 All right, there's our jazzy intro. Really excited to be here. Alan Levine coming to you from Central Saskatchewan and really excited to talk to colleagues. I got to know when I was at TRU, we have Melissa Jacquebec and John Belshaw and with the scintillating title, The Case of the Accidental Open Textbook. And so I'm really primed for this presentation. So take it away, Melissa and John. Thanks, Alan. And good morning, everyone. I should say wet book wide tip, Melissa Enzquest. We just want to take a moment to acknowledge that I'm coming to you from the Thomson River University campuses, which are on the, well, actually, I'm coming from my house, but it's also on the traditional lens of the Tacomlox to Shaquette Mac, Cowloops campus. And the Tacalc is where our Williams Lake campus lies within Shaquette Maculou, the traditional and unceded territory of the Shaquette Mac people. I'm grateful for the Shaquette Mac nation's generosity and hospitality while I live, learn and work in their territory. And the other contributors to this project, including John Belshaw, who's joining us this morning, live and work in treaty six territory in the traditional lands of the Musqueam, Squamish and So what tooth first nations and in Snana territory on Vancouver Island. So welcome. I'm here to talk to you about course development project using, was called History 3711, Histories of Indigenous Peoples in Canada. And at TRU, we start with the course outline and then we usually bring together a course development team. Now I actually was brought onto the project after the course development team was formed. So I owe this wonderful team to my esteemed colleague, Michelle Harrison. But the team consisted of the people on the screen. And I think John's available to tell you a little bit more about that team. Sure. Thanks. I'm very pleased to be able to say a few words about this project. For me, one of the great pleasures in life is putting together an effective team that generates something of quality. But it has to be fun because, well, otherwise why bother? Now I've worked with Melissa on curriculum development and revision processes in the past. And she strikes a very nice balance between encouraging professional and drill sergeant. We certainly have deliverables in a project like this and we do have to deliver. And it's nice to have a timeline and someone who's keeping you to more or less that timeline. And this was a great experience for I think all parties concerned. For many years, starting in the 1980s, I taught a number of courses dealing with Indigenous histories. Now the more one knows about Indigenous experiences, the more clear it becomes that a settler teaching Indigenous histories is problematic. Against that, it's just plain wrong to have a curriculum that doesn't include Indigenous histories. And so that's where the balance needs to be struck. Some of our solution needs to be pushed through. More than 20 years on, there's a growing number of superb Indigenous scholars in Canada, knowledge keepers who are doing that work in ways I simply can't. So this was an opportunity, this project represented an opportunity to pull together a few threads. I understood the outlines of Indigenous histories and where the field was going for the most part and much of the literature as well as some of the pedagogical challenges of what we call rewriting and unsettling Canadian history. I was also familiar with the process of developing both curriculum and OERs and also developing open learning courses. Courses are designed to be continuous access, not pure-based, not cohort-based educational models. And I'm familiar with open educational resources, including open textbooks. So we have Melissa prowling the bench behind us like a hockey coach, capable of deploying resources. But what we needed was a level of expertise and engagement with the material and communities with Indigenous voices that would guide us. And in that respect, we were very lucky. Now, we have a collective agreement that says when we set up projects like this, you get a curriculum developer and a consultant. And I knew that given the scope of this material, we were gonna need more voices than that. And I argued for two consultants. One, the argument would have been nice to have three or four, but two is, I think, as much as we could expect. This is one of those cases where one acts first and apologizes later for breaking the rules. I get to apologize. I doubt that I will ever actually apologize. We brought on Dr. Chelsea Horton, who was a newly minted PhD with appropriate expertise and years of working with Vancouver Island First Nations on education initiatives. Dr. Sarah Nicolle is another fresh PhD. She hails from the Shakwakum First Nations in Kamloops. She was, at the time, a prof at the University of Saskatchewan. She's now at the University of Alberta. And between us, we created a four-member team with development expertise and across-the-board experience, delivering the goods in terms of curriculum materials, but also in terms of the pedagogy. Both Drs. Nicolle and Horton are deeply immersed in the political realities of indigenous histories and current conditions. They've got expertise in those areas. So I felt confident that they wouldn't let us put a foot foul and they were great in this respect. I'd write, they'd revise, point me at new studies I hadn't heard of and new theses that were just being released publicly. We'd discuss and debate. It was kind of like a graduate seminar on indigenous histories since 2010. It was great fun. Now, as Melissa will explain, we thought we might start with an open textbook, then we didn't, and then we did. By the time she guided us into port, I think we were all very happy with the process, the time that we'd invested in it, the outcome. This was both something that would actually do some good, too, which is a great feeling at the end of the project. Now, back to you. Okay, thanks, John. So the next couple of slides just show you a bit of that collaborative process. You can see here, I've just taken an excerpt from the collaborative documents, the working documents as it were. For the course, and you can see here, Sarah is commenting on, perhaps this needs to be explained a bit earlier for students or referenced a bit earlier. And then in the next one, Chelsea's commenting suggesting maybe this additional resource would be useful for this topic. So as we were writing the course, and then as John said, they thought about an open textbook at the beginning and then decided against temporarily. So but when I came on board and was looking at all the course materials, we basically had a textbook because the units were divided into topics and each of those topics had a lot of extensive narrative. It provided necessary background and weaving of the resources and the historical events that were being studied in the course. There was also review questions, article readings with directions to complete reading notes, suggestions for additional resources and further readings. But when you take all that and take it and put it in a learning management system like Moodle, you're gonna end up with a lot of scrolling and overwhelming amount of text for students and it's just not practical in an LMS. I think speaking to an audience who's well aware of all the limitations of LMSes. So we were like, what are our options here? How can we make this more user friendly for the students? So we looked at suggestions. Our production team is leaning a lot towards using Moodle books. Those do allow you to download but then how are you gonna print them? Not everyone has a printer. Are you still stuck on the screen? How are you gonna organize those materials? The same applies to linking PDFs to particular spots in the course. So we were leaning more and more towards press books. Press books offers offline availability, multiple formats. It can be organized like a book. It just seemed to tick a lot of the boxes for how we wanted to make this material more flexible and user friendly for students. So if we were going to use a press book site, it seemed like just a natural evolution to then make the textbook open. And we are in BC. We have a lot of support from BC campus and a lot of promotion of open textbooks. They have a collection. They have a process. We actually hosted this textbook on our own press books server, but afterwards we were able to put it into the BC campus repository. And as John alluded to earlier, he has previous experience and has written, in fact, two open textbooks on Canadian history, both pre-confederation and post-confederation that are used across Canada and are in that BC campus repository. So you'll just see from the screenshot or the landing page, just how flexible a press books site can be and how many different options students have for how they'll download and use that book. So if they've got a Kindle or a Kobo, they can put it on that device or an iPad. They could put it on their phone. They can print the PDF. They could do all of these things. It's entirely up to them how they want to access it and they can read it online. So if they haven't remembered it, it's still accessible openly 24 seven. So there are a lot of benefits to that, but the process, when you then decide after you're finished that you wanna make a piece open, that's where things got a little bit complicated and version control was essential. And I'm not sure we always mastered that. But basically my task then was to make sure that we extracted the open textbook portion from the course materials, ensure that there was appropriate overlap and repetition of what was needed to be both open and within the course itself for students and that the navigation signals were clear. So poor John, this involved a lot of back and forth and he was very patient with me. And then we have a lovely editing team at TRU and Corey Stumpf was our editor and he did a lot of double checking for us. So you'll see here, I've just taken a screenshot from the middle course where the learning instructions, the activities are for the students. And it's really important that the references here match the references in the book. So you can see here, read chapter one better together in their course textbook. So then in the textbook, it's gotta say chapter one better together, the great Confederacy. It seems like a small thing that should be so easy. But as I said, because we were pulling things out and making sure that repetition and alignment was there was key and the editors were very helpful with that. I should say this press book site, I think I forgot to mention this, John actually did all the press books building as well. So he was the one who took the material and put it in press books, which isn't part of our usual process, but we were trying to save time and simplify things a little bit. And it also gave him a bit, I think a bit more control over how things looked in the end. The assignments rested in Moodle. There was no need to have the assignments shared openly on the internet, but we had added a WordPress site. So the assignments were duplicated in a WordPress site. We usually offer this course in two sections. So two groups of students will be taking it at the two groups of students will be taking it with two different instructors. So this also offered an opportunity for students to share their posts about, this was most about the ancestral lands that they lived on and having them look at their surroundings through that indigenous lens and then share with each other. So they could see what other people were writing about. You can see from this example, students were talking about Chilliwack BC or Terrace BC and they could provide images as well to show their experience. So as I said, the influence of the audiences for each of these resources made it so that we also had to look at how things were organized and change them a little bit. So in the press book site, we have a long list of additional resources and readings at the end of the chapters. But in the Moodle course, by topic, students are referred to further readings and suggested readings. It has to be a little bit more directive for actual students in the course for what they'll need to do. But for other audiences using the course, using the textbook either for their own interest or in a course, you want that flexibility that they have the resources there in case they want, but we're not telling them they have to read them or that they should read them. Again, as I said, it's really important to make sure things were really aligned. So press books might call it chapter four, the Transcordillarine West and then the Moodle course would also reference the Transcordillarine Rest and that chapter as students were reading. Just I wanted to give a shout out to our Intellectual Property Office who were very patient in advising us on the credits because initially the course had been envisioned as a course, not an open resource. It was important to include images in the course and I actually think from the start, John was very cognizant of trying to use Creative Commons sources, but then our Intellectual Property Office still went through, ensured everything was open, available and had been cleared to be open on the internet in this press book site and provided the credit lines. Our graphic artist, Nicole Singular, did a really wonderful job too of finding an image and consulting with the team on what image they felt would be most appropriate to use as a title page and ensuring that this also was a Creative Commons image. And then there were some things we added to the press book site afterwards thinking, well, now that it's open, we also wanted it to have a glossary that included all the names of the indigenous nations that had been included in the book and how they were also referred to. So you can see Anishinaabe, also known as Ojibwe and Chippewa, and that. And of course, it's also critical to have a territorial acknowledgement in a book about indigenous histories. So I've just taken a small piece of it. You're welcome to look at the entire acknowledgement. It's quite lovely in the book itself, which explains some of the importance of having that acknowledgement and then making sure it encompasses the territories of everyone involved in the project. So at the end, we basically learned the lesson that it's, it takes a lot of effort to retrofit something to become an open textbook. It would have been easier if we'd made that plan at the start, but I think we'd all agree after everything that it was well worth the effort to have this textbook available openly and freely to students and educators across the country. It has been put into the BC campus open textbook repository and meets the requirements. Somebody always asks about accessibility for accessibility. And we're really happy and it has been adopted at other institutions. But unfortunately, I wanted to get feedback and our course just launched about a month or so ago. So I asked for the open learning faculty members if they had any feedback and they didn't really have any feedback on the textbook. They hadn't heard anything negative. And I am also happy to say that Dr. Chelsea Horton was hired as one of the open learning faculty members to deliver the course to students. And so I'm sure especially given Chelsea's experience in this entire process that as she works with the textbook, if she sees places where we can improve, we can continue to update. And it's not meant to be a static. As you know, open textbooks can be adapted. They can be remixed. They can be updated. And it's really important that we will have that ongoing conversation. And I think that is actually the rest of our time unless there's some questions or anybody has any comments. And I will put the link to the Oh, we got it. Text in the chat. We got the link done for you. So I appreciate that. I mean, affirmation, you know, people are loving the additional resources and the beautiful glossary and hearing about a bit of freezing going on there. Your process. Sorry if my internet is slow, but people really appreciate the resources and the glossary and especially hearing your process. I would say accidental because it wasn't what you intended to do, right? So happy accident. Happy accident. I think so. I mean, we started, as I said, by thinking that, well, it'd be great to develop an open textbook in this area. And one of the attractions of open textbooks is you provide a foundational amount of information. And then somebody's using it in New Brunswick. Well, they'll add some McMull material and somebody's using it in Treaty Six. Well, they'll bring in more Creer. It's a toppy material. There's just so many ways to bolt on interesting aspects or just get rid of a chapter because you don't really need that. And it struck us as something that would have a positive impact and really be an asset. It'd be great to have as an open textbook, but it just seemed like such a huge project to begin with that it seemed, once you started bringing it back to course material, that seems more manageable, but pretty soon you realize that it's going to be in a way that we are sometimes. So it's going to touch out there and people will chance to change it. That's right. And so someone really appreciated the extra effort to acknowledgement, especially dealing with clearing the copyright. I think you went above the beyond. So, Gotson is asking how long did it take you to go through that process? Probably too long. You know, it's really sad because I think we were trying to save time. So as I said, John put all the materials in the press books himself. That was in December of 2019. And I think the course didn't actually launch till a couple of months ago, but it probably took, you know, there's cues and all kinds of things in our process that take too long and get quite frustrating, but it probably took the intellectual property office a month to go through or not too, you know, just probably not as long, but we're always careful with that, with everything. And I have to say, it's probably part of my weakness that when I look at something, I'm like, so I'm like, oh, okay, we have to make this open. And then I go, because I had a history course, I know an English course in the 18th century novel and you know, you're finished. And then it's like, oh, all these works actually are available in public domain. So I went through and then picked out and make sure there was no textbook cost to students for that course as well. It's never trivial. Have you heard any feedback from the use of the textbook so far? I have not. A little, I've heard from a couple of colleagues that they're enjoying using them. And so that's the great news. And the best part will be hearing if they're enjoying changing them. Yeah, that's great. So I really wanna thank you, Melissa and John, for sharing the happy accident of the open textbook. I think we're all appreciative of that and everybody else who joined us for this session. And it seems to go by too quick, you know, lightning lightning, but we appreciate. And of course, you know, you can ask further questions and Melissa and John in Discord and find out how to contact them. Okay. Thanks so much everyone. Om nom nom.