 Welcome, everybody, to this session at OER 22. Thank you very much for everybody who has already said hello in the chat. Please do continue to introduce yourself. And it is a very special privilege for me to introduce today's speaker, who is going to share with us a session on open e-textbooks for access to music education, outputs and reflections. And with me here is Lorna Campbell. Hi, Lorna, very warm welcome. Hi, Madden, thanks for the welcome. It's lovely to be joining you. And I should add that it's just going to be me that's talking to you today. My academic partner, Nikki Moran, is actually on sabbatical at the moment. But the project that I'm going to be talking about would absolutely not have happened without her. So if we're ready to get going. Yeah, to do any over to you now. Brilliant, thank you, Madden. So today I'm going to be talking about open e-textbooks for access to music education. And this was an exploratory open text books co-creation project that we ran at the University of Edinburgh from February to October last year. Together with our team of student interns, we actually spoke about this project at last year's OER conference when the project was just getting underway. So this year I'm back to reflect on the outputs, what works, what didn't, the impact the textbook had on developing teaching and learning enhancement and the experience of our student partners. And I'm also going to be introducing Edinburgh's new e-book service, Edinburgh Diamond. But first a little background. And if you heard us talking about this project last year, then you'll have to forgive me for going over a little bit of the same ground by way of introduction. So at the University of Edinburgh, we believe that supporting the creation and use of all kinds of open education resources is strongly in keeping with our institutional vision and values to discover knowledge and make the world a better place. And to ensure that our teaching and research is accessible, inclusive and relevant to society. This vision is backed up by an OER policy approved by our learning and teaching committee, which encourages staff to use, create and publish OERs to enhance the student experience, expand provision of learning opportunities and enrich our shared knowledge commons. And to support this policy, we have an OER service, which is where I work, that provides staff and students with advice and guidance on creating and using OER, engaging with open education and developing information and copyright literacy skills. Over the last 10 years, the university has shared a wealth of open content with the global knowledge commons, including hundreds of open education resources, Wikipedia entries, open licensed media resources, research data sets, open journals, historic images from our university collections, and of course MOOCs and free online courses. Now MOOCs have been a cornerstone of the university's commitment to opening access to high quality online learning opportunities, widening access to knowledge and community outreach since 2012, when the university signed up its first partnership agreement with Coursera. And since then, the university has launched over 88 MOOCs, running across three platforms and engaging over 4 million learners. In order to ensure that course materials from our MOOCs are easily accessible to all users, high quality videos from these courses are released under open license through the university's open media bank, where they can be viewed and downloaded for reuse and repurposing under open license. And there are now over 650 videos from 25 MOOCs available for free download and reuse from open media bank, with more content being added every day. So please do go and have a look at this resource and feel free to help yourself to anything that you find there. One of the university's earliest MOOCs was Fundamentals in Music Theory. This course was developed by senior lecturer, Dr. Nikki Moran and colleagues at the Reed School of Music and launched in Coursera way back in 2014. The course introduces key concepts behind conventional Western music theory, providing students with the skills to read and write musical stave notation and to apply this knowledge to analytical listening. The Fundamentals of Music Theory MOOC has run continually since its launch in 2014, and over 450,000 learners have participated in the course over the last eight years, making it one of the university's most consistently popular MOOCs. The continued success of this course demonstrates evident global appetite for music literacy education by adult learners, and also highlights demand within UKHEIs for fast track courses in music theory and notation, skills which have historically defined the disciplinary distinctiveness of music degree curricula. In 2019, with support from the university's learning design service, content from the Fundamentals of Music Theory MOOC was repurposed to create a new credit-bearing on-campus blended learning course for undergraduate students. Key improvements to this course included the addition of learning outcomes, addressing students' critical and contextual awareness of the course content, new content addressing global curriculum decolonisation issues around music theory and music education, an extended resource list and a course textbook, accompanying the video lecturers repurposed from the MOOC. Talked by Nikki Moran, the course has now run for three years and is an integral component of the Bachelor of Music degree programme. Although staff and students at the University of Edinburgh have created and shared a wide range of open education resources, until recently, there's been relatively little engagement with open textbooks. Although a number of our academics have independently started creating their own open textbooks using GitHub Pages, these textbooks primarily cover programming and technical topics and are available to access and download from open.ed. And I'll be sharing these slides in Discord afterwards so you can access all the URLs. In late 2020, Dr. Melissa Highton, Assistant Principal for Online Learning and Champion of the University's Mission and Vision for OER, suggested repurposing content from the Fundamentals of Music Theory MOOC to create an open textbook, which might be a useful way to explore the practicalities and affordances of reusing existing open content to create e-books. We brought together staff and students from the Reed School of Music and the OER service and succeeded in securing a student experience grant to undertake a small exploratory project, open textbooks for access to music education. And this was a really small grant. I think it was about 3,000 pounds or something like that. But this funding enabled us to employ three part-time student interns and partners. Ifina Chukwu ends in Madu, Anna Reina Garcia, and Carrie Ding, who worked part-time on the project for a period of five months. The primary aim of the open textbooks for access to music education project was to explore the potential of providing access to free, accessible, adaptable open textbooks in a convenient and reusable open format, ideally suited to hybrid and online learning. Using existing content from the Fundamentals of Music Theory MOOC and on-campus course, the project set out to create a prototype open textbook that could be used for undergraduate teaching within the university and made available more widely under open licence. The development process enabled us to explore and evaluate... So, you're now... Sorry to interrupt you mid-flow there. Just a moment ago, the slides stopped moving. So, sorry to interrupt you. I just wondered if we could just restart the slide share so maybe we can get the correct slide up. Of course. Let me just stop there. Sorry about that. That's okay. We're having all the technical gremlins today. We do indeed, yes. Sorry about that. Just to make you feel... Let me just get them all out of the way of course. Just to make you feel extra welcome, but... I could see in the comments the chat. So, sorry about that, everybody. No problem. Let me just try again. So, you should be seeing a slide saying aims and objectives. Can you do that? No, just at the moment, we're just seeing the opening slide in PowerPoint. So, I wonder whether we're seeing that now. Okay. So, what are you looking at at the moment? So, we're seeing the PowerPoint window with one of the big slides aims and objectives, but we see that we're basically not seeing the presentation mode. We're just seeing... Right, you're not seeing presentation mode. So, let me just try presentation mode one last time, and if it doesn't work, we'll just stick with this view. Yeah, don't worry. Has that come back to the opening slide again? No, it's still on aims and objectives, but I'm not sure what you may need to do is click manually through the slides in the slide window next to the, like, in PowerPoint, basically, not in presentation mode. Let me just... Then we'll be able to see the slides. All right. So, can you see the slides now? Yes, we can see your mouse now. We can see you moving around. Right. So, well, let's just stick with it. Sorry about that, Lorna. Absolutely fine. Don't worry. Like I said, if we can get all the technical pictures over and done within this presentation, hopefully that will be running smoothly for the rest of the week. Apologies. I'll keep an eye out now and I'll give you a shout in case anything happens more. OK, right. Well, hopefully that will be the last of the gremlins. OK, so where were we? So, using the existing content from the Fundamentals of Music Theory MOOC and on-campus course, the project set out to create a prototype open textbook that could be used for undergraduate teaching within the university and made available more widely under open licence. The development process enabled us to explore and evaluate different open textbook platforms, learn about the logistics and practical processes of creating open textbooks from existing content and whether it will be feasible to extend this model to further open textbook projects. The experience is particularly valuable at a time when universities are increasingly moving from print to digital textbooks and are facing rapidly rising textbook costs, which is a serious problem for university libraries. At the same time, the project enabled our student partners to develop valuable digital and copyright information literacy skills, including an understanding of open education resources, open licences and open e-textbooks, familiarity with current e-textbook applications and experience of working with existing digital content and education resources across a range of platforms. Excuse me. So, owing to COVID-19 restrictions, the entire project was undertaken online from March to October 2021. Microsoft Teams was used to facilitate project work and a project blog was set up on the university's academic blogging platform, Blogs.Ed, to enable us to capture and reflect on findings and disseminate outputs. The project was managed by the OER Service and Dr. Nikki Moran led the development of the academic content of the textbook. The project team made weekly to plan activities and our interns were encouraged to coordinate their work with each other, so we really did encourage co-creation of this project. Digital skills development about open education, OER, open licensing and academic blogging was also provided at the start of the project. One of the first tasks undertaken by the team was to evaluate a range of e-book platforms in order to identify a service to host our open textbook. The students evaluated four platforms, manifold, press books, get-up pages and open monograph press, which the university library was implementing as the basis of a new e-book service, Edinburgh Diamond, and you can read our interns' evaluation of all four platforms on our project blog. Given the short duration of the project and limited ability to get new software running on university servers at short notice and without additional resource, we decided to publish our e-book on Edinburgh Diamond, which was still under development at the time the project was underway. So Edinburgh Diamond supports the publication of academic and student-led open access books and journals. The service provided by the library helps academics and students publish or migrate their own online monographs... Oh, excuse me. The telephone call, I beg your pardon. Open monographs, textbooks and edit collections and provides a host of platforms, training advice and technical support. Edinburgh Diamond incorporates the university's successful open journal service and supports the publication of a wide range of academic and student-led open access journals. The service is provided free of charge to University of Edinburgh staff and students and there's also paid for shared service for the Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries and External Partners. And I should add that Edinburgh Diamond isn't affiliated with Edinburgh University Press. That's actually a different business. Edinburgh Diamond is the service provided by the University of Edinburgh Library. By electing to publish our book on Edinburgh Diamond, we were able to take advantage of support provided by Open Access Publishing Officer Rebecca Wojterska, who oversaw the process of assigning ISBNs and DOIs and publishing the book to the new platform to coincide with the launch of the service in 2021. To co-create the content and structure of the open textbook, our interns worked closely with Nicky Moran to collate and organise videos and transcripts from the original Coursera MOOC, text content from the on-campus course handbook and new material covering music theory in contextual critical global context. The textbook is designed to be suitable for all entry levels of learners and is structured in topics rather than chapters so that users can follow the content in any way that is useful to them. Our interns' thinking around the content and structure of the open textbook provided valuable insight and input to the Coursera MOOC and on-campus course as well, particularly in relation to how rudiments of musical notation is taught. The project spurred on new development of the MOOC and the production of new revised video material and additional content. And the MOOC was relaunched with this new content at the beginning of this year and Edinburgh students have already benefited from the new video material in the on-campus Fundamentals of Music Theory course. For reflecting on the project, Nicky Moran commented, in terms of the quality of teaching and learning that these students have received, I believe that they've had great benefit from the reflective cycle behind this e-textbook project where the students' interns' input and development of my original teaching materials has brought about further teaching and learning enhancement and I also expect this e-textbook to be an important asset in future for on-site students. And, in turn, if any Chukwends and Madhu commented, I was able to contribute towards repositioning some of the topics to allow for a smooth transition between topics in a way that is simplified for somebody new to music theory. Hence the inclusion of student agency in the creation of the e-textbook will not only be transformative for the interns' student-teacher collaborative experience, but an extension to other students who will use the final textbook. Our interns each took responsibility for editing and formatting individual sections of the book and creating new graphics and illustrations were necessary. These sections were then brought together into a final golden copy which was reviewed and proofread by Nicky Moran. And having the input of a single academic and subject specialist was absolutely critical to the success of this project because I have to confess I know absolutely nothing about music theory myself. In order to make our open-textbook as accessible and reusable as possible to teachers, learners, and the wider public, we've made it available in four different formats. Word, PDF, flowable and fixed format e-pubs. And the videos accompanying the book can also be downloaded directly from our open media bank. An HTML version of the book has also been created and will be added to Edward Diamond very shortly, hopefully. The book is licensed CC by non-commercial share alike and it can be downloaded in its entirety or as individual topics in different formats. So onto lessons learned. What did we learn from all this? One of the things we learned was that having multiple editors working on different sections of the textbook although it enabled us to produce the book content rapidly. However, despite using a set word template, formatting inconsistencies crept in as our interns were using different versions of Word. And although these minor formatting inconsistencies have little visible impact on the word and PDF versions of the files, they often had a significant impact when generating the e-pubs. Now these issues could be mitigated by all editors using the same online version of Word and by a single editor managing the golden copy once all content had been assembled. And while it's relatively simple to create a basic e-pub from using Adobe InDesign, more complex formatting, type setting and graphic design was beyond the resources of the project. So what I'm actually saying here is that I had actually never used InDesign before so I was absolutely learning on the hoof here. I was actually generating the e-pubs and my InDesign skills are very, very basic. So if we were going to produce more open textbooks through the OER service in the future, then really what we would need to do is to commission the design of basic InDesign templates with appropriate University of Edinburgh branding and open licensing, etc. That would make things a lot easier and more straightforward. One drawback of publishing our open textbook on Edinburgh Diamond is that because Open Monograph Press is primarily designed for publishing scholarly works and managing editorial workflow, it doesn't automatically generate the individual book files from a golden copy. So as a result, all the individual files and formats have to be generated and managed manually for each section of the book. So in our case, that meant manually creating a total of 53 files plus associated style sheets and graphics. So fixing a single typo that was spotted after the book was published, despite proofreading it several times, necessitated editing, recreating and re-uploading 10 separate files. In addition, the platform workflow, particularly around the allocation of DUIs, is perhaps better suited to scholarly works and open educational resources. However, the experience we gained from this proof of concept project means that it should be possible to amend the production process for future open textbooks. So now on to the really important stuff, though, the student experience. Our students responded extremely positively to their experience of participating in this project, engaging with OER and contributing to the co-creation of an open textbook that will directly benefit future students. And they also really, really enjoyed participating in the OER Domains Conference and presenting their work there last year. So Anna commented about the conference. It's been a great experience to participate and listen to what other colleagues in OER had to say. Every day I am learning more about OERs and the infinite possibilities and applications that exist. And Ifie Naitukwu said, attending other seminars by speakers from around the world, further opened my mind towards understanding OER in a broader perspective. The OER Domains Conference has not only broadened my understanding of OER, but also challenged me to think about OER as a multi-dimensional art. I really love that quote, a multi-dimensional art. And in this final reflective blog post on the project, Ifie Naitukwu went on to write, OER means opportunity to me. The opportunity to share knowledge of a subject in a more accessible format that is mostly not bound by financial capability to access the material. Hereby creating a channel that facilitates equal educational opportunity for all. Through this project I have developed a better understanding that OER presents flexibility for students, teachers, content creators and end users to have access to the content, to modify and adapt materials in a way that is not usually permissible via traditional textbooks. So to conclude, I think it's fair to say that the open e-textbook for access to music education project successfully fulfilled its aim of exploring the creation of an open textbook using existing open license content. And the project has actually, the textbook has now been downloaded over 2,000 times over the world and Dr Moran is already working on a second edition of the textbook and two of our student interns will be rejoining us to present the project at the University of Edinburgh's internal learning and teaching conference in June, which we really hope will encourage other colleagues to consider creating their own open textbook projects. We really hope that the publication of Fundamentals of Music Theory will be a valuable first step in enabling the university to shift towards the use of open textbooks across a number of undergraduate courses. This would benefit the university by reducing textbook costs, benefit staff by providing them with access to easily customisable open textbooks and benefit students by providing them with free, high quality digital learning materials. Furthermore, open textbooks and OER have the potential to facilitate the democratic reshaping of teaching materials through student engagement and co-creation. So, all in all, this was really a hugely rewarding project, not least because of the enthusiasm and dedication from the team, from the Reeds School of Music. So, before I finish, I just want to say one last enormous thank you to Dr Nicky Moran and our student partners Anna Reina Garcia if any took the ends in Madu and Carrie Bing. Thank you very much. Thank you, Lorna. Thank you very much. I just posted a link to the book in the chat as well. So, fantastic to see all those resources. We have a few minutes for any comments and questions and I know I think a few have already been posted in the chat including InDesign is not for the faint hearted. Oh, you're telling me. I'm the clearest thing about it. I am not a graphic designer at all. I mean, really not at all. We ran this project so quickly with so little resource. I mean, I was working. This was also in the middle of the pandemic and we were trying to support hybrid and online teaching. So, I was literally like, how the hell do I use this? And I think the thing with although there's lots of online resources about InDesign, it's such a complex. You can do so much for that. It's quite hard to know where it starts. Well, I think nice comment here from back who really enjoyed the presentation and I could see Anna and Rob and I think Sarah are also posting in the comments. Are there any other comments or questions for Lorna before we finish this session? Do you please post them in the chat? I did have a question myself Lorna if I may while we wait for any more to come in. It's great to hear more about creative disciplines like music and art in OER and I think in the last few years we've seen more of this. Do you think there was a particular music flavour to this particular project? Did the subject matter make a difference to your approach? That's a good question. I think maybe it did because like I said, a lot of content that went into this text book is quite old content and I think the fact that the MOOC has kept running just shows how much demand there is for open resources for music education in these sort of creative subjects. I learned a lot from working with the staff and students from the Reed School of Music just seeing their approach to how they develop the content and how they structured the text book in particular the way they thought about the different ways that people would access the content of the book. I have to confess I'm actually quite a linear thinker and seeing the creative approach that they brought to how people might interact with this content I certainly found really inspiring. I certainly really appreciated the opportunity to work on a creative project like this. Thank you. We've had a couple more comments in the chat so there's one here from OpenEd Research saying it's great to hear from the students in your presentation and to find that they get a lot out of co-presenting at conferences too. This is the thing we never saw kind of five years ago. Do you want to comment a little bit more on the student involvement? Oh yeah I mean it was like I said the funding that we used for this project it was from the student experience grant and this is a very small pool of funding in the university. I think some of it might even come from alumni I can't quite remember off the top of my head where it comes from and it's really the funding is there for students to do creative stuff to enhance their own experience so although we were creating an open textbook and we had a very sort of like we had our own aims and objectives really the primary aim of this project was to give these students an enjoyable a beneficial experience and they certainly as you can see from their comments they learned a lot about open education, about open textbooks about affordances of open education in the OER but they really really enjoyed participating in the OER domains conference they found that hugely enjoyable. Now of course one of our students, Cahiding, has already graduated and moved on Anna and if any chick were have moved on they're still at the university so that's why they're going to be able to come back and present their learning and teaching conference but they really did find it a very sort of empowering experience and again they all wrote little reflective blog posts about the conference which you can find on the project log and yeah one of the things I really appreciate about working with student interns is they bring such a fresh perspective to the real benefits and affordances of open education which I've been working this domain for so long and you know I'm absolutely committed to it but to see it through somebody else's eyes is just really inspiring Wow it sounds like you've inspired our whole audience there's a lovely comments in the chat here good to challenge students to think about how they would teach music to those who it is a new topic a lot of love for this particular project for you and your collaborators Lorna is there anything final comments that you want to say before we wrap up? Not at all just like thanks for all the comments I look forward to sort of like having a quick look through them and I will be sharing resources from this presentation I'll share the project log, I'll share the e-book I'll share all the resources in Discord and of course you're very welcome to ask any more questions there or of course you can always find me on Twitter as well Fantastic Wow from everybody here at the OER22 conference thank you so much Lorna to present this really exciting inspiring project and thank you everybody who's joined us in the chat conversation will continue on Discord so thank you again Lorna Thanks a lot, bye