Global Collaboration in Action: Insights from Building an Open Book Across Borders

When Associate Prof Mpho-Entle Puleng Modise registered for the Commonwealth of Learning’s ODL Practitioner Mentorship Program in 2023, she had a specific concern: that no one would be interested in her research on ePortfolios in the African context. It’s a topic that’s long been underrepresented in global scholarship, especially compared to work coming out of Europe, North America, and Australia.

That worry dissolved when she met Dr. Norm Vaughan, a professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, who became her mentor. What began as a mentorship soon grew into an international collaboration that would produce a 730-page, peer-reviewed open-access book with 85 authors across six continents, completed in just nine months:

Digital Resilience of ePortfolios During and Beyond the COVID-19 Pandemic: Lessons for the Future.

The scale of the book is striking, but what makes the project remarkable is not its size or speed. It’s the way an online mentorship evolved into a global research partnership, and how open publishing enabled a shared commitment to educational equity to bring together dozens of scholars who might never otherwise have worked together.

Why ePortfolios?

ePortfolios are digital collections of a student’s work over time. But for both Associate Prof Mpho-Entle and Prof Norm, they were never just a method of assessment. They were something more layered—records of reflection, revision, and growth that show learning as an unfolding process rather than a final result.

They’ve existed in education for decades, but Associate Prof Mpho-Entle and Prof Norm both saw them as being more urgent now than ever. The world is changing faster than curriculum can follow, they argue. COVID pushed education online in a way not seen before. And employers want evidence of thinking and adaptability, not just qualifications.

“When you’ve got a grade, it tells you what a student has got. It tells you the student marks. But an ePortfolio tells you who a student is becoming”

Associate Prof Mpho-Entle Puleng Modise, Associate Professor at the University of South Africa

For distance learners especially, students who may be studying between work shifts and children’s bedtimes—and who may never set foot in a physical classroom—an ePortfolio serves as something close to a mirror. Look how far you’ve come. And it helps your story count as evidence.

From check-ins to co-editors

The collaboration began with regular check-ins, a co-authored research article, and presentations at global conferences. But somewhere in those conversations, Associate Prof Mpho-Entle asked a question that changed the scope of everything: Could we do a book?

Prof Norm’s first instinct was cautious. He’d been part of traditional academic publishing projects before, and his experience had left him wary of a few things. 

First, he recognized the cost barrier. Grants had to be secured, and money had to be found. Second was the precious resource of time. In the fast-moving world of educational technology, books routinely took two to two-and-a-half years to reach publication, by which point parts of them were already outdated. And third was the matter of access. Even digital editions often ended up behind paywalls and license restrictions, limiting who could actually read them.

But Prof Norm had recently been introduced to Pressbooks, a publishing platform used across several Alberta institutions. He’d seen a colleague use it to have undergraduate students publish their own course texts, complete with print editions. And the learning curve, he kept hearing, was basically flat.

So they decided to try it themselves.

Building the village

“It takes a village to build a Pressbook across borders”

Dr. Norm Vaughan, Professor, Department of Education at Mount Royal University

Working from Calgary and Pretoria simultaneously, Associate Prof Mpho-Entle and Prof Norm put out an international call for contributions. They received 73 abstract submissions.

Authors came from Kenya, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, and beyond. Some were senior academics. Others were masters and doctoral students just completing their studies for whom a peer-reviewed chapter in an internationally published book represented a significant milestone. 

The editorial process was built almost entirely from free tools: Google Forms for abstract submission and Google Drive for manuscript management. This included 43 individual folders, each containing the original submission, two blind peer reviews, the revised manuscript, and a revision table the authors were required to complete showing exactly what changes they had made. 

One lesson Prof Norm wants to make sure is emphasized in this story: bring in your copyright officer at the beginning of a project like this, not at the end. The book’s copyright specialist, Taylor, spent two full weeks working through 43 chapters and 85 authors’ worth of permissions. She got there, but the timeline was more taxing than it needed to be.

Whose stories get told?

One of the themes running through this project is what becomes possible when the barriers to academic publishing come down.

For Prof Norm, open publishing solved problems he’d bumped against before: the cost of getting a book out, the long timelines, and the loss of control that can come with handing a manuscript to a corporate publisher. For Associate Prof Mpho-Entle, it meant a chance to put African voices at the centre of a conversation that had largely been dominated by researchers from the Global North. ePortfolio research in the African context, she notes, remains significantly underrepresented in the literature.

Digital Resilience of ePortfolios During and Beyond the COVID-19 Pandemic reflects both of those motivations. Its strongest geographic representation comes from Africa. The editorial structure was built to amplify a breadth of voices: a limit of two chapters per author, no single author listed first on more than one chapter, and a deliberate effort to include contributors (among them masters and doctoral students) who might not have had a straightforward path to publication otherwise.

Prof Norm’s current publishing project carries that spirit forward: a book on Indigenous ways of knowing in digital spaces, co-edited with one of Associate Prof Mpho-Entle’s UNISA colleagues, and bringing together scholars whose perspectives and ways of writing have rarely been centred in mainstream academic publishing. Open access isn’t just about removing paywalls. It’s about who gets to be in the conversation at all.

Sustaining a living book

What Pressbooks made possible, both editors emphasize, is not just a cheaper or faster version of a traditional academic book. It’s something structurally different: a document that remains editable after publication.

After the book had been published an author emailed to say she’d moved institutions and wanted her contact details updated. Done in minutes. An image credit that needed to be changed after publication was corrected and live again before anyone needed to send a formal erratum. Authors who want to update their bios, fix a citation, or revise a section in light of new research can do so, and the editors can make it happen.

This fluidity and connectedness also changes the relationship between a published book and its readers. Instructors using chapters in their courses can point students not just to the text itself but to the author. In this way, the book becomes a network, not just a document—one that continues to extend outward in ways its editors can’t fully predict.

The ripple, as Prof Norm put it, keeps on moving.

Special thanks to:

Norman Vaughan

Mount Royal University

Mpho-Entle Puleng Modise

University of South Africa

Supporting Institutional Priorities 

This collaboration demonstrates how open publishing can support institutional priorities that extend well beyond creating a single book. By enabling researchers across six continents to collaboratively develop, peer review, publish, and continuously update a scholarly resource, the project illustrates a more agile model for academic publishing—one that reduces barriers to collaboration, accelerates knowledge sharing, and expands whose voices are represented in the scholarly record.

For institutions, this kind of publishing infrastructure supports strategic goals around research visibility, international partnerships, knowledge mobilization, and equity. For the authors and humans involved, it creates opportunities to build lasting professional relationships, learn from colleagues across cultures and disciplines, and become part of a global community of practice.