Open Textbook Adoption

Quick StartStep 1: Find an Open Textbook Search for an open textbook from the following sources: MERLOT Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources Global Text Project OER Commons Orange Grove Connexions USG Share (click on on word - guest) Textbook Revolution The Assayer MERLOT Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources Wikibooks Audio Books CK12 Flexbooks Flat World Knowledge Public Literature Questia Step 2: Review and Select an Open TextbookAs you search for open textbooks in repositories, consider what criteria you will use to select appropriate an open textbook for your own use. You can develop your own criteria or consider adapting existing criteria from other sources.Take a look at the criteria available from MERLOT's Peer Review process. Consider using or adapting the Evaluation Criteria Checklist used for content in USG Share. The Curriki Review System allows content-area experts and teachers to review and rate resources in the Curriki repository. A video is available which explains the process. See Assessing the quality of open education resource based wikis. Watch this video lecture about educational quality assessment. Make your selection based on criteria such as: Quality of content, literary merit and format Accuracy Timeliness Favorable reviews Permanence/lasting value Authority of author Scope and depth Physical quality Formats available: print, CD-ROM, online, etc. Reading level and writing style Accessibility Language(s) Copyright restrictions on modification and reuse Cultural relevance Cultural factors include race, ethnicity, language, nationality, religion, age, gender, sexual orientation, income level, and occupation. Ensure that information is relevant to the intended students' social and cultural contexts. Also, check for ratings, reviews or endorsements of open textbooks and OER by professional societies and organizations. For example, some professional organizations use an endorsement Lens at Connexions to indicate that content meets their minimum standards.Step 3: Customize your Selection as desiredFew existing open textbooks will meet all your instructional needs so you may want to customize the open textbook you have selected. Consider the following ways you may want to modify the open textbook to make it more appropriate for your teaching style: Combine two or more open textbooks and OER. Rearrange the content in the open textbook. Add a glossary, hyperlinks, and test bank. Make edits to improve accuracy and currency. Make the content usable by students with visual impairment. The BookBuilder tool at CAST is just one of several tools that can be used to create your own customized version of the open textbook. Another tool is available from BongoBooks. If the open textbook you selected is in the Connexions repository, you can make your own copy of the open textbook then make your own modifications as a 'derivative work.' CK12 and Flat World Knowledge allow for development of modified versions of open textbooks.Step 4: Disseminate Your Open Textbook to Your StudentsDisseminate your open textbook in either digital or print format to students in your course. Be sure to give your students clear instructions about appropriate use of printing services on your campus. Try to coordinate with the student computer labs, library, bookstore, and printshop on your campus.Do-It-YourselfEmail the website address of the open textbook to your students. Download the open textbook as a file (e.g., Word, Open Office, PDF). Email the file to your enrolled students. Post the website address or document file to your students' course management system course site.If the Word document file or PDF is too large to email or post, use a free online file storage or file sharing service.Box.net BT Digital Vault Openomy Tour of Lulu Students can download and print the Word document file, PDF, or website contents. Campus Printshop Create a Word document file or PDF of the open textbook that you have selected. Open Office is another option. Email the file to your Campus Printshop per their specifications. Printing Services Create a file (e.g., Word, Open Office, PDF) of the open textbook that you have selected. Email the file to a printing service such as exlibris per their specifications.

What are Open Textbooks?Open textbooks "are textbooks that are freely available with nonrestrictive licenses. Covering a wide range of disciplines, open textbooks are available to download and print in various file formats from several web sites and OER repositories. Open textbooks can range from public domain books to existing textbooks to textbooks created specifically for OER. Open textbooks help solve the problems of the high cost of textbooks, book shortages, and access to textbooks as well as providing the capacity to better meet local teaching and learning needs" according to a Module created by Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME). Five steps to adopting an open textbook for your course Give your students an alternative to expensive textbooks by following these five steps. Step One: List keywords based on course objectives or student learning outcomes. Step Two: Search for open content using the keywords. Step Three: Select or create appropriate open content. Step Four: Organize open content into an open textbook. Step Five: Get necessary approvals and disseminate the open textbook to students.

EXAMPLE Health Course Textbook A textbook commonly adopted for a Healthy Lifestyles or Health Education course is

An Invitation to Health

by Hales. This 2007 textbook is 696 pages in length and has a list price of $108.95. One open textbook alternative is selected content from MedlinePlus. This content is free for downloading and printing.

An Invitation to Health

Table of Contents Medline PlusOpen Textbook Equivalent Chapter 1: Your Invitation to Health Health Literacy Evaluating Health Information Chapter 2: Changing for Life Healthy Living Chapter 3: Psychological Health Mental Health Chapter 4: Personal Stress Management Stress Chapter 5: The Joy of Fitness Exercise and Physical Fitness Chapter 6: Personal Nutrition Nutrition Chapter 7: Taking Control of Your Weight Weight Control Chapter 8: Communicating and Relating Personality Disorders Chapter 9: Personal Sexuality Sexual Health Chapter 10: Reproductive Choices Reproductive Health Chapter 11: Avoiding Addictive Behaviors and Drug Abuse Drug Abuse Chapter 12: Alcohol Use, Misuse, and Abuse Alcohol Consumption Chapter 13: Tobacco Use, Misuse, and Abuse Smoking Chapter 14: Defending Yourself Against Infectious Diseases Immunization Infectious Diseases Chapter 15: Keeping Your Heart Healthy Heart Disease Prevention Chapter 16: Preventing Cancer and Other Illnesses Cancer Chapter 17: Health-Care Consumerism and Complementary/Alternative Medicine Complementary and Alternative Medicine Health Fraud Chapter 18: Healthy Aging and the Circle of Life Seniors Health Chapter 19: Staying Safe: Preventing Injury, Violence, and Victimization Injuries Safety Domestic Violence Chapter 20: Working toward a Healthy Environment Environmental Health

WorksheetYou can print out a Worksheet to guide you through implmentation of the five steps.

Step One

TASK List keywords based on your course objectives or student learning outcomes.

EXAMPLE Health Course Textbook For a typical Healthy Lifestyles or Health Education course, expected outcomes are that students will be able to: Appraise and assess public attitudes and behavior regarding health and disease. Recognize, examine and formulate the importance of immunizations. Recognize and assess public bias towards aging, diabetes, epilepsy, STDs, etc. Differentiate the major classifications of communicable and non-communicable diseases. Examine and discuss the role of epidemiology in public health. Assess and analyze nutritional behavior. Identify the major means of transmission for communicable diseases. Identify and examine immunizations in relationship to immunity. Examine the three levels of health promotion/disease prevention. Identify, compare, and discuss normal versus abnormal patterns of behavior. Identify and compare the major classifications of drugs. Examine and appraise patterns of drug abuse. Compare cultural health behaviors and suggest associated consequences. Keywords identified for a Healthy Lifestyles course are: communicable and non-communicable diseases immunizations aging, diabetes, epilepsy, STDs epidemiology public health nutrition immunity health promotion drug abuse cultural health behaviors

Step Two

TASK Search for open content using the keywords you have identified. Several resources are available on the Internet that provide teachers with tools to identify and select open content for use in instruction. Some of these are: OER Commons MERLOT Connexions Internet Archive FREE: Federal Resources for Educational Excellence COL Knowledge Finder Creative Commons OpenDOAR Curriki Hippocampus Edu2.0 More Content Sources Also, see Discipline-Specific Content Sources, OER Public Domain Textbook Sources, and textbooks listed at OER Commons.

EXAMPLE In order to locate open content for a health course, use search engines available on trusted U.S. Government sources of health information such as: MedlinePlus Centers for Disease Control Healthfinder

Step Three

TASK Select or create appropriate open content for your course based on the objectives and keywords. As you search for OER using these tools and repositories, consider what criteria you will use to select appropriate OER for your own use. Take a look at the criteria available from MERLOT's Peer Review process. See Assessing the quality of open education resource based wikis. Watch this video lecture about educational quality assessment. Make your selection based on criteria such as: Quality of content, literary merit and format Accuracy Timeliness Favorable reviews Permanence/lasting value Authority of author Scope and depth Physical quality Formats available: print, CD-ROM, online, etc. Reading level and writing style Accessibility Language(s) Copyright restrictions on modification and reuse Cultural relevance Cultural factors include race, ethnicity, language, nationality, religion, age, gender, sexual orientation, income level, and occupation. Ensure that information is relevant to the intended students' social and cultural contexts. Also, check for ratings, reviews or endorsements of your sources by professional societies and organizations.

EXAMPLE Health Course TextbookThe open textbook content selected for a health education course from Medline Plus is subject to Quality Guidelines.

To determine quality and reliability of other health sources on the internet, look for the HONcode badge on the website. Websites that adhere to HONcode principles of the HON Foundation can post this badge. Be sure to verify the authenticity of the badge.

For additional health information that has been reviewed for quality, see the HEAL Reviewed Collection.

Step Four

TASK Organize open content that you have collected into an open textbook. If the content you have selected does not comply with ADA Section 508 accessibility requirements and copyright laws, then you will need to modify the content or select other content. Accessibility Certain accessibility requirements must be addressed when selecting and developing OER for electronic dissemination to students. By law, ADA Section 508, learning materials, including interfaces, images, sounds, multimedia elements, and all other forms of information, must be made available for used by anyone, regardless of disability. Detailed information about accessibility guidelines are available at Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Certain accessibility requirements must be addressed when developing OER for electronic dissemination to students. For example, see Distance Education: Access Guidelines for Students with Disabilities from the Chancellor’s Office California Community Colleges. By law, ADA Section 508, learning materials, including interfaces, images, sounds, multimedia elements, and all other forms of information, must be made available for used by anyone, regardless of disability. See this microtutorial about Section 508: http://21cif.imsa.edu/tutorials/micro/mm/508 Detailed information about accessibility guidelines are available at Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Utah State University, Web Accessibility in Mind (Webaim) offers various "How To" information and support on creating accessible web sites. Web authors can find a Section checklist, sample HTML markup and various articles and courses on accessible web design. The Accessible Web Publishing Wizard simplifies the task of converting PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, and (in the future) Excel spreadsheets to accessible HTML through an easy-to-use user interface and automation of many of the details of conversion. Art of ALT, a series of online lessons about building accessibility into Web-based humanities content. These lessons provide information to help build Web sites whose content is available to those with disabilities. A-Prompt is an accessibility evaluation and repair tool from the University of Toronto in cooperation with the Trace Center and CAST. A demonstration version is available for download. A-Prompt lists what it considers to be errors and offers a chance to correct each one. My Web My Way Tips for Students about how to make the web easier to use Accessibility Evaluation and Repair Tools Accessibility Training and Resources Accessibility Checklist-508 Compliance Resources for Checking Accessibility and Captioning Multi-Media Copyright Although documents, pictures, audio and other information are all easy to copy from the Internet, it is your responsibility to understand and respect the laws that protect the author(s) of electronic information. The copyright laws that govern information in all formats are complex. It is impossible to reduce them to a few simple rules. We encourage you to visit the pages listed here. They have been prepared by legal and other experts on the subject of copyright and can help you learn to decide for yourself whether it is appropriate to use electronic information sources in your work.A basic understanding of copyright, fair use, the TEACH Act, and intellectual property is necessary before using and developing OER in order to minimize the risk of violating the law. Did you know that the copyright notice © is no longer required for works published after March 1989? This means that the absence of a copyright notice does not necessarily mean the work is within the public domain. If you are unfamiliar with copyright issues, you are encouraged to visit one or more of the many online tutorials exist which address these topics. Watch this video clip that addresses the challenges faced by faculty when distributing copyrighted material from various sources: The Case of Dr. No. Many basic tutorials about copyright are available: Copyright and Distance Education © Primer, University of Maryland The Copyright Crash Course, University of Texas at Austin Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States Copyright Management Center at IUPUI VA Tech Copyright Info Copyright Tutorial 21st Century Information Literacy Micro Tutorial about Copyright License Your Work - Creative Commons Copyright Law in the Electronic Environment

EXAMPLE Health Course Textbook The Health Course open textbook alternative content available from MedlinePlus complies with Section 508 accessibility and is available for use under the Copyright Information stated on their website. Photographs, illustrations, and multimedia selected from the Public Health Image Library (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) generally free for use without copyright restrictions: Most of the images in the collection are in the public domain and are thus free of any copyright restrictions. If you look directly beneath the image you will see a fair use statement that tells you if the image is public domain or copyright protected. Permission is not required for public domain images, but we do ask that you credit the original institution and contributor, when known, whenever the image is used in any publicly distributed media.

Step Five

TASK Get necessary approvals and disseminate your open textbook for student use in your course. Approvals Get approval from your academic department to use the open textbook in your course. Get your open text on the approved list for articulation purposes with transfer schools, especially if you teach at a community college. DisseminationDo-It-Yourself Create a PDF of the open content that you have selected. Use Drawloop for creating PDF Use Connexions to create PDF Use OER CommonsConvert Gutenberg Text File to PDF Email the PDF to your enrolled students. Or post the PDF to your students' course management system course site. If the PDF is too large to email or post, use a free online file storage or file sharing service Box.netBT Digital VaultOpenomy Students can download and print the PDF or simply view the PDF on their computers Campus Printshop Create a PDF of the open content that you have selected. Email the PDF to your Printshop per their specifications Printing Services Create a PDF of the open content that you have selected. Email the PDF to one of the following Printing Services per their specifications Tour of LuluSafariUIlluminaexlibris

EXAMPLE Health Course Textbook Virgil Bourassa and Fred Mednick from Teachers Without Borders posted a 2006 textbook on child health for their Health Education Course at Connexions. The textbook can be easily downloaded as PDF and printed from the site. Health educator Stacey Hughes uses Lulu to distribute her 2006 book titled: Health & Social Care Teaching Resources.

This Module was developed by Dr. Judy Baker, Director of the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources. January 21, 2008. To join the Consortium, please contact Dr. Baker at bakerjudy@foothill.edu For more information about open textbooks and open educational resources, see the Introduction to Open Educational Resources self-paced tutorial.