Open Educational Resources: Open Education Alberta

Good places to start

This video, Open Educational Resources: What and Why (3:27) provides an overview of OERs, open textbooks, and the kinds of content you may wish to include in your open textbook or manual.

Licensing

All publications published as part of the Open Education Alberta initiative must be covered by one of the four Creative Commons licenses

• CC BY (users are only required to provide proper attribution)
• CC BY-SA (users must provide proper attribution and license new works based on yours under identical terms)
• CC BY-NC (users must provide proper attribution and new works based on yours must be non-commercial)
• CC BY-NC-SA (users must provide proper attribution and new works based on yours must be non-commercial and licensed under identical terms)
• This video, What is Creative Commons? (1:23) provides an overview of how the Creative Commons licensing system works.

Using Pressbooks

Pressbooks is an open source platform for creating and publishing textbooks and manuals that is based on Wordpress. Anyone can sign up for a free Pressbooks account that gives you 5 MB of storage and basic features. Users at Open Education Alberta collaborating institutions may request a full-featured Pressbooks account hosted by the University of Alberta by reaching out to their institution's Open Education Alberta contacts.

This video, Introduction to Using Pressbooks (2:56) gives a brief overview on how creating and publishing a book on the Pressbooks platform works.

Some Pressbook manuals and guides you may find useful:

• Pressbooks User Guide (Pressbooks)
• Self-Publishing Guide  BCcampus, 2018)
• Ryerson Open Textbook Authoring Guide (Ryerson University, 2017)

Some resources to help you make your open textbook or manual accessible to students with perceptual and other disabilities:

• Accessibility Toolkit, 2nd ed. (BCcampus, 2018)
• Understanding Document Accessibility (Ryerson University, 2020)