Collaborative Open Textbook Publication Systems Pilot

Pilot the use of Collaborative Open Textbook publishing platforms within Ontario higher education.

Open Textbooks are a type of Open Educational Resources (OERs) which are teaching resources that are freely available to the public, and usually posted as digital files on the Internet. They can be used and reused because of the open licence given to them by their creator.

A collaborative Open Textbook publishing platform is a desirable platform for instructors as it allows better scalability for textbook projects – chapter-based contributions from instructors within Ontario, and eventually around the world.

Interested faculty do not have to commit to writing an entire Open Textbook on their own or to finding their own partners, but can use a collaborative, sharing approach to the creation of Open Textbooks.

This benefits the open educational community as it supports a much easier process for the creation of Open Textbooks, which presently can take significant resources to organize, project manage, create and publish.