Open Educational Resources

Remember, when considering an open textbook for your course,  there are only 3 possible outcomes:

• Lower costs and poorer learning outcomes
• Lower costs and similar learning outcomes
• Lower costs and better learning outcomes

Open textbooks always cost less than a traditional published textbook. When lower costs are combined with similar or better outcomes, there is a net benefit to the student. These net benefits to students will occur twice as often for open textbooks than a traditional fee based text.

This material is based on original writing by David Wiley, which was published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license at:https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3743

• Make it your own! Open textbook content is almost always presented in a way that makes it easy to edit, adapt and restructure. Bring the content into your favourite word processor or document layout software and start working with it.
• Give the content a geographically relevant focus. An excellent first step in adapting any open textbook is to provide a geographic focus that suits local needs.
• Provide format options. Open textbooks offer a huge advantage over traditional publisher supplied textbooks when they are available in many format options. Work with your library to offer your students a range of formats (e.g. epub, mobi, pdf and html). Publisher supplied e-textbooks typically come in a format that serves the digital rights management needs of the publisher, with little regard for student accessibility.
• Use your course management system. If you are stumped on how to deliver your open textbook, consider making it available through the course management system available at most institutions.
• Give back. If you have found useful texts, go back to the site that you found them on and provide a helpful review. Others need to know what is good and not so good about these resources.

H5P stands for HTML 5 Package

H5P is an open source creation tool. It gives educators the ability to create interactive content (from over 50 content types) without any requirement to understand coding languages.

Why H5P?

It's Easy

• H5P is easy to use.
• It is intuitive with strong documentation and does not require coding skills.

Mobile-friendly content

• H5P content is responsive and mobile friendly.
• H5P interactive content works with computers, smartphones and tablets.

Documentation

• Demos/downloads, tutorials and documentation are available from H5P.org.
• Support is also built into the H5P Pressbooks editor.

Share and Reuse

• H5P content can be imported into a Pressbooks book. Once in Pressbooks you can:
  • Adopt – use the H5P as is , or
  • Adapt – Change and modify in some way.
    • Revise and customize so that it is a better match with your course.

H5P Plugin in Pressbooks

• Allows Pressbooks users to create H5P inside the Pressbooks platform.
• Editing access is attached to the Pressbooks hosted book.
• You can import and use H5P content that is already created.
  • Options include interactive material, quizzes, timelines, drag-and-drop questions.
• H5P documentation and demos can be accessed from within Pressbooks.

Embed Option

You can also use the embed code to share the H5P on any web page including LibGuide pages and Learning Management Systems (LMS) like Blackboard.

Using H5P in Pressbooks Copyright © 2023 by NSCC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.