In my role as the manager of education technology for BCcampus, I have been responsible for the evaluation, piloting,  and deployment of numerous learning technologies in consultation or collaboration with any number of our 25 partner post-secondary institutions within the province.

In this section, I would like to focus on one specific initiative where I was responsible for researching, evaluating, recommending and deploying an open-source publishing platform to support the creation and publication of open textbooks as part of the British Columbia open textbook project.

Description

In 2012, BCcampus received a grant from the British Columbia Ministry of Advanced Education to advocate, develop and support open textbooks within the British Columbia higher education system. As part of the project, I was responsible for evaluating and recommending an open textbook publishing platform that would support faculty across the province in developing and creating open textbooks.

Working with a technical analyst that I had recruited from another department, I began my research into publishing platforms with extensive consultations with other open education initiatives and projects, including the Connexions project (now OpenStax), Open Education Consortium,  MERLOT, Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resource (CCCOER) and other like-minded organizations. I also consulted with numerous institutions in the province.

From this early research, I  created a list of high-level considerations that would guide my platform recommendation.

First and foremost, I needed to consider the very idea of what a “textbook” was in a digital age, and find a publishing platform that would allow us to take full advantage of both digital and web affordances.

Second, the platform needed to be able to output a number of different formats, including ePub, HTML, and PDF, the latter of which could be used for both reading digitally and for creating print-on-demand physical copies of textbooks, which were still very much in demand at the time of the project.

In addition to these considerations, I also created the following requirements to guide our search.

• Open source. As a project that was creating open textbooks, we felt it vitally important that we reflect the ethos and values of open by choosing an open-source publishing platform.
• A sustainable business model. While open source was a requirement, we wanted to ensure that whatever open-source package we chose would be supported with a sustainable business model.
• Ability to host locally on our own servers to comply with local privacy legislation.
• Extensible. While we may not find all the features and functionality we were looking for, we wanted something that could be easily extended to add functionality as required.
• Easy to use. While a somewhat subjective marker, we wanted to find a platform that faculty could feel was familiar to them and intuitive to use.
• Support for open licenses.

With these high-level requirements, I conducted a deeper environmental scan and began comparing the features and functions of different possible publishing platforms.

During the process of the environmental scan, I refined the requirements and began focusing on more granular features and functions of the various platforms until we came up with a comprehensive list of requirements for the platform and a set of potential applications that could fit those requirements.

Finally, my technical analyst installed a number of platforms to test and pilot until we had gathered enough information to make a recommendation that we adopt Pressbooks as our open textbook publishing platform.

Reflection

While this was far from the first evaluation project I led, it was an insightful one as it reinforced for me the lesson that choosing a learning technology is often an act of compromise. Rarely will you ever find the perfect technology that fits all your requirements, and you either have to accept the limitations of your final decision, or come up with a strategy to mitigate the limitations. In this case, I developed a mitigation strategy that included restructuring the role of the technical analyst I was working with to become a dev/ops position, and forging a relationship with the core Pressbooks development team so that they would be more accepting of the code we developed and contributed back to the project to help fill the gaps in the software that we discovered in our analysis.

My second reflection about this project is a retrospective examination of the impact that this decision to adopt Pressbooks has had on the wider open education ecosystem. BCcampus has a positive reputation within the open education community and has close relationships with numerous open education initiatives in North America. Since I made the recommendation in 2013 for BCcampus to adopt Pressbooks, Pressbooks has been chosen as an open textbook publishing platform by numerous other open textbook projects and Pressbooks itself has developed a sustainable business model for their open-source product by developing commercial hosting and support packages.

Since the adoption of the platform by BCcampus, and the considerable amount of textbook and EdTech specific code that the BCcampus developers have contributed back to the project, Pressbooks has now become one of the de facto standards for open textbook publishing in the North American academic world. I consider my decision for BCcampus to both adopt Pressbooks, and to become a major contributor of code to Pressbooks, as one of the most significant contributions I have made to the larger open education ecosystem as it introduced Pressbooks as a viable open textbook publishing platform that has since been used by many other projects in North America.

Evidence

Open Textbook Authoring Tool Recommendation (PDF 3 pages).
This is the 2012 analysis and recommendation brief I created for BCcampus outlining my rationale for choosing Pressbooks as our open textbook publishing platform. This document was taken from our BCcampus internal wiki.