 Welcome to Lorna Campbell, who leads the team, which proposed this session on the Skating of Open repurposing open resources for music education. And a warm welcome to Anna Reina Garcia, Kari Ding, and Ifan Shukwu Esimadu, who are students at the Reed College School of Music in Edinburgh and are currently working as interns on a project that deals with open textbooks for access to music education. The presentation is 15 minutes and there will be five minutes for questions at the end of the session. Over to you now, Lorna. Brilliant. Thank you very much. It's a real pleasure to be here today. My name is Lorna Campbell and I'm the manager of the Open Education Resources Projects Service at the University of Edinburgh. And today we're going to be talking about how the university's strategic commitment to open knowledge has enabled us to reuse and repurpose open education resources in order to create new and innovative learning materials in a wide range of formats. And this presentation is actually brought to you by a cast of thousands. There's been lots of people involved in this project. And I'm very pleased to be joined today by three students who are working on this project. Although I think at the moment we probably only have two here. Oh, here, I'm here to join us as well. So, Anna, would you like to introduce yourself? Yeah, I'm Manu. I'm a student of your music here in the University of Edinburgh and I'm from Spain. Thank you, Anna. Kari, would you like to say hello? Yeah, can you all hear me, I think? Yes, we can. So, my name, yes, thank you. So, my name is Kari. I'm from Hong Kong and I'm a master of music and musicology student in the University of Edinburgh. Thanks, Kari. And, Athene, would you like to introduce yourself? Yeah, my name is Eufran and I'm a second year music student at the University of Edinburgh and I'm also from Nigeria. Brilliant, thank you for joining us today. 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 our teaching and research is accessible, inclusive and relevant to society. The University's vision for OER has three strands, building on our excellent education and research collections, traditions of the Scottish Enlightenment and the University's civic mission. This vision is backed up by an OER policy approved by our Learning and Teaching Committee which encourages staff and students to use, create and publish open education resources to enhance the quality of the student experience, expand provision of learning opportunities and enrich our shared knowledge commons. And to support this policy, we have an OER service 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 ten years, the University has shared a huge wealth of open contents with the global knowledge commons, including hundreds of open educational resources, Wikipedia entries, open licensed media resources, research data sets, open journals, historic images from the University's collections, MOOC and three short online courses. MOOC have been a cornerstone of the University's commitment to open access to high quality online learning opportunities, widening access to knowledge and community outreach since 2012 when the University signed its first partnership agreement with Corsera. Since then, the University has launched over 8G MOOCs, running across three platforms and aged 3.7 million learners. One of the University's earliest MOOCs was the Fundamentals of Music Theory. This course was developed by senior lecturer Dr. Niki Morang, a colleague from the Reed School of Music and launched on Corsera in 2014. The course introduces key concepts behind conventional Western music theory, providing students with the skills to read and write musical styles and mutations and to apply this knowledge in analytical listening. The Fundamentals of Music Theory MOOC has run continually since its launch in 2014 and over 200,000 learners have participated in course over the last seven years. In order to ensure that course materials from our MOOC are easily accessible for 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 or used and repurposed under open license. There are now over 500 videos from 20 available, or three download and reuse from the Open Media Bank, with more content available every day. 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 20 graduate level 7 on campus blended learning course for undergraduate students. The University's Elder Learning Design Approach is adapted from the University of Northampton's Tisle Purve Center. Elder is a creative, supportive and collaborative process where participants tackle problems together, resulting in better solutions and strengthening the thief. Key improvements to the music course include the addition of learning outcomes that address students' critical and contextual awareness of the course content, new content addressing global decolonization issues around music theory and music education, an extended resource list, and a course textbook, accompanying the video lectures repurposed to the MOOC. This course has now run for two years and is an integral component for 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 has been relatively little engagement with open textbooks. Although open textbooks are the predominant form of OER in many parts of the world and are used extensively across all levels of education in both the US and Canada, they have not been widely adopted in the UK, despite the 2018 UK Open Textbook Project reporting significant and growing interest in the format. Among its findings, this Hewlett-founded project called for national level research into student experiences and what impacts, if any, textbook costs were having on their studies, plus additional research on how textbooks are used by educators in different regions with different funding and tuition costs. Open textbooks are once again in the spotlight as institutions are facing rapidly increasing e-textbook costs as they move away from print materials in response to the COVID pandemic and longer-term trends in academic publishing. Campaigns such as e-book SOS have been launched by academic librarians and concerned colleagues to raise awareness of publishing practices that are making e-books unaffordable, unsustainable, and inaccessible to university libraries and they are calling on the UK government to investigate the practices of the academic e-book publishing industry. Increasing adoption of open textbooks and open e-books is one way to address these concerns and a number of institutions including the University of Edinburgh, NUI Galway, University College London and University of Manchester are in the process of launching their own open presses. At the University of Edinburgh, a number of 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. At the same time, the university's open journal service which already supports and publishes a wide range of academic and student-led open access journals is expanding their service to provide an open textbook publishing platform based on open monograph press from the Public Knowledge Project. In late 2020, Dr. Melissa Hayton, assistant principal of Olay Learning and champion of the university's mission and vision of OVR in Open Knowledge, suggested a repurposing content from the fundamental music theory MOOC to create an open textbook who would be a useful way to explore the practicalities and affordances of e-books. Staff and students from the Ritz School of Music came together with colleagues from the OVR service and were successful in securing a student-experienced grant to undertake a small exploratory research project, open textbooks for access to music education. University student-experienced grants are one of contributions to support innovative projects and initiatives that will enhance students' social, academic, entrepreneurial, supporting or cultural development. This funding has enabled us to employ three-part-time students' interns for a period of four months to work on this project. The aim of Open Textbook for Access to Music Education project is to explore the potential of providing access to free, accessible, adaptable open textbooks in a convenient and reusable open format, ideally suited for hybrid and online learning. In addition to evaluating a range of different open textbook platforms, the project will create a prototype textbook comprised of existing content of the Fundamentals Music Theory courses, which can be used for undergraduate teaching within the university and made available more widely under open license. The development process will enable us to explore and evaluate different open textbook platforms, learn about the logistics and practical process of creating open textbooks from existing content and whether it will be feasible to extend to this to further open textbook projects. We began by exploring a range of e-books and open textbooks and evaluating for open textbook platforms, open monograph press, manifold, press books and GitHub pages. A project blog was set up on the university's academic blogging service so we can capture and reflect on our findings and disseminate the outputs of the project. GitHub pages is a subsidiary of GitHub which presents its content in the form of a website, even though it is designed to be managed by users with some experience of coding, this will be simplified using Jekyll, an extension that transforms plain text into a study website. All the GitHub pages have a big community to support new users due to the short-term skills of a project we do not have the time to develop the coding skills to use this platform. Manifold is a non-profit open source platform created by the University of Minnesota Press to read and publish e-books in multiple formats. This platform is designed not only to publish but also to engage with readers and host discussions about the content published with varied tools such as annotation, sharing, highlighting, bookmarking, and commenting. Manifold was considered one of the top choices of platform due to the simplicity of the user interface across different devices, ability to include supplementary resources in the main material, and limited ability to edit, update, and export books. Pressbooks is an open source content management system designed for creating books and exporting them in multiple formats including PDF, E-Pub, Mobi, Webhook, and HTML. A great thing about this platform is that it is based on WordPress, a platform we are already familiar with which will make the production process much easier. However, we were concerned that the University's IT services, may not have the capacity to set up and maintain a new Pressbook service at such short notice. The University's own open press service is a new service based on open monograph press which is due to launch in May DCM. We agree that this seems like a great way to publish a group as we already have access to the platform. The team of open press service will be able to provide us with support and help with all the licensing, policies, and indexing processes. The service is still in its final stage of development. So this will be also a good opportunity to assist the platform with the open press service to see if there are any practical issues. In order to ensure that our open press book will be accessible and reusable as possible to the wider public, we are planning to make the contents available in a wide range of formats such as HTML, EPUB, PDF, MP3, video, and video transcripts. Our book will be suitable for all levels of layers and structured in topics rather than chapters so that users can follow the content in any way that is useful to them. Each topic will be accompanied by an introduction that identifies other relevant topics. For example, in order to get the most from this topic, you may find it useful to be familiar with the following topics. And we also plan to create a visual overview that will illustrate how all the different topics overlap with each other. This will not be necessary to work through the content in linear sequence. Video from the original Coursera MOOC and content from a supporting note and book developed for on-campus course delivery will form the basis of the open textbook. New materials covering music theory in contextual critical global context will be added from the most recent run of the course and new video materials will be added as it becomes available, replacing the old Coursera video. Content relating to the regiment of musical notation will be drawn from existing sections of the course material and collected into a new regiment's topic. To conclude, although our research project is still in its earliest stage, if it is successful, we hope this will be a valuable first step in enabling the university to shift towards the use of open textbook across a number of undergraduate courses. This would benefit the university by reducing textbook costs, benefit staff by providing them with access to easily customizable open textbook and benefit students by providing them with free high quality digital learning materials while also providing free open education resources for music learners worldwide. To find out more about our project and to follow our progress, please visit our project blog. Thank you very much. So, thank you very much. That was wonderful. That was really, really wonderful. I'm particularly happy that there are three students from diverse parts of the world presenting with Lorna. And on a topic that I think and I could see from the chat, participants felt is so important, but also sometimes underrepresented. So, I was looking at the chat and I could see that participants were really, really into this project. So, my question, because I can't see questions here at the moment, just very, very positive and overwhelming good comments from the participants, my question is really, you said that people can actually contact you via the blog. Are there any other means of contacting you? I think there will be a lot of discussion after this presentation going on. You can certainly, any questions on the conference hashtag, I'll see, and I'll also be on Discord all day. I know I'm very grateful that the students are here today because I know that they're extremely busy with their own coursework as well. Also, you can always get in touch with us through open.ed.ac.uk, which is the university's OER service, which is managing this project. I should also say a huge thank you as well to Dr. Niki Maran, who has really been instrumental in developing the original MOOC and she is our project partner on this project. So, Niki's not with us today, so I just want to acknowledge her contribution to this project. Thank you very much. I think it's so important that you did that, Lorna, because there are so many hands involved in this project, not all visible, obviously, for the obvious reasons, not visible in the presentation because the presentation is rather short. But I think the important part is that there are so many different ways of contacting you and we know them now, and I think most of the discussions will actually take place later on beyond this presentation. And I would like to announce that I, for once, am particularly interested in this topic, and I will be in touch with you because I'm involved in the project that also deals with music education and I will definitely be in touch. So, thank you very much for your presentation and I'm very much looking forward to everything that's coming out of your wonderful presentation here. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.