Open Educational Practices/Pressbooks

This lesson introduces creating and editing open educational resources using Pressbooks.

Objectives and Skills

Objectives and skills for this lesson include:

• Edit and create open content
• Work in teams

Readings

1. Rebus: A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students
2. Rebus: Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far)
3. EdSurge: A Growing (But Controversial) Idea in Open-Access Textbooks: Let Students Help Write Them
4. Wikiversity: Collaborative Learning
5. Wikipedia: Tuckman's stages of group development
6. The 5-Step Guide to Using Pressbooks

Multimedia

1. Pressbooks Demo: An Orientation
2. Pressbooks YouTube Channel: Includes a range of demo videos for individual and educational users

Activities

1. Edit and create open content.
   • Access the Piazza web service at Piazza: Open Educational Practices to join the course discussion forums and review existing posts.
   • Use Piazza discussion groups to form teams with others from your area or discipline or from your institution(s). Note that smaller teams are typically more effective. Team sizes of three to four are recommended.
   • Form teams to develop or enhance an openly licensed Pressbooks resource. Options include importing and revising content from an open resource identified in a previous lesson or creating new content for use at your institution, either in the faculty learning center or in a course you teach.
   • Create a free account on Pressbooks.com and create a new book to edit. Add each team member to the book. Create an outline for the resource you are creating and add a page or pages to cover the scope of the effort. Import (copy and paste) any existing open content you can use as a starting point, being careful to check the license and attribution requirements first. Select areas of responsibility for the collaboration and then add your content. Take turns editing the entire resource until everyone is (reasonably) satisfied with the results.
2. Seek feedback on open content.
   • Access the Piazza web service to join the course discussion forums. Share your new content with the designated audience and seek feedback on your efforts. This may be within your own institution or with others in your discipline discussion group. Create a new post or respond to existing posts to address one or more of the following questions:
     • What resource subject did your team choose to create or edit, and why? What enhancements did you make?
     • What difficulties did you encounter in collaborating with others on editing Pressbooks content?
     • How did team members communicate with each other during the effort? What roles did each person adopt?
     • What concerns do you have in using Pressbooks for student assignments? How might these concerns be addressed?
3. Edit this page.
   • Review Wikiversity:Be bold. Wikis only work if people are bold.
   • Review your notes of new concepts or key terms from this lesson and compare them to the Lesson Summary and Key Terms listed below.
   • Be bold by improving this course wiki page using the Edit tab. For the Lesson Summary and Key Terms, include references for any content you add. If the Lesson Summary and Key Terms sections seem complete to you, review the Readings and Multimedia links for opportunities for improvement. But note, improving a wiki does not always mean adding to the wiki. Consider how much content you, yourself, are willing to view. Add, edit, update, delete, replace with links to better resources, etc. Your guide should always be to leave the wiki better than you found it.
4. Reflect on open educational practices.
   • Reflect on what you learned in this introduction to creating and editing open educational resources using Pressbooks. What surprised you? What have you learned so far that you can apply to your own learning environment(s)? Post your reflection in the Piazza discussion forum, sharing it with either the entire class or one or more of the available discussion groups.
   • Review other reflection posts and respond to at least two that interest you. Post any questions you have that you would like others to address.

Lesson Summary

Additional items will be contributed by course participants

• Participants will, if possible, form teams to create or edit a Pressbooks resource through collaborative learning.
• Pressbooks is yet another tool for sharing OER and OEP, so we will compare it to other tools (like Wikis) we've tried already.
• Pressbooks allows authors to license their work under the following: all rights reserved, CC BY, CC BY-NC, CC-BY-NC-ND, CC BY-NC-SA, CC BY-ND, and CC0

Key Terms

Additional items will be contributed by course participants

collaborative learning

Collaborative learning occurs when students work together to create, evaluate, and/or discuss projects and resources in order to learn. This allows students to build on each others' contributions and skills, leading to better learning outcomes. Collaborative learning results in better student engagement and improved student success as measured by student grades, course completion, long-term persistence from semester to semester, and degree completion.

contextual learning

Contextual learning is based on a constructivist theory of teaching and learning in which subject matter is related to real-world situations, allowing students to make connections between knowledge and their own experiences.

open pedagogy

The practice of engaging with students as creators of information rather than simply consumers of it. It's a form of experiential learning in which students demonstrate understanding through the act of creation. It includes three sets of foundational values: autonomy and interdependence, freedom and responsibility, democracy and participation.

Tuckman's stages of group development

Four group development phases which are necessary and inevitable in order for the team to grow, face up to challenges, tackle problems, find solutions, plan work, and deliver results. These phases include: forming, norming, storming and performing.

See Also

• Pressbooks: User Guide
• WikiEdu: Teaching with Wikipedia
• Rebus: Modifying an Open Textbook: What You Need to Know

References

← Wikis

Open Educational Practices

Multimedia →