,
uh, magical on that, um, repository that
tells you whether or not it's made in latex.
But usually something like, if you go into the
publisher, it may stay here somewhere in the description
. It may say this was built using late check
, and here are source file. So, um
, you can see this one. Uh, it's
open source. You can download the latex code.
Yeah. So I'm going to go and find that
latex coat, and it's a lawyer down here.
It's hosted on Get hub, and this is git
hub. And there's this nice green clone or download
button, and I'm gonna go ahead and just download
a sip of that repository. And so I've got
that downloaded, and now I can go to over
Leaf. So, um, just to give you
a quick overview of over leaf, this is what
our homepage looks like. And you can start just
as easily as click and create a new paper.
You don't even need to be signed in to do
that. Although if you do want to, um
, save and share your work, it helps to
create an account. And for what we're going to
do now to just upload some existing files, I'm
going to go to my my projects dashboard, and
that's acceptable up at the top of the screen next
to my name. And this shows me all the
projects that I've been working on, um, which
are important to us now. But what is important
is this new project button and primarily this upload button
. So I'm gonna click that, and I'm going
to upload the zip that I just downloaded. And
it's very nicely allows me to just drag and drop
. So I'm going to drop that and it imports
those files and it actually unpacks that zip. And
if those files where they need to go and occasionally
there'll be, um, some files that, um
, don't download correctly. But I think that's of
no consequence, really. In this project, you
may find, depending on your source code, that
you may have to do a little bit of cleanup
work, um, in the source or a lot
of clean up pork. Yeah, and if you're
not familiar with late check. It can look a
little bit daunting, because you do. You see
all these tags in here and all this source code
. Ryan. Sorry. Can you expand the view
a little bit, make your screen a little bit
larger? Sure. I have it at full screen
right now. Uh, do like a plus.
Uh, yeah. Thank you. Yeah. How's
that? Is that better? Okay, so here
we have your daunting looking source code, okay?
And you can actually switch over to a rich text
view. This is great if you lot of latex
before or if you're new to using over Leaf.
Um, you can, um, go into this
, uh, source code mo or rich text mode
, and you'll still see some, um, stuff
here start to see things that look a little familiar
. Like, here's that title. So it says
the open logic text and all I need to do
um, here is just start typing in that editor
and you'll see in just a moment that previous going
to refresh and it should update my title. It
is always slowest during a live demo. Okay?
And you can see over here in our files pain
that these are all these files that I was talking
about before that latex concatenate and compiles together to turn
into, um, this nicely typeset documents So refreshing
. So while that's refreshing, I'm gonna show you
what you want to do. Um, if you
want to just create your own text from scratch rather
than adapting someone else's work. So in over a
week we have, um, lots of templates that
are already built in, um, to the system
, and they're accessible from this template page on over
leaf and have some popular tags here. Just some
categories. And there's even one, um, you
can also search on any tag or key where you
wish to search on as well. They'll fight Mexico
in books you can see right away. There are
a few books here. There's quite a few,
actually. And, um, the two I'm going
to show you is one that's really simple and when
it's a little more complex. So here's this,
like hockey pob e book template, and you can
see the, uh, public license. And there's
a little, uh, tool tip about our different
licenses there. And if I want to start writing
in this, I opened this as a template you
can see again. Here is that, um,
editor. And here's our preview. I can slip
over to the rich tech mode so it looks a
little less daunting. And you'll notice over here in
the preview, it might be a little smallest See
. But after this first paragraph, it goes into
alarm. Epsom. And that's just pulled in by
this lip. Some command, so I can get
rid of that. If I want to where I
can leave it there, I'll leave it there for
now. But, um, I will start just
typing some other texts and we'll see if that preview
where we're fresh this, then there we go there
, you can see. Um, there's the test
text that I just wrote over here in the preview
. So this is a really simple template that you
can use, and it really just, um arranges
it nicely into paragraphs, gives it some basic formatting
. Um, give that some consistent font and some
consistent style. For instance, it pulls in the
page numbers automatically and does a few other things to
be helpful. Now, if I want to do
something a little more complex. Let me find my
uh huh templates. There's also something like the tough
decide book, and this one is also under a
Creative Commons license as well. And I can open
this one as a template, and this one's a
little more wanting to look at. You'll see there's
this text in Blue. It's commented out using a
percent sign so it gives you a little bit of
explanatory text here. And, um, this is
our top style book and it pulls in a bunch
of different commands to give it that, um,
failure. Tough t Look, if you ever seeing
his work before for any of his books. And
again, just like with the other one, I
can, uh, make modifications to this tax and
hopefully the preview will refresh and it will show that
over here, there we go. I like good
design. So it's, uh, compiled my edit
, right? And you'll notice I wrote just as
I write normally and again, it, um it
applies all the formatting and even that, um,
full capitalization. Um, without me having to do
anything, I could conceivably take my same text,
and I could pull in a different latex package,
and it would apply different formatting to that, and
it would make it look completely different. Now I
want to share my book or my project that I've
been working on. I have a couple of options
, so the first one is just this. Pdf
. If I click the PDF button, it's going
to create a pdf that downloads, and I can
open up that. PdF. And there it is
. It's just a pdf of this stuck, and
hopefully you can see if I'm scrolling through so I
can distribute that. Pdf, as I wish,
if I want to do something else if I want
to invite collaborators, for instance, or I want
people to be able to see, um, all
of these, um, different files that I have
over here, I can share it in a couple
of different ways so I can allow people to read
and edit my work by distributing this. U R
l Anybody who has this u r. L is
going to be able to come into this project just
like I'm in it now and make any edits that
they wish. We do have versioning and history,
so you'll be able to see who made which edit
. But if I don't want them to make any
edits, I can share this read only link with
them. So, um, this allows them to
see the project, and they can see the files
, but they can't make any changes to it.
Then the other option I have with the pro account
is to make this a protected project this way.
Um, the only way we can get into this
project is if I invite them and allow them to
edit it or just to read it. And so
now that I've invited Shelly to work on this project
, she can get into this project if she has
logged into her over leaf account. But nobody else
can get into this, uh, project so she
can't distribute that you are all without my knowledge and
move it around. So those are the basics.
The very basics of, um, adapting and authoring
with over leaf. And I know we're running,
um, a little short on time. So,
um, I have some slides, and I'll send
these to Anita. Um, or you can contact
me to get a copy of this presentation and have
some additional helpful links in it. Um, we
do have a robust f A Q and help section
over leaf dot com slash help, and you can
always contact anybody at overly fat over lean dot com
slash contact. Does anybody have any questions? No
questions from the room. All right, well,
thank you, everyone. Um thanks, Anita,
for inviting me to participate in this. And again
, please feel free to, um, get in
touch if you have any questions about offering with over
leaf. Thank you, Ryan. Okay, So
our next presenter mhm presenters are Lisa Petrino's and then
the Boland of the Institute for Knowledge Management and Education
. SK Lisa is the founder and CEO of It's
Me. And Mindy serves as the manager of our
products and services, and they are going to talk
with us about your comments. Good morning. This
is Lisa P treaties and my colleague Windy Bolan's from
me, and we are Commons. And thank you
so much, Ryan, for jumping in ahead of
us as we worked out a few problems on our
end. Um, we're here this morning to talk
about, uh oh. Er comments are digital public
library and collaboration platform. and I wanted to start
by telling you a little bit about Ask me.
We are in education, nonprofits if you don't know
us and our work is really focused on improving the
practice of continuous learning, collaboration and change in the
education sector. Open education resources is a big part
of our work and since 2000 and seven, we
have developed and been running the Digital Public Library er
Commons to really support curriculum improvement in both higher ed
K 12 community colleges and also in informal education.
Our infrastructure really leverages best practices in library science,
and we focus a lot on the interoperability around our
content and our tools and our services. Um,
we have been curating collections from over 400 content providers
of and we are integrated with many different local campus
based or district wide LMS is and we also have
been mhm, mhm. We have been we host
content on oh er comments through our authoring tools,
which you'll see a little bit of today. Um
, and the platform itself enables you to both create
collaborate and remix content as well as look at content
that is hosted, um, and other places that
we can still align to standards and put in groups
and collections. And we'll show you a bit of
that this morning as well. So, Mindy,
why don't you go ahead and share your screen?
Sure. Thank you all again for joining us this
morning. Um, so as you can see here
, this is only our comments, and you can
see the web access to and with the other way
. Either way, um, as Lisa said,
we consider earlier comments of digital public library of open
education resources, but we also think about it in
terms of collaboration and authoring. So I want to
show a little bit about finding content on o er
comments and then get into some of the authoring and
collaboration tools that we offer as features of the site
. So first, you know, right away when
you get to o er comments, we like to
make it easy to get straight to resources. We
know that that is often the primary reason that people
come to er Commons. So we put this search
bar right here in the center. You can see
how you can also filter right across the front here
. If you're looking for something specific so, as
you all are probably aware earlier can be many things
it could be. Of course, it could be
a lab. It could be a video, and
people come looking for different reasons on the left.
Once you've done a search with a keywords like I
did, you can filter your search using these different
filters. So, for example, if I came
here and I was really looking for an interactive to
use in my course, I could select that filter
, and it would take me to stimulations and different
kinds of interactive resources. So let's go into this
foot simulation, and I'll show you what it looks
like when you get to a resource page. Um
, all of the resources on O. R.
Comments have landing pages like this one. There's a
few different things you can do here. There's a
lot of descriptive information about the resource. There are
tags the user generated, and internally generated users can
add more. You can see right away the conditions
of use. You can comment, share your experience
of the resource. You can also provide a star
rating here, particularly sources aligned to a few different
common core standards. But you can also evaluate it
using an invite the achieved rubric, which is right
here. And if you're not interested in the standards
, you can get in and still talk about the
quality of the subject matter, the utility of the
materials and all of that and every bit of user
generated resource. Um, feedback like that evaluation star
ratings comments really adds to the value of what you
find out. We are Commons. This is a
resource that is hosted externally, and that means that
we don't own it. We just indexed it.
We have described it. We've made it easy for
you to find, and then we will take you
out to it. But when you get links to
it from earlier comments, you will get this I
frame at the top of the screen, which allows
you to still do those same things that you were
doing could do before you can rate it. You
can evaluate it. You can comment on it.
Um, you can also share it on social media
or again, add tags. You can save it
to my items or groups. And then, um
, this icon here is if you're using Google Apps
for education. You can save this to my classroom
. And that way you can create assignments for your
students. Yeah, Since we don't have a lot
of time, I'm going to jump over now to
the authoring tools. Um, we offer three different
cropping platforms on O er comment. I'm going to
show you two of those today. Um, open
author is are more mature platform. Essentially, you've
got a single page and a WYSIWYG editor across the
top. You need to get the title and on
the left here, you can create some structure and
outline to your resource with the units and headings and
subheadings. So there's really just headers that will create
a table of contents. I could format this with
all these nice formatting tools across the top. I
can also insert media. So maybe I have a
picture that I want to include in my In my
resource, this is going to not be very smooth
. Here we go. And one thing that,
you know, er comments is accessibility. So resources
that are added or images that are added to open
author or the module builder you do have to provide
an aria description included in addition to a short one
. So Okay, so you would do that there
and then you've embedded the picture across the bottom.
Here, you can see some other features of older
comments. You can associate your resource with other earlier
that you've saved. So perhaps my resource about my
dog is really related to geometry in three D,
and I could add that there and those will be
a link there. So when users come to this
resource, they will also have reference to this resource
here. I could add co authors. If I'm
working with a colleague, I could add them to
my resource, and we can work together on it
in draft form and collaborate. Um, the last
piece here is import from Google docs, which I
know is important to educators because so many people do
work in Google docs here. If I click import
from Google docs, it will link into my my
Gmail account, and that is where I would be
able to create a new resource. It would also
carry that formatting over. Now I'm going to go
back and show you a published open up a resource
so This is what a resource looks like when you've
already When you published it on Oh, er comments
, um, you can see here on the left
we've got the summary and the learning goals. Those
are parts of the described screen that will show you
in a minute. So everything that you author on
, er comments you have to describe it with some
metadata, which is what makes it findable for other
users. Um, also on the left. Here
, you can see some more information about the resource
, including the version history, which is a nice
feature to show you how a resource has been remixed
. How many times whether it's been translated, um
, something that you don't get when you're making a
copy in Google Dogs. One of the nice things
about using, open and author is that it's really
easy to remix. All you should do is like
remix this resource, Um and you'll have you'll be
back in that editing mode that we saw a moment
ago. So this is inevitable version of the same
resource. So now I could make this more applicable
to my students. I could change some examples,
change the text, whatever you wanted to do to
update it to make it. I work for your
students. Now this is the describes cream that you
would do for any open author resources where you add
your descriptive information, your abstract, the subjects,
all of those bits of information that make it findable
for others. And the last step would be the
submit button here, and that is where you'll be
adding your Creative Commons license. We'd like to keep
it simple with just a couple of questions and and
then you're on your way. So that is open
author. We're going to also show you quickly the
module builder the module builder is again. It's another
authoring tool, and the difference, really is that
with this tool, you can create both student and
instructor facing views so you can make a task,
for example, for a student, but still communicate
to other people using the resource like your intentions or
the learning objectives it was meant to solve. For
example, again, you can have an opening image
. This overview is just to describe what the module
is about. It does more instructor facing than student
facing, and this slightly different with your weight editor
, but similar. Um, you can again embed
images and videos and math and tables all of the
formatting that you can see here. You can also
attach resources to your module. So if you have
, for example, an anchor text or some sort
of solutions or, you know, rubrics, whatever
you can associate those at the both the module level
and at the task level. Um so these are
the tasks, and this is where you would see
both the instructor and the student facing content. So
again, this is where I could talk about the
learning objectives boy. And this is where I would
create the student facing content. So, um,
what's nice here is you can have some activities for
a student to do and say you're using an anchor
tax. You can attach that here by adding a
resource. Um, similarly, you go through a
described screen and you can have co authors. I'm
going to show you one that's published, I think
is a nice example of using this module builder tool
. This was done by somebody at University of Washington
, and you can see she's created this this nice
module overview. She's linked out to some other resources
as an introduction. And then really, what they
did was use slides as the main, the main
path students to view. And I'm going to use
this to show you also here on the right you
have. This is what we call the student view
. And that is where you would see the content
that was specifically meant for the students. So each
of those tasks that are created is a student as
part of this student view. And this was what
you would get if you were accessing this module using
the lti consumer, for example. Go back over
here and you can see again just remixed button,
which lets me just change it up. So each
of these would be editable. And if I was
to edit this and publish it, the original author
would be notified that I did that just to show
you the described screen for the module builder. You
can see it here. It's very similar to open
author. You put the education levels and subjects the
licensing, all of that. Okay, now I'm
going to back it up a moment before I move
off of bothering. Does anyone have any questions you're
all forced to meet anyway, aren't you? Um
, Okay, so now I want to show you
group, um, groups is a feature of all
E. R comments. That's really meant for communities
of practice to facilitate communication. Um, collaborative sharing
curation. Um, just really to create a way
for folks to work together. Um, I added
myself to be to Anita's Virginia er project to use
that as our example today. Sorry, Anita,
I'll get out of your group when I'm done.
Um, but you can see here. We've got
this nice description. You can see the members and
resources. They've done some soldering here on the left
. And this is a nice way to, um
, create your own taxonomy about how you want to
organize your resources. Um, there's also a discussion
board. And this If I was to start a
discussion, I could do that here. I would
be notified about responsive new threads. Um, you
can also pin resources or discussions to the top of
the list. So if you have, for example
, guidelines for your group or a welcome for your
discussion board, you can pin this to the top
so that users would see those first, um,
groups are available to anyone on o er comment as
long as you're a registered user. And so there
a nice way to get started using only our Lastly
, I'm going to go to hugs, which is
a service that provides, um, we have a
number of different kinds of network hubs. They can
be at a state level, a district level.
Um, we've worked with some consortium to we've worked
with NGOs. Um, we've also partnered with other
organizations. Um, also, sometimes it creates our
own hubs when we notice a particular interest from our
users. So, um, the first one I'm
going to show you is the open fact tub,
because I think this is a wonderful example of how
we have partnered with another. We are content provider
, um, open stacks books, and I'm sure
you guys are aware are openly licensed college textbooks.
And, um, they found that people who were
using their books really, you know, they wanted
they were creating ancillary is to support the books,
whether that was power points or study guides, etcetera
. And they wanted to share back to the community
. So it was kind of like open practice in
action and open sex insiders who work with that.
We are common to create a hub so that they
would have a place for the community of users to
start sharing their content back. So what they've done
is they have some nice guidelines here at the top
, and then they have a working group for each
of their books. And people who use these books
can join the group and they can start contributing.
So what they've done, they've pinned this resource at
the top. How to use the open sex community
hub and then down here, they have resources that
have been submitted by their users. Mm hmm.
I should also note that when you're a member of
a group, it's easy to add to the group
. There was a contribute to this group brought down
right here, and you can submit a U R
l. Or you can submit an author resource and
it will be added directly to the group. I'm
going to go back to the hub. Let me
find you another Clinton should give you, um I
One of one of my favorite hubs to show is
the Michigan Colleges online, Michigan. They have an
association of 28 community colleges and they are doing and
we are initiative. And so they have developed this
hub for that work. And, um, I
like the way they did it. It's very straightforward
. They have there descriptive. You know, this
is what this hub is about. And then they've
created curated collections around each of the primary discipline topics
that their colleges and you can see right away.
These are not huge collections. And I think that
is an important thing to note because really, what
this shows is that there really emphasizing resources that they
have vetted and that they wanted they want to share
with their with their community. So people from Michigan
colleges or really other colleges could come here and note
that these resources have been validated their high value,
and they've been chosen to be a part of this
hub. What they did here below is they use
the same group, the er Commons groups, and
they created one for each of their colleges. Um
, in in planning this hub, we work closely
with the librarians at these different colleges, and I
believe what they do is they're they're adding resources.
The members of the groups are adding resources. And
then when they have been fully vetted, they get
added to the collections. So this is a nice
way to do that sort of community curation process using
the groups. And again, they've done the same
kind of folder in here on the Left. Another
thing that happens when you get a hub. If
you are the person who is the administrator of the
Hub, you have this hub settings link in the
top right corner, and this allows you to sort
of control the look and feel of your hub.
And what is this late there? So I could
change the title. I can change the description,
the logo, the cover image. All of this
is available to the administrator for managing the site.
Yeah, on the left. Also, they have
control of their membership so they could make other members
into administrators. They could add. People remove people
same for groups they can add. Groups remove groups
, change the order in which they are displayed collections
as well, and here with announcements, they can
push out announcement to all of the members of their
hub whether they do that only as an announcement that's
displayed on the page or via email. That is
the choice, Um, for each announcement, they
can make that choice. And lastly, what they
get here are activity reports, which is a nice
way to measure engagement with their hub activity. Reports
can be viewed by users by standard alignment, or
you can filter by groups by user type, and
you can see how how it's being used. So
they've got 385 shared resources. 111 saved. You
can see that all across the top. And then
there's also some graphical views, and you can see
them all here, too. And you can export
those out in CSP if you want it to.
So a nice way If you are trying to measure
the engagement with your hub or you want to report
up to someone else in your in your administration,
you can do that here, too. Okay,
that was kind of a whirlwind Lisa. Did I
forget anything? So I think that was great in
the time that we have, and I believe that
you can't ask questions directly here, but you could
send them into the chat screen. If you'd like
to ask anything, okay? It doesn't. It
doesn't appear that there's anything feel free to contact us
. I'm simply Lisa at isc me dot org and
India's suspending, and it's dot org. And,
Anita, thank you very much for your delighted to
be able to present here this morning with you.
Yes, Thank you. Hello. This is Hugh
. Okay, so I'm going to talk about two
platforms, um, that are related. Um,
one is the Revis community and the others press books
. Um, I think I'm gonna start with the
Revis community. Um, to explain what that is
and press books is a tool that we're using within
the religious community, so I can talk a bit
about that. Um, So the idea behind Revis
community is that there are a lot of open textbook
projects happening. Um, generally relatively small projects.
Um, you know, one book, two books
, five books creating open textbooks at various campuses around
, um, well, around the world. Really
? And the idea behind Revis, um, is
threefold. Um, first of all to try to
make a standard, um, community driven process that
makes sense for creating open textbooks. Um, so
a lot of times, what's happening is a Usually
it's a librarian. It gets tasked at a campus
with running there. But we are a program which
involves getting adoptions but also helping support creation. And
that means generally they're having on the creation side to
sort of invent, um, out of usually thin
air publishing process for getting up in textbooks out into
the world. Um, and so the idea was
Revis is to partner with existing institutions. Um,
like, uh, someone like Anita, um,
or any library or any faculty who is creating an
open textbook, Um, And to help develop a
process around that, um, eventually to make it
very clear what the process ought to be, um
, and build tools to help manage that process.
So again that it's clear, for instance, that
at a certain phase you might need to do proof
reading. Um, you might need to get pure
review done, etcetera. So build in a set
of tools to support a workflow for creating open textbooks
. Um, and finally, all of everything,
we're doing it. Revis is undergirded by the notion
that we really need to foster collaboration across different institutions
to make open textbook creation scalable. So, you
know, we have, uh, open tax that
is probably the most famous of the open textbook projects
. Um, they have a very, uh,
wonderful program, but it's a very traditional publishing models
, so the cost is high. Um, and
and it's it's not really an open publishing process in
any sense. Um, it's, uh, they've
approached. It really is a traditional publishing workflow publishing
process. And at the end of the process,
you've got open content, which is great, but
in terms of scalability, the cost is high.
There in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce
their textbooks, or at least some of the big
ones, um, and finding ways to support more
grassroots open textbook creation is what we're trying to do
here. So the idea is to develop a process
around, um, creating open textbooks that is,
uh, developed with input from the community. Um
, developed tools and developed, uh, undergrad all
of that with the idea of collaboration. Um,
so Revis community at the moment is essentially a discussion
forum, but we're using it to manage specific projects
so you can find us here in the U.
R L is forum dot reviews community. Um,
and here is, for instance, a list of
users who signed up and said Hello. So here's
Julie Ward from University of Oklahoma has got a Spanish
book. We have David Squires from Washington State.
There's cereal overland or etcetera. So these are people
who joined on board and have expressed interest in either
starting projects or helping out on the projects. Um
, and again, the idea is that if someone
at University of Oklahoma is working on a special language
book, there may well be someone at University of
, uh, Humboldt State University that would be interested
in contributing to that. Um, and this is
really driven by the notion of the open source approach
to things that, rather than having one person or
one institution, takes, you know, the whole
raft of what needs to be done to create an
open textbook, that we can find ways to break
up the work, um, and distribute that work
across a broad swath of people. So we really
see ourselves as as helping develop the infrastructure. But
always with this notion that collaboration is the most important
piece. If we want to get this to work
at scale. Um, part of what we're doing
is just helping as we're talking into various people.
Uh, we're working on open textbook programs, figuring
out issues that need to be resolved that aren't specific
to a particular project but are generally important overall.
So here's a threat where we're working on developing an
approach community driven approach to accessibility and open textbooks.
And that means figuring out how we build accessibility into
the whole offering process from the beginning, rather than
having it be sort of a gate that you have
to pass at the end and may require remediation.
Another issue that's come up is M. O.
U S and contracts for faculty making. Oh,
we are. So we're working to develop a set
of templates around that so that people can take a
draft template and adapted to their needs. Various other
issues. Another big one that we're trying to figure
out is pure review. So how can we build
your review into the publishing process and just make that
a formalized piece of the process itself? Very important
. Everything we're doing thing we try to really work
as a um a note for collaboration, but working
with everyone we can work with. So that includes
other organizations, like the open textbook network, Um
, other publishers, like open stacks and certainly all
sorts of libraries. And, um, uh,
libraries and universities and colleges around the world. Um
, yeah. So here's just a threat of of
how we plan to address, uh, the accessibility
question. Um, and we have a group of
people, people who are posting and discussing this,
and then we might break out into other conversations elsewhere
. And in this case, what we're doing is
we're taking a, uh, representative open textbook,
and we're just going to review it. Um,
So I think about five different experts and accessibility are
gonna review that open textbook and help develop just at
least that we have a shared language about approaches to
this and figure out how we can implement, um
, systems upstream to help support accessibility. Um,
that's the discussion peer review, which I think is
a really critical part of open textbooks. So again
, we want to identify these sort of public.
What's your type? Problems within the process of making
a technical files find ways to solve them that makes
makes sense. Um, global distributed, collaborative,
collaborative kind of way. Um, this year is
a list of our active, open textbook projects that
we're working on. Um, so we've limited ourselves
. We're starting with 12 projects. Uh, and
we doing that something focus on these projects and work
on generally, we're working on a specific issue within
each project. Um, you can see the list
of projects here were working on were working on the
open anthology of early future planning and implementing a digital
community. And these projects Good Washington. Um,
literature, review of education, nursing graduate students with
Washington state. Um, i'll do some work with
, uh uh, yeah, mhm and existing.
So developing some silly materials and help from the idea
. Really? For us is organizing mhm and hope
Is that this stuff? Whatever happens here, it
goes out to the youth. Yeah, of course
. Um, into all sorts of platforms. And
if in some cases, were working for from the
side of the project, So, for instance,
we have our uh huh, most, um,
complex projects. Interesting to help. People can do
it. Uh, we've been able to sense in
talking. Yeah, I see. There's some notes
here saying that people are having trouble hearing me.
And I was like, Okay, now, Okay
, a few minutes. Okay. Um, okay
. So I'll continue on. Just keep an eye
on the chat here if things go wrong with the
with the audio just to let me know again.
Um So, as I was saying with the intro
to philosophy project, which is led by Christina Hendricks
, sort of University of British Columbia, we really
were working from the very beginning of the project to
do everything from helping to develop the table of contents
, helping to get collaborators on board. Um,
and we'll just be working all the way through the
project to help with that, Um, with the
, uh, history of science and Technology project here
with, um out of the University of Maryland.
In that case, there was a very robust,
um uh, project plan tabled contents. Very clear
definition of what was going to be in the project
. There were already 15 collaborators, but there was
a real need to get more collaborators on board.
So that's what we've focused on is helping get more
people on board to help out with that project creating
sections of that project. Each one is a 1000
words section, Um, and it's It's really a
full history of science and technology from, um,
earliest civilization to today. Um, in another case
, the Global Regions Project, um, world regional
geography for globalizing world. Uh, this is a
project that was originally out of U. C.
L. A. Um the book had been accepted
by Oxford University Press, Um, but then got
the project got canceled. For whatever reason, the
manuscript is complete. Um, so it's really a
matter of doing some of the additional sort of latter
in parts of of the publishing process. So in
that case, we're working on helping to source,
um images. Uh, and then we'll be helping
with peer review and proof reading and formatting. But
it's it's really the content is already there. It's
a matter of just adding on to, so we
have a very kind of open approach to how we
can help. But the idea is that we should
be a place, a resource that anyone starting an
open textbook project can come to the help build out
the collaboration around that project. Um, I'll show
you just an example. Right now, we have
a very basic technology infrastructure here. Our interest is
figuring out what this ought to look like. And
we started by just working with projects. And as
we work along, we're building out more fancy software
to support this. But this is what we're starting
with, um, and so the idea here is
you have some basic project information. Uh, but
the title who the lead author is, um,
subjects, etcetera. A little bit of a description
of what the project is for. And then here
, this is a key part is help needed.
So we need authors to to write short introductions to
eat section. So this is an anthology of public
domain text. Basically, um, we need copy
editors and proofreaders and help with formatting, um,
and then figure out how to get into classrooms.
Um, and how we're working right now is,
if you're interested in participating in a project, you
just post and say, you know, here's that
love is probably So, um, here's my name
is Angela Wheeler. I'm a professor, etcetera.
I'm happy to help out with copy editing, proofreading
, etcetera. So we just collect a group of
people who spend a fair bit of time spreading the
word about these projects to get people engaged. And
the idea is that rather than producing these books,
sort of in your own silo working quietly in your
, um at your desk that open textbooks are gonna
be a lot more powerful if we can build communities
around them as they are being produced, rather than
trying to figure out what happens to them afterwards.
And so if we have 30 people from 20 different
institutions who are helping produce a book, the theory
is that those people are gonna be advocates for that
book once it gets completed. Um, here's another
project financial strategy for public Management out of University of
Washington. In this case, our real focus is
on peer review. So we're working with Jeff,
and we are here to develop an approach to peer
review. And each time we figure out or think
, we figure out one of these core parts of
the publishing process that gets built into how we're going
to be, um, sort of a planning projects
in the future, And the idea is that eventually
this becomes an open platform, right Now we've got
a selected number of projects that we're working on,
but the idea is that eventually wants the, um
once we have a clear idea of best practices here
, we can make this an open platform. So
anyone can post a project and say, I'd like
help with this set of things. And the hope
is that we'll have a wider community of people who
will already be engaged with us who be interested in
helping out. For instance, I have an interest
in biology and open education. So I'd be happy
to copy, edit if there is such a project
that comes along mhm. Um Right. Okay,
so that's Revis. Um, I might take a
pause right now just to see if anyone has questions
. I think that has to be done on the
in the chat here. I'll be moving next to
talk about press books, which is the tool um
, that we're using in Ribas to produce the textbooks
are coming out of this project. So I'm just
gonna take a quick pause. If anyone has any
questions, fire away on on the chat. Um
, and I think I needed I don't know if
you or someone can confirm I have another 15 or
20 minutes. Is that right? And if all
is silent that I may just continue on. Hi
, Anita. I can see you. Look at
that. Yeah. Um, okay, maybe I
don't see any any questions here, so I will
just jump into press books now. Um, so
press books, uh, press books is an open
source book production platform. It's built on top of
WordPress. So we've taken WordPress and built it out
as a book production platform. The, um,
idea is to make a simple way to get nicely
formatted professional looking PS for print or digital distribution.
E pubs, um, and Moby for kindle.
Uh, and all of them all books have by
default a Web version which can can be or cannot
be public based on whether you want them to be
. So again, press books is open Source.
Um, uh, which I think in The context
of open textbooks is very important because we can start
to think about building layers on top of to,
like, press books based on books that are there
. So, um, press books is used by
a number of open textbook projects uh, B C
campus uses it, uh, learning open. So
many open Oregon. Um, you can either host
it yourself or press books can host it for you
. So we work. So and just for clarity's
sake, I am the executive director of the grievous
community, which is a, uh, non profit
. I am also the and the CEO, founder
of press books, which is a a very small
but is technically a commercial software company. Um,
and so we host and manage systems. For instance
, the University of Michigan libraries, uh, open
Oregon State Open, Oregon, Um, a number
of other institutions as well. Um, so the
objective behind press books is to make Oh, and
I'm sorry. And the religious community has, uh
, press books instance as well that allows people who
are producing both time, uh, within the readers
community to access and produce books on press books.
Um, so this is what a book looks like
inside press books again, it's built on WordPress.
So it means that the interface is very familiar if
you've lived inside of WordPress or work inside of WordPress
, but it's focused on book production. Um,
so here, this is Justin Marlowe's book at a
university Washington Times Financial strategy for public managers. Um
, that's sort of dashboard. We have a book
information page which has standard metadata. Um, we're
going to be extending this metadata module soon to have
some more robust information. But here it is,
Um, and this is the, um, the
book itself. So this is kind of where you
can manipulate the book. And for instance, you
can edit a chapter here. Um, and I
could put in some text, which I won't do
because this is a live book that belongs to someone
else. Um, but it's a basic the standard
WordPress, um, set up, um, so
it's relatively familiar. We've extended it, for instance
, with takeaways learning objectives, specific text boxes and
continue to extend things who support more robust, um
, open textbook needs. Um, like all wordpress
, uh, things with WordPress universe we support,
of course, images and embedded videos, et cetera
. Um, the exciting thing from my perspective about
press books or about open textbooks is the fact that
while there are export versions and we'll show you the
exports in a second, there's also a fully native
Web version of every book. And this allows some
really exciting things in particular. We've been working with
hypothesis, Um, and here we have a book
developed by Robin Derosa. Um, and I think
this is still a private book. I'm not sure
, but in any case, you can see here
a set of annotations made by her class as they
are developing this book. So, Robin, I
don't know if you're familiar with Robin Rosa. She
wants that, um, University of New Hampshire or
Plymouth State. Not quite sure the exact name,
but University of New Hampshire, Plymouth, Um,
and she's developed a really exciting practice around open textbook
creation. So her students actually create these resources,
and then they work with them and do things like
annotations. And so, to me, the Web
web iness of open textbooks is is probably the most
exciting part of the whole universe. Um, and
here I can you guys see this? This is
a financial strategy for public managers. Is that visible
to everyone? And can anyone here? Yes.
Okay, so this is, uh, an example
of the pdf output, Um, which I'm gonna
work with Justin to make a little bit nicer,
but it's a standard nice, clean looking PDF output
that be ready for print. More digital distribution,
as you like. Um, And the point is
that building in the web to start means that we
can get out into all these other formats easily.
Which is it's not the case. If you're building
from bird, it's very hard to get into different
formats. Um, and, you know, pdf
rinse your starting with P f for in design,
etcetera. Um, so professional, clean looking output
. Um, here is one. Um am I
sharing the whole desktop? If I show you guys
, please, can you see this? So,
I got, uh, I should have a pdf
preview or open. Is that visible to anyone?
Yes. Okay. Um, so this shows this
is a There's actually a custom template. Pdf,
uh, for the Cato Institute, actually. Um
, so again, the original sort of concept behind
press books was to make sure we could produce clean
looking, professional looking. Pdf outputs for, uh
, for print on demand. Um, and mhm
. Yeah, associative. Um, but this kind
of web print a pub is really the place where
we are excited. Is that the fact that these
things can live simply aimlessly in all those kinds of
outputs. Uh, there's some work we do with
tough school of medicine. So they have their whole
set of Silla by which tend to be 250 to
300 page books, essentially textbooks. But their sell
by, um And so this is a more sort
of textbook you looking output. But it's nice and
clean, and and they went from having all of
this content in word files, um, which was
kind of chaotic to update and look all that great
to having a standardized look and feel for all their
outputs across all there. I think they have 50
or 60 different versions of the syllabi. Um,
but the nice thing is that you then have to
know what based system that can be updated easily by
anyway. Um, and I think that's that's more
or less the run of press books. Um,
I'll be happy to take questions if there are any
about either. What we're doing Revis around sort of
building communities of collaboration for creating this stuff or press
books, which is, uh, a piece of
that creation part, um, which is a tool
it can produce books for you. Um, yes
. There you go. So open to questions.
Um, if anyone has any good. Thank you
you very much. I don't know if you can
hear me. Can you hear me? Can?
Yes. Good. Okay. I apologize for the
lack of introduction. The people in the room got
one, but you just know when online heard it
. Okay. Are there questions either from folks in
the room or folks online? You can add them
to the chat, please. And thanks. I
hear this is Robert. Uh, I like the
looks of press books quite a bit. Have any
, uh, late check compatibility? Um, that's
a little bit of a thorn in our side,
so, yes, but not amazing. Um,
it's kind of a key area of development that we
are looking at. So currently we support, um
, late check, uh, in a fairly lightweight
, but you can write latex equations within the press
book system. Let me see if I can just
demo that for you. I won't do it in
this book. Testable carriage Hope cat. Um,
so if I'm not mistaken, I do something like
, um, equals and see squared. So something
like this. So it's It's not a full compatibility
of a whole ATEC output, but, um,
work. Yeah, so there you see if you
can see on the screen there. But there's been
a a late check conversion of that. So So
we, um, it's kind of an area where
it's clearly critical as we moved from on the press
book side, you know, supporting primarily, um
, self published authors and more scholarly monographs on the
humanity humanity side. As we're moving more and open
textbook, it's becoming a critical piece that we know
we need to support better. So work is being
done to address that. But currently, the answer
is, we sort of supported, but not with
a lot of, uh, not with a lot
of, uh let's see anything that makes me very
happy at the moment. Mhm. All right.
Thanks a lot. Other questions. Mhm and okay
. Uh, well, thank you very, very
much. Um, all of you for sticking around
. Thank you to you for your time and for
showing us what press books can do. And about
the religious community and the support available there. So
we are all done