This post was originally published on the UK Copyright Literacy blog here.
In this piece, Sarah Sherman and Leo Havemann share how they published a free, open
access ebook based on work they had completed during a two year project. Here,
they offer their tale as a guide to publishing openly.
Context
The Bloomsbury Learning Environment (BLE) is a
shared e-learning service comprising six London-based HEIs. The BLE brokers
shared software licences for learning technologies for its members, organises
staff development events and manages collaborative projects. In 2014, the BLE
directed its attention to the ways in which learning technologies can enhance
and support assessment and feedback. We wanted to gain an overview of our local
practices, and at the same time uncover and share examples of people making use
of learning technologies in ways which go beyond the norm of usual practice.
Over the two subsequent academic years, we organised a programme of online and
face-to-face events, conducted some research, and collected case studies
highlighting good practice.
Why
write a book?
Unlike academic research, which by default
tends to be shared through publishing and conferences, teaching in HE is often
seen as a more individual pursuit. In our experience, teaching staff simply
don’t have much opportunity to find out what their peers are doing in the
classroom or VLE. We hadn’t originally set out to produce a book as part of the
project, as throughout the process we had been gathering and publishing case
studies on our project website, but slowly it dawned on us that we actually had
sufficient material to put together an edited collection. We felt that
producing and launching a book would provide a way of declaring the project
complete and getting more attention for the authors who had generously contributed
these insights into their practice. We also felt that a book might be viewed as
more scholarly by the academics whose practice we wanted to develop. Therefore,
we decided to collate all the written outputs from our project into a single
volume, which we also chose to publish as a freely available, open access ebook
entitled Assessment,
Feedback and Technology: Contexts and Case Studies in Bloomsbury.
What
did we include?
The ebook contains over 20 chapters, which
were contributed by academics, learning technologists, administrators and
consultants, bringing a variety of perspectives to the topic. Following the
editorial introduction (written by us at the very end of the process), the
first three chapters are longer research papers produced during the project,
which capture macro-level snapshots of current practice across the BLE partner
institutions. Each paper stands alone as a distinct piece of research but
together, they offer a good sense of the assessment and feedback landscape in
Bloomsbury.
During the project, we also collected 21
pedagogic and three technical case studies from our colleagues to share their
practice; to aid the collection and coherence of these, we had developed a case
study template consisting of headings and prompts. This ensured they were
roughly similar in length and more importantly, addressed a standard set of
questions. Once the case studies had been written, they were peer reviewed by
members of the project team (most of whom were also case study authors).
How did
we produce our book - and what help did we need?
You might think, as we
did, that since all the chapters of the book were (more or less) complete,
there is little else remaining for editors to worry about. This is not the
case, at least not if you are publishing it yourself. For about 6 months after
the project itself had closed, we slowly worked on pulling all the content
together into one giant Google Document and editing it during quieter times.
Ideally, the process would have been faster, perhaps with the eventual
publication coinciding with the close of the project, but as we hadn’t
initially planned on publishing a book we hadn’t allocated time within the
project to do this. Without dedicated time of our own, or other dedicated
project resources, we appealed to the better nature of various colleagues and
friends for help at different times. Sonya Powney,
Elizabeth Charles, Dawn Marsh, Sarah Turner, Nicola Proudfoot and David Hipple
kindly proofread, copy-edited and formatted the text into a presentable and
printable state.
We were grateful for the artwork used as the
front cover that our friend Sonja Grussendorf created for us. We were really
lucky that not only is Sonja a talented artist, she is also a learning
technologist based at LSE, so really understood what the book was attempting to
achieve.
What was our budget?
We didn’t really have a
budget! Our proofreaders (Sonya, Elizabeth and Dawn), copy editors (Sarah and
Nicola) and cover artist (Sonja) worked for free out of the goodness of their
hearts. We were able to pay two days of consultancy to David just before
publication to sort out the design, layout and typography, ensuring it was in a
presentable state to be released (it had been less presentable than we had
realised!). But David worked for much longer than this and we were very
grateful for his commitment and enthusiasm. We launched the book in October
2017 at an event hosted at one of the BLE member institutions, so we were not
charged a room booking fee. We sought sponsorship to fund the catering from a
commercial vendor (Panopto), which was referenced in several of the chapters,
and we offered them the platform to say a few words about the topic of the
book. They also wrote a post on their own blog discussing
one of our case studies.
How did
we make it available?
At the same time as producing an Open Access
(OA) book, we also envisaged our book as an Open Educational Resource (OER) for
the wider education community; we did not want to charge readers nor did we
wish to charge anyone for work conducted under our employment. Also, we felt we
would make a greater impact if the publication was a free download, and as
such, we applied a Creative
Commons Attribution - Non Commercial - No Derivatives licence (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 - you can see the range of CC
licence options at https://creativecommons.org/choose/). We added
the licence to the copyright page of the
book (for more information about the ‘front matter’ of books, see https://www.thebookdesigner.com/2012/02/self-publishing-basics-how-to-organize-your-books-front-matter).
We chose this particular licence as we felt
that we wanted to make our work available to be freely downloaded and
distributed, always attributed to us as editors and individual chapter authors
(BY), but remaining in its original form without being amended, remixed or
repurposed without gaining our express permission first (ND), and we didn’t
want anyone attempting to sell the book or part of it (NC). Licensing decisions
are sometimes hotly debated in the OER community as it is felt by some that the
application of ND and NC elements to a work renders it much less open, and part
of the ethos of OER is that resources should be adaptable. We felt that here
however, in this case of a collection of authored papers, that it is not the
book or paper itself we are inviting someone to adapt, but the ideas contained
within it.
We uploaded our final version - a pdf file -
onto Figshare, an open, online repository which enables users to “make all of their research outputs available in a
citable, shareable and discoverable manner” (see: https://figshare.com/about). Importantly, Figshare provides each item uploaded with
a DOI (Digital Object Identifier), which uniquely identifies an output and provides “a persistent link to
its location on the Internet” (see http://www.apastyle.org/learn/faqs/what-is-doi.aspx). We thought about getting an ISBN but this didn’t seem
necessary for our purposes.
We also investigated
uploading the book to Amazon (using Kindle Direct
Publishing). Once we worked out how to
tweak the table of contents according to the instructions provided, we found
the book converted serviceably into Kindle format. We therefore added a version
of the book but were disappointed to learn that we couldn’t make it free; the
minimum possible price is 99p. At various times, a special ‘promotional’ period
allows the book to be free. So, although the book is available via Amazon, we do not
promote this version.
As a dedicated ‘home
page’ for the book, we created a page on the BLE website with a simple URL (http://www.ble.ac.uk/ebook) to provide additional information about the content.
One of the advantages of hosting the book on Figshare was the option to embed
the platform’s content viewer on our own site, which we did. We therefore
referenced the book’s home page in all publicity in promotion in order to drive
readers to download the Figshare version, enabling us to keep track of the
numbers of views, downloads and (eventually) citations. That said, we also
uploaded the book into all the BLE institutional repositories and onto academic
social network sites (academia.edu and ResearchGate), to increase visibility.
How did we promote and publicise it?
Publicity and promotion
was conducted under a variety of methods: we sent a press release to all the
participating institutions in the BLE in order to have announcements on the
institutional newsletters and/or websites, and we wrote a post for the Birkbeck Research blog. We then posted to Twitter (using relevant hashtags),
the BLE blog and emailed mailing lists to get the word out. Over the past six
months, we have presented at various conference and events - internal and
external. We have also been invited by several institutions (including
international) to talk about the book and its content.
Conclusion
At the time of writing, there have been over
1,600 views and 1,100 downloads of the Figshare version alone. Our book
acknowledges the inspiring work of our colleagues but also contributes to the
wider discussion in the education community regarding improvements to
assessment and feedback. Most of all, we hope the collection will be of
interest to learning practitioners who are curious to learn about and develop
new assessment approaches. We would absolutely consider writing (and
publishing) another book in the same way, but would schedule firmer deadlines.
Hindsight is valuable; now we’ve done it once, we are sure it will be much
easier to repeat. Well, easier…
Over recent years, agencies such as Jisc and UCISA, have researched and written much about how to best prepare students for the digital workplace (UCISA 2014). In 2015, Jisc noted that ‘developing learners who can learn and thrive in a digital society is a key role for universities and colleges’. Where we cannot deny the importance that higher education institutions have on preparing learners for their careers, are we locking the stable door once the horse has already bolted? The BLE's Digital Awareness Course focuses specifically on equipping students with some key capabilities required to learn and successfully achieve their qualifications. Moreover, the instruction is intended to be delivered before the student arrives at the gates of the institution. The focus on graduates entering the workplace has lent itself to ‘bolt-on’ interventions, which are often too little, too late; our plan is to embed these skills from the outset.
On Tuesday 10th September 2018, I presented this collaborative project at the annual ALT Conference. I provided a little context and described the research we conducted to help us design the course. I then explained the structure of the course and demonstrated how it will look to students. The metaphorical suggestion that I proposed is that we can unlock the stable door and let our students to roam free, safe in the knowledge that they are digitally aware in terms of their learning.
