Amy Song is the Customer Success Manager at Pressbooks and presented on “Finding and Remixing OER: A Practical Introduction” at Open Ed 2021. The first step Song described was finding OER. They mentioned finding topics and features and coordinating with a librarian. Song listed several OER repositories such as OpenStax, Lumen Learning, Libre Texts, Open Textbook Library at UMN, CUNY Manifold, MERLOT, H5P and OER H5P Hub, PHET Simulations. They focused on the Pressbooks Directory: a collection of books that is free to use even if you don’t have a Pressbooks account. Some books can be reused depending on the license. There is also a Pressbooks Directory Tour. There is a sorting function that could be really useful: some filters were language and when the book was last updated. Another feature is to search for H5P activities! You can also identify cloned/child versions or remixes of original Pressbooks. There are icons for H5P activities: you click on them and you can view H5P activities! I have had issues embedding H5P in our WordPress sites. It may be easier to encourage the use of Pressbooks instead! Song suggested evaluating books by focusing on accessibility, licensing, peer review, diversity of authors, inclusive images, layout… and overall completeness of the book. For an in-depth evaluation of resources, Song suggested considering reviews from other adopters, evaluation criteria from BC Campus, worksheet for improving diversity, and the Evaluating OER article by Monica Brown. I didn’t know that there are free, paid, and open source versions of Pressbooks.
For adapting and remixing OER, Song suggested starting by reusing. Next, if the license permits, remix an OER to fit your needs. Song mentioned getting professional help and reviews for the chapters/resources you remixed. One mentioned was the Textbook Success Program that I would love to be a part of! The Iowa State OER Starter Kit was recommended by Song as a good place to start. With Presbooks University, Song demonstrated how easy it is to clone a book with the URL alone. The cloned books appear on your network with the original source. The original content is present in full. With the Tools module, you can import pages from another book and decide what to include. How cool! You can also import from Word documents. Now I want to check if our Pressbooks can do this! You can also import images and H5P activities individually. Song went back to the 5Rs of the OER lifecycle and emphasized how communicating with librarians is a great place to start! Song now inspired me to attempt to create the Frankenbook of Metagenomics!
