Presentation at the 2014 BCNet conference outlining the BC Open Textbook project and the customizations made to the PressBooks WordPress plugin to enable textbook authoring for the project.
2. open.bccampus.ca
“Connect the expertise, programs, and resources
of all BC post-secondary institutions under a
collaborative service delivery framework”
2
3
Open Education
Student Services & Data Exchange
Collaborative Programs & Shared Services
1
3. open.bccampus.ca
“Connect the expertise, programs, and resources
of all BC post-secondary institutions under a
collaborative service delivery framework”
Open Education
1 Support & promote the development & use of Open Educational Resources
Support instructors who want to use technology in their teaching practice
OER Global Logo by Jonathas Mello is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Unported 3.0 License
4. open.bccampus.ca
“Open Educational Resources (OERs) are any type of
educational materials that are in the public domain or
introduced with an open license. The nature of these
open materials means that anyone can legally and
freely copy, use, adapt and re-share them.”
UNESCO
http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/access-to-knowledge/open-educational-
resources/what-are-open-educational-resources-oers/
What are OER?
5. open.bccampus.ca
A textbook licensed under an open
copyright license, and made available
to be freely used by students,
teachers and members of the public.
What is an Open Textbook?
7. open.bccampus.ca
Visual notes of John Yap announcement, Giulia Forsythe
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gforsythe/8094691691/
Used under CC-BY-SA license
First province in Canada
40 free and open textbooks available for the
highest enrolled 1st & 2nd year post-secondary
subjects in BC
BC Open Textbook Project
8. open.bccampus.ca
We have a problem (2 actually)
Images: http://www.openeducation.net/2009/09/17/beyond-textbooks-andy-chlup-discusses-digital-learning-models/
used under CC-BY license
9. open.bccampus.ca
Students spend $1200/yr on textbooks
4x rate of inflation over past 20 years
70% students have not purchased textbook for a
course because of price
Problem #1
41. open.bccampus.ca
Remix - PBT Plugin
Importer
•EPUB
•DOCX
•ODT
•WXR/XML
Open Textbooks
•Download links to 47 open textbooks
42. open.bccampus.ca
Remix - PBT Plugin
Pseudocode (DOCX import):
- test if it’s a valid Zip file
- get the file paths to content
and metadata
- get the content and metadata
- get endnotes, footnotes, and hyperlinks
- process them (they are in separate documents),
save them
- import a monstrous XSLT stylesheet
- throw the styled content into the DOM
- parse by Chapter, insert into PB
44. open.bccampus.ca
Redistribute/Retain - PBT Plugin
Textbook API
•the solution to the problem of redistributing protected files got me
thinking about how to implement textbook API’s
Redistribute and retain files for free
•Download links to each of the latest export files (epub, pdf, xhtml,
hpub, mobi, wxr, icml) on the homepage