Open Educational Resources

Building Your Open Textbook or Manual

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 based on Wordpress that allows you to create and publish textbooks, manuals and other educational resources. U Lethbridge is a member of Open Education Alberta, a collaboration of Alberta post-secondary institutions, which provides registered faculty and students with a full-featured (enterprise-level) Pressbooks account hosted by Pressbooks. If you would like to register for an OEA Pressbooks account, please reach out to the U Lethbridge contact on the Open Education Alberta contacts page. As well, anyone can sign up for a free basic Pressbooks account that provides up to 5 MB of storage.

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)