Iowa OER’s February webinar showcased a few major authoring tools that instructors can use to create or adapt OER for their courses. 

The speaker for this webinar was Mahrya Burnett, Scholarly Communications Librarian at the University of Iowa.

You can watch the recording or read the summary blog post below for additional information:

Authoring Tools for OER

Although the bulk of Mahrya’s talk focused on three tools commonly used for creating open textbooks and other text-based OER, she started by stressing that there is a wide range of authoring tools available that can be used to create open content, some of which may be easier for newcomers to use. Mahrya broke this down into three categories:

• Low Tech tools: Word processing tools like Google Docs or Word
• Medium Tech tools: Specialized software with user-friendly interfaces like OER Commons Open Author
• High Tech tools: Very specialized tools with a high learning curve like Jupyter Notebooks

Especially for those who are new to the idea of publishing OER, it’s best to start with tools that you’re familiar with for drafting content, and leveraging the support services or expertise of others at your institution if you want to do more.

Pressbooks

Pressbooks is an open-source software for book publishing built on WordPress. Although many larger OER initiatives buy institutional accounts with Pressbooks, Pressbooks.com is a free website that authors can use to publish their open textbooks, with only slightly limited functionality compared to the premium version of the site. 

To showcase what a Pressbook looks like, Mahrya began by touring a Pressbook and showing how to navigate a book published in Pressbooks, before showing the back end of the system. 

After you log into a Pressbook, there are a few major sections you will want to get acquainted with: 

• Book Info: here you can add your book’s title, author, description, license, and other metadata.
• Appearance: here you can select a Theme for your book, which will alter its font, color choice, and the general “feel” of the text. You can also alter the font and colors within the text through the Theme Options menu, as well as more granular information, like the size of the page and fonts for Print copies.
• Users: here you can add additional authors, peer reviewers, and other users to your book, so they can access and read it before the book is made public.
• Organize: here you can access your book’s Parts and chapters, which are broken into three areas by default: Front Matter, Main Body, and Back Matter.

Editing individual chapters

The interface for editing in Pressbooks is similar to WordPress or any other web-based authoring tool you might use for blogs or other websites, which makes it a good entry-level tool for people who are new to authoring OER.

During her talk, Mahrya pointed out a few key formatting and editing tools in Pressbooks, like how to add media and format text in unique ways. For example, you can add custom Textboxes (callout boxes) to books in Pressbooks, like Learning Objectives, Key Takeaways, and Exercises. This functionality can improve the visual appeal of a project in Pressbooks and is uniquely helpful for textbook projects. Finally, she shared the Export feature in Pressbooks, which allows authors to create PDF, EPUB, and other exports of their books to share offline copies with students or other readers.

OER Commons

Next, Mahrya discussed OER Commons’ free authoring tool, Open Author.

OER Commons is a popular OER repository for instructors in both K-12 and higher education contexts, and it contains content from many different places, including linked content housed on other sites and content created or housed within OER Commons directly. You can find content that was created with Open Author by searching in OER Commons and filtering by Content Source to Open Author.

To create content in Open Author, all you need is to create a free account with OER Commons! From there, you can draft content to share or upload content you have created in Word or in Google Drive. This can be particularly helpful if you do not have an institutional repository or other means of publishing content online where others can find it. 

You can also choose to add Instructor Notes to your content, which will not appear in Student View, but which can be viewed by instructors on the platform using your materials.

Open Author is particularly useful for sharing lesson plans, modular content like weekly readings or assignments, presentation slides, and other ancillary materials. However, if you’ve drafted a textbook-style resource in Google Drive and you want to share it openly, OER Commons’ Open Author tool can help with that as well!

LibreTexts

Finally, Mahrya shared LibreTexts, another free authoring tool for OER that also has built-in functionality for modular and interactive content.

Like OER Commons, LibreTexts can be searched for existing content, in “Libraries” broken down by discipline. LibreTexts began as a Chemistry-focused tool but has branched out quite a bit since it first began. You can search through the content in LibreTexts using the new LibreTexts Commons.

Within each Library in LibreTexts, you will find a few areas: Campus Bookshelves (content created or remixed for use by a particular institution), Bookshelves (content shared for wide or general use), and Learning Objects (labs, case studies, assessments, interactive content, and other teaching materials).

Unlike Pressbooks, which attempts to replicate the feel of a “book” in its design and presentation, LibreTexts’ content is more focused on its online functionality and has a modular system for displaying content by topic.

Course materials can still be downloaded as “book” formats for print and offline use, with a simple and attractive design.

One of the more exciting tools built into the platform is its Remixer tool. If you find one or more resources in the LibreTexts’ system that you like, you can import the chapters or units from that resource into a new, customized remix for your own use.

After you select materials you want to remix using the Remixer tool, there are other functionalities you may want to explore or add from LibreTexts as well, which you can access from the Tools menu on the left side of your screen. One of the most exciting of these is the ADAPT Homework System, a new Adaptive Learning System that LibreTexts is developing right now to help instructors who need auto-graded homework for their courses as well other homework types that can be managed through the system. What’s nice about the ADAPT system is that many books in LibreTexts have assignments already paired with their materials in ADAPT, which you can explore and remix for your own needs.

LibreTexts can be a daunting tool at first glance, but it has a lot of depth and the fact that it is free makes it an excellent resource for OER authors or instructors who want to adopt and adapt existing materials for their course.

Chat with us!

If you are interested in exploring other tools for creating OER, reach out to us on the Iowa OER mailing list! We’re always looking for new topics to highlight in webinars for our audience.