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0625 Critical Race Theory in Education - Open Pedagogy & OER Creation

This guide covers the basics of how instructors and students can create open educational resources through student centered pedagogy

Accessibility starts with your book's content.

  • Use chapters, headings, and subheadings to organize your book's content for easy navigation.
  • Add alternative text to images for people with visual impairments
  • Make sure your font is large enough to read--12pt for regular text and 9pt for footnotes.
  • Use high contrast colors for charts, diagrams, and text in graphics

Use these tools and resources to ensure that your book will be accessible for all audiences:

This content is adopted from the University of Illinois Library Publishing in Pressbooks Libguide

Pressbooks is an open-source editing and publishing platform for self-publishing books based on WordPress. Start at iu.pressbooks.pub/ and use the Indiana University Login button to sign in to Pressbooks.

Here are two examples of student-authored Pressbooks at IU

  1. Short Guides in Education Research Methodologies – Open Textbook (pressbooks.pub)
  2. Perspectives on Black Markets v.2 – Simple Book Publishing (pressbooks.pub)

 

You should select a single person who is responsible for creating the book - e.g. your instructor. After this, each person can add their individual chapter. To create the book follow the instructions at The Simple 5 Step Guide to Making a Book with Pressbooks – Pressbooks User Guide. If you have previously created a book in Pressbooks, to create a new book you will need to go to your Admin Dashboard, hover over "My Books" in the top left corner, and select "Create new book" from the drop-down list that appears. Remember that the book's web address cannot change, so be very deliberate in the URL you choose. Your book title and other info, however, can be changed at any time. 

To add all users to the book, everyone must have logged in to the Pressbooks platform at least once so that their user profile is created. Then from the Dashboard menu select the "Users" page and "Add New User". Enter the email address of each author, and they will receive an email asking them to confirm the invitation. These helpful videos shows how to edit your profile in Pressbooks and create a new chapter.

 

Dashboard
The Dashboard is where you will control every aspect of your book.

Use the menu on the left side of the screen to navigate and customize your book.

Use the Catalog at the top of the dashboard to navigate between multiple books. 

 

 

 

 

OER Settings

Since you are creating an OER, the book must be set to public. This should only be done when the entire reader is ready to be publishedUnder the Dashboard Menu select "Organize" and click the radio button for "Public" at the top of the Organize page.

 

Add Book Information - Licensing and other descriptive information

You will need to go to the "Book Info" page to add a Creative Commons license. Remember that the Non-Derivative (ND) licenses cannot be used for an OER. Under the Dashboard menu select "Book Info" to add edit metadata--descriptive information about your book. Under the Copyright section, enter all contributors' names as the copyright holder, and chose a Creative Commons license to apply to the book. The recommended licenses are CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-NC-SA.

You can add a different license for your individual chapter as long as it is consistent with the license for the book. For example if the book is CC-BY-NC you can choose to make your chapter more open by using a CC-BY license which would allow commercial reuse without payment, or you can make your chapter more restrictive by using a CC-BY-NC-SA license which would require that anyone using your content to also make their content open for non-commercial use under an identical creative commons license.

Other metadata you will need to provide includes, Title, Subtitle, Short title (for the file name), Author names, Publication Date etc.

Some of this content is adopted from the University of Illinois Library Publishing in Pressbooks Libguide

Although it is possible for you to create your content directly in Pressbooks using the visual editor or text editor, this is not recommended. This is because the version control in Pressbooks is not as robust as in Microsoft Word or Google Docs. You should write and edit your review in one of these editors and then import your content into Pressbooks. You can still make edits in Pressbook after this if you wish to.

When editing in Pressbooks, you can use the visual editor or the text editor. The default is the visual editor, which uses a What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) similar to word processors or blogging platforms. The text editor allows you to edit plain text and HTML code.

The Visual Editor:

  • Write and revise content
  • Add and format media and content
  • Structure page content, add text anchors and hyperlinks
  • Use the Insert Footnote button in the editing toolbar. When the footnote button is pressed, the footnote content is added directly in line with the previous text (as opposed to the bottom of the page). 

The Text Editor:

  • Clean up HTML code that might be causing formatting problems (especially if the text was copied and pasted from Microsoft Word or similar)
  • Paste HTML embed codes

Pressbooks supports embedding from YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud, Social Media sites (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc.), Flickr, and TED.com and many others.  

Some of this content is adopted from the University of Illinois Library Publishing in Pressbooks Libguide

Follow the instructions in the Pressbooks user guide to import content Import – Pressbooks User Guide. Since you should be preparing your review as a Microsoft or Google document, this is straightforward to import.

To import 3rd party content i.e. the article you are reviewing, it must be in one of these formats. While you cannot import a pdf, many journals give the option to download an epub and an epub file can easily be imported into Pressbooks. Remember that you should use only use articles with an open license. Make sure to include the full citation for the 3rd party content you are importing, in compliance with the open license attached to that content.

The article shown in this image allows you to download an epub, however it shows that copyright is held by the authors. Look for a CC license to make sure that you can use the article in this project.

 

In this case, the CC license is found on the article landing page and the authors have applied a CC-BY-NC license.

Create separate chapters for your written content and the 3rd party content that you are reviewing, as this will give you more flexibility.

If you need to assign a separate license for your chapter you can do this in the chapter metadata section. It is very likely that you will need to do this for the 3rd party article you select for review. From the Dashboard menu go to the "Organize" page and choose "Organize". All the chapters will be displayed. Find your chapter and click on the title. This will open the Pressbooks visual editor. Scroll down to the "Chapter Metadata" section and fill out the copyright information.