At the end of today’s network manager new features webinar, we invited attendees to share projects or news that would be of general interest with other Pressbooks network managers. We had a lot of great suggestions. It seemed like a good idea to me to make a regular topic thread for these kinds of announcements, so I’m starting here. @Leigh_KP @klaurits @liz @lhogendoorn @Abbey_Elder @hrwheeler and others, please feel free to share more details about your news here.
Adam Hyde and the good people at the Coko foundation have just announced the creation of a new ‘open publishing awards’ program with awards being planned for two categories: Open Source Software and Open Content.
They describe the Open Content category like this:
Content types emanating from the Publishing sector are eligible including Open Access articles, open monographs, Open Educational Resource Materials, open data, open textbooks etc. The only criteria is that the project uses an open content license (such as Creative Commons or similar). Nominations may be for a single work or group (in the form of a collection, project or organisation).
I’m guessing that many of you are building, supporting, have worked on, or know of projects that would be strong candidates for this kind of recognition.
Nominations are open through September 20 and you can nominate as many projects as you like, including your own. More details on the judges, criteria, and nomination process available at https://openpublishingawards.org. If there’s anything that we can do to help support your nominations, let us know!
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Thanks Steel! And thanks to you and @mcgratay for hosting such an informative call. I can’t wait to start playing with your fun new features.
As for Rebus Community’s new feature, the Textbook Success Program, I’m always happy to talk about it.
The Textbook Success Program is a professional development package that equips faculty, librarians, administrators, and managers with the tools they need to make great open textbooks. Participants benefit from a 12-session course and regular check-ins, as well as all Rebus resources developed over years of managing the creation of open textbooks.
For more info, please read our Frequently Asked Questions and feel free to add any unaddressed questions in the FAQ thread. You can also schedule a consultation to find out if the Textbook Success Program is right for your project and your institution. Or you can ask me!
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I know that many of you have been interested in cloning/remixing/adapting OpenStax books and that the import process is often very difficult. I just saw this news today from BCcampus: https://bccampus.ca/2019/10/08/easier-customization-33-openstax-textbooks-now-in-pressbooks/. Very very exciting!
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Looks like @paradisojr and colleagues at UCF have brought the OpenStax American Government 2e text into Pressbooks: https://twitter.com/paradisojr/status/1258582623644987392?s=20. Nice work all!
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@EDU_Managers The folks at Coko and punctum books are putting together a decentralized virtual ‘open publishing fest’ over the last two weeks in May: https://openpublishingfest.org/. If you want to pitch an event or talk about any work you’re doing (see https://openpublishingfest.org/form.html) and would like our help in any way, please let @Amy_Song or I know – we’d be delighted to help you share your successes/challenges in whatever venue suits you best.
Hi folks,
I hope everyone is doing well. If we haven’t met yet, my name is Amy, and I am the new support specialist for Pressbooks. Along with Steel, I will be helping answer questions from EDU network managers.
I’m writing to let you know that the location of our Knowledge Base docs will be changing this week as part of our adoption of new support ticket software (Zendesk). Our KB and FAQ can now be found at https://pressbooks.zendesk.com/hc/en-us. We have automatically changed the knowledge base URL for all of the links we’re aware of on our web properties, but wanted to notify you of this change in case you or your users have bookmarked or saved the old https://pressbookshelpdesk.groovehq.com/help link, which will no longer be active.
We have not changed our premium support email address, which will continue to be monitored and responded the same as it was previously.
Happy publishing!
Kind regards,
Amy
Thanks, @SteelWagstaff…and for those interested, we also have University Physics 1, College Physics, and Astronomy pretty much done (and in our public catalog: https://pressbooks.online.ucf.edu/catalog/) with University Physics 3 and Psychology on the way (hopefully, ready in fall). Our goal is to produce these with as little custom CSS as possible so what you see is what you get (when you clone it). Super proud of our team of faculty, designers, and developers working to make learning more affordable at UCF and beyond! Charge on!
@EDU_Managers We wanted to let you all know of two online presentations we’ll be participating in this week as part of the Open Publishing Fest:
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On Tuesday, May 26 at 2pm ET @hughmcguire and Jeremy Anderson from American Womens’ College at Bay Path University will be hosting a session on open publishing & OER entitled “Open… Publishing, Education, Platforms, Standards”. More details at https://openpublishingfest.org/calendar.html#event-195
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On Wednesday, May 27, also at 2pm ET, I’ll be leading an end-to-end demonstration of how people can use Pressbooks to publish anthologies/collections of public domain material. Might be of special interest for instructors who teach subjects where much of their primary material was published before 1924 (literature, classics, history, political science, law, etc). More details at https://openpublishingfest.org/calendar.html#event-224
@EDU_Managers, the recording from the webinar on ‘Making Public Domain Anthologies with Pressbooks’ has been uploaded with captions and can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Wnyq98E7qQ. Hope some of you find it useful.
@EDU_Managers, nominations for the 2020 Open Education Awards in Excellence are open through June 30. Nominations and awards can be made/received by anyone. Awards are given in three broad categories, described below:
Individual Awards
- Leadership Award
- Educator Award
- Support Specialist Award
- Emerging Leader Award
- Student Award
What We Share Awards
- Best OER
- Open Curation / Repository
- Open Reuse / Remix / Adaptation
- Best Open Tool
How We Share Awards
- Open Pedagogy
- Open Collaboration
- Open Research
- Open Policy
- Open Innovation
Two special awards for 2020 are the Open Resilience Award, which recognizes exemplary leadership (individual or organizational) and Open Education practices implemented in the context of COVID-19, and the Unesco OER Implementation, which recognizes exemplary leadership (individual or organizational) and practices to support the implementation of the Unesco OER Recommendation.
More details about the awards and nomination process here: https://www.oeglobal.org/activities/global/open-education-awards-for-excellence/.