 The following is a prerecorded briefing for the Coalition of Networked Information by members of the Open Textbook Collaborative Project team. Representing the team are myself, Project Coordinator Steve Chudnick, Rob Hiliker, Curriculum Council Chair, and Mark Sullivan, our lead programmer. Our Project Director and Principal Investigator, Marilyn Ann Ochoa, also contributed to the presentation, but was unavailable for this taping. The Open Textbook Collaborative is a grant project funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, or as we like to say, FIPSI. As part of our work, we have recently launched our Open Publishing tool, which is an extension of the OpenNJ OER repository. First off, the OpenNJ is a fully searchable New Jersey-centric digital space hosted by Middlesex College that enables students and faculty to find OER created and or adopted by faculty members across all New Jersey higher education institutions. Additionally, it's a space for faculty to both share as well as identify OER for potential adoption and adaptation. Our Open Publishing tool provides a set of user interfaces that support the creation, organization, and augmentation of OERs in a wide variety of formats, thereby lowering the barrier to update and adapt existing OER materials. In this presentation, we will review the project's development timeline and demonstrate our progress to date. First off, though, we'd like to provide a bit of background about the Open Textbook Collaborative. So the Open Textbook Collaborative is a $1.44 million three-year U.S. Department of Education FIPSI grant. Our goal is to create, disseminate, sustain, and incorporate open educational resources into high-cost STEM career and technical education programs. Led by Middlesex College, it consists of New Jersey's County Colleges and Rowan University, along with support from Rutgers University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, New Jersey Council of Community Colleges, NJ Transfer, VAIL, and AJA Veritable, POPRI of educational technology organizations in the state of New Jersey. Along with secondary and higher education, the OTC works to find collaborators across community and faith-based organizations, state and local governments, and business and industry. Basically, if you're out there, we want to work with you. Of the five major goals of the Open Textbook Collaborative project, number three is of most relevance to our talk here today. Not only do we seek to fund OER content for the already existing OpenNJ repository, we also want to establish an open-source publishing platform with versioning functionality within it, so as to assist with the adoption, adaptation, and sustainability of materials created through the grant. With all this in mind, let's turn over to Rob Hilliker, who will ask and answer some deeper questions. Rob? Thank you, Steve. So, the first question might be to say, why build an OER repository in a traditional digital library? Why does OpenNJ exist? So, the first advantage of doing so is that it builds on existing handshakes with other systems, including library service platforms, being able to leverage mark records, OAPMH in particular, Mets and mods and other standards for other standard metadata schemas that really facilitate description, discovery, curation, and so on. The goal as well is to present OER content in parallel with primary source material, right? So, there's an opportunity for those educational resources that are primary sources to be in your traditional digital library, the OER content, living alongside it, having relationships with it, again, in the metadata, and so on. And then the OER repository itself can support all these different file formats and all different media that you might want to have digitally included in the repository and available for your students and for faculty developing OER. So, the next question would be, okay, why build an open publishing tool inside an OER repository? And this is really at the core of goal three of our grant, because it's one thing to have OER and then deposit it and then have somebody say, that looks pretty good, I think I might use it, but then they take it and most faculty members or instructors are going to want to modify that content. And to really build the communities of practice that are the goal of our grant, we realize that we need this open publishing tool to facilitate the creation of OERs, particularly for faculty who may not be familiar with other authoring tools that are available. One of the things that we provide is a lot of support in terms of instructional design and also licensing content to make sure that everything is appropriately licensed. So being able to do that through a shared platform is also helpful. But even more importantly, it facilitates the adaptation of existing OERs and then the dissemination of those adaptations, because once you have a community of people who are teaching the same course or similar courses, who are modifying and updating material, then they may want to share that with their colleagues at their own institution and all be using the same version or to share it with partners at other institutions who may decide to modify or augment the material. So it facilitates all of that sort of robust sharing and publishing workflow smoothly. And again, just to circle back here, right, that really this is about creating disciplinary communities of practice by having these linked adaptations. So with this slide, I'm going to hand it back or rather hand it over to Mark Sullivan, who is the technical lead who's working on the development of the open publishing platform. And again, just underline for you, right, that model where the publishing tool is really in some ways an add-on to the existing open NJ repository, and it's built within this digital library framework of Sobeck. But that in many ways is that the core conceptually of what we're trying to do with our grant, which is to create a sustainable community around OER development for these courses. So with that said, I'm going to give it over to Mark who'll do more technical deep dive into the project to date. Okay, so we talked about the OTC a little bit and the open NJ repository that we're building, and we're going to talk some more about OER publishing. But first, I wanted to go into just sort of showing you the open textbook collaborative online, that is, of course. So this is the open NJ site, the highlighted collection is the OTC. From the home page, you can go in and look at the different institutions, you can search by subject, and just very broad kind of searches. But OTC is here's the open textbook collaborative. If you go down, you'll see all the different projects that are currently a part of this. These are just the projects that are part of the grant, obviously. So we have a good amount of OER stuff being created. And so you can navigate into a collection and view the material. This one has just a textbook, essentially. So you can do page Turner and you can look at these. We have a lot of things that we sort of get from already building this within a digital repository, right? So all of this was already there. So one of the things that we're adding then was the open publishing tool itself. And before we get into demoing that, I just wanted to quickly go over a couple bits of this. So what are some of the selected features of the open NJ? It's to support OER content creation, adoption and adoption. So we're developing the publishing tool to facilitate the upload and creation of content within our site. So that includes like textbook and OER, creation and customization online, as well, of course, uploading existing content. And one of the things we're also trying to do is then better integrate this digital repository with LMSs. And that's using LTI and other APIs and course management, learning management systems. So we did say this was built on an existing digital repository. That repository is Sobeck CM. Originally began development in 2001. It was released as open source in 2013. Continuing development is supported by Sobeck Digital Hosting and Consulting. We also do hosting as we're hosting this site. So this supports a wide variety of resource types, metadata and interoperability. So some of the Sobeck CM metadata we just sort of get because we're part of a digital library are like these kind of things like Darwin Core might be interesting for an OER piece of material, for example. But then we had to turn to the open NJ metadata itself. We had to sort of select which materials to use. So many of these are these fields, some of them, you know, sort of like base resource material field. Some of them came in from the IEEE learning object metadata. So like material type, resource type, interactivity type, for example. So this is really the bulk of the metadata that we sort of expect people to hopefully provide when they're submitting material. Of course, not all of this is required, but so let me show you then submitting material through the open publishing tool right here. So if you're logged on, you can go to your open NJ and you're appropriately permissioned, of course. We'll log on and tell it to remember me this time. Okay, so I will say we'd like to start a new item. So we'll come in here. We have a couple different templates that we can use, but we'll hit accept. And this is the one sort of single page to collect all the data about this material. So you put in your OER title and course title, you can have a course title as well. So we'll say this is Peter security, perhaps enter your creator, myself as a creator, you can have creation dates, obviously. So then material type, we'll say we're creating a textual materials, we'll leave it as textual, but just to show you in what we can say textbook, perhaps, and resource type is more general. So these are our selected terms that we kind of went through and said these are the control terms that we wanted to use. Interactivity type, you could say this is expositive, intended user, might be both a teacher as well as the learner themselves. Target audience is really what grade level we're looking at. So we'll just say this is lower level undergraduate. You have an opportunity to subject keywords, abstracts, et cetera. And of course, choose your rights management. This is our default rights management that we select for everybody visibility. We tried to limit it to be kind of super simple in the system. So you're either instructors or everybody has access to it. We'll hit next. You don't have to upload materials, but you certainly could upload materials at this point. For example, we could upload. Hey, look at that. Here's a video, this short portion of this video, in fact, we'll upload that, give it a label, not a very exciting one, but still and we'll hit submit. So it tells you it's been submitted. You can then view your item. So this is the video that we just uploaded. This is a portion of the video that you're watching now. The description includes all the information that we entered. You can see most of these things are linkable. If we'd entered a subject keyword, that would have been linkable as well. We can link to other materials inside this stuff as well. You can edit metadata and then you can say related items as well. There's your video viewer, of course. Things are available as download. Because of the template we use, the open textbook option is also here. So you can come in here and you can sort of view what this item looks like, but you can then hit edit content and you can change this to be my OER content. This is really just sort of a WYSIWYG tool where I can start typing my content. You can upload, you know, obviously you can do links here. You can upload images and attach images as well and save. So you'll see that it comes in private. So by default it goes in as private. So it has a chance to be peer reviewed sort of and then uploaded and then made public to people. So if you click on the open publishing tool, which is here and also available here, it'll allow you to add. So you'll see right now we only have one sort of resource, the structure is only one thing, like the main body. So we can instead say we want to add a new division here. We can call it chapter two, save. Oh yes, we add a new division within this one actually. So we could add a another new division here and say chapter three, save. You could of course add a whole one before this. If you wanted to have a forward, you don't really have to type in both them. But you can see just the way we were trying to develop to give you sort of a visual view of the resource that you're working with. And we'll hit save now and you'll see that it appears over here. So we have these forward, we have the table of contents that we created sitting right here. So here's our different chapters in the open textbook here, whoops, over the text book. So we can then edit these right here and say chapter three, for example. So this is sort of where the very basic parts of what the open publishing tool is, is this creation. We're also working on the adaptation as well. So we saw the submitting of it. This is just a little fancier one. We've had a bigger table of contents here, and we've uploaded an image and we have some text. Again, this is just to show you the editor that you can use when you're editing. It's basically just HTML. Basically just HTML is how it's all saved. So again, each one of these things has an HTML page behind it that you're going to edit and do whatever you like with. So those are, you know, that's one that we've been working on. We're also working on these workflow changes about restricting access by user groups. We've created special registration screens for instructors, made a way to sort of queue that people have requested access to submit and things like that. So we had a lot of like administrative upgrades and sort of simplifying the UI as much as we could. As well as adding, you know, as the content's coming in, we're discovering, you know, the great variety of content we receive. We're creating custom viewers for certain things to make it easier to view. So going on forward, you know, what are our plan features? We're going to be continuing iterative improvements on the center face, of course. We're looking at export features into EPUB, Word, and PDF. Just utilizing this with the basic HTML. Well, EPUB basically is HTML, but in HTML to Word and PDF. We also are looking at importing features. And from OpenNJ, it really is adapting or adapting, which is something we are working on as well. But importing from pressbooks, obviously, we currently can upload Word and convert it to PDFs, but maybe importing some of the stuff directly from Word. And just really adding more collaborative features to promote the open pedagogy and then continue the testing of the OMAP stuff. So our timeline is we open publishing sort of out there in alpha at this moment. This month, I was hoping to actually get it done for this video, but the adaptation interface is almost complete, where you can say I'd like to adapt a resource, you get to choose what files are included, update your metadata, and create a new item. We'd also like to support the pressbooks interface. And this is both exposing our content to be able to be consumed by pressbooks as well as consuming their content, so that you could adapt pressbooks content onto this platform. And then June was really getting back to the open publishing tool, adding styles or automatically gives you cover pages, sort of some of the nice things that makes it look like you're working at a textbook. And then some smaller enhancement, sensational editing, and then we'll be pushing the open publishing tool out into beta, which we're definitely excited about. And then July, we'll do some more testing with LTI integration and LMSs as well. So some of the OpenNJ future considerations we're looking at, we would like to be able to support math equation, that's something we're not currently have yet on our timeline. We'd like to support interactive OERs and grade books, obviously at some point, because those things are super, super convenient to have in the same interface for the users, for the students, better support for peer reviewed open pedagogy of course, and just continue to promote the OER creation and adoption within OpenNJ. And with that, I'll pass you back to Rob and Steve. Thanks again for that detailed explanation Mark. If I were to try and tie up this presentation in a neat bow, I would say the following. The open textbook collaborative is consciously sought to make New Jersey created OER material accessible and sustainable by utilizing the already existing OpenNJ repository and supporting it with the open publishing tool. With proper professional development, training and marketing, we should achieve our goals of having our OTC materials easily adopted and adapted, which should lead to a sustainable OER collection to benefit students and faculty alike. Thanks for listening. And should you have any questions or comments, please contact any or all of us with the contact information on this last slide. Thank you.