Supporting and Sharing the Open Education Journey
At Pressbooks, we’re proud to support people and organizations at all levels of maturity in their open education initiatives, from publishing their first book to launching and growing substantial digital libraries of interactive books.
One of the defining traits of the open education community is how widely and generously it shares knowledge. Attend a single webinar and you’ll find the comments flooded with adaptable materials and frameworks. Ask someone about their LibGuides and you’ll have a list of helpful resources at the ready.
Sharing knowledge, resources, and lived experiences is essential for open education to thrive as we discover together what’s possible for this movement. With this in mind, Pressbooks has created our own reference guide to help organizations progress in their open education journeys. It’s rooted in our Open Education Maturity Model framework, designed to help navigate growth, address common challenges, and achieve sustainable impact with open education.
On This Page You’ll Find:
The Pressbooks Open Education Maturity Model—A simple planning framework for growing open education initiatives
The Pressbooks Open Education Reference Guide—A curated selection of helpful resources for OER champions and practitioners, mapped to the maturity model
On-Demand Webinar: Mapping Your OER Journey—An expert panel sharing insights and lessons learned about the OER journey
OER Referatory: The Pressbooks Directory—A referatory of content with over 6,300 open access books, including “Collections” for student-led OER, high enrollment courses, language learning, interactive OER, and more
Where are You in Your Open Education Journey
To help surface patterns and insights about how open education initiatives progress, Pressbooks developed the Open Education Maturity Model, informed by our work with institutional partners. Whether you are just starting to evaluate the place for OER at your institution, or you’ve been leading a mature open education initiative for years, this framework offers a chance to pause and reflect on your goals and how to deliver lasting impact.
Learn more about the Open Education Maturity Model
The Open Education Reference Guide
Building on the Open Education Maturity Model, Pressbooks has curated the Open Education Reference Guide to provide helpful resources that can help you move forward, wherever you are in your open education journey.
We’ve included helpful repositories of OER, suggestions for lively community forums, stakeholder talking points, a policy hub, and much more.
The guide begins by asking reflective questions to help leaders of OER initiatives evaluate their progress and place their work within the Maturity Model framework:
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- What are your goals for open education?
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- What are the forces and desires driving this work today?
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- What successes have you experienced? What are you proud of?
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- What key pain points have you experienced with your OER initiative? What resistance are you running into?
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- What needs have you experienced around publishing, adapting, and/or maintaining OER content?
Resources are then mapped to maturity stages as well as key areas of focus:
Learn from Open Education Experts
On-Demand Webinar: Mapping Your OER Journey
In this webinar, a panel of seasoned experts walk through the Open Education Maturity Model to help deepen our understanding of what to consider as initiatives develop through stages of maturity and how to navigate growing pains.
View the webinar slide deck, which includes the results from the webinar poll about open education maturity. You can also view the chat log to read the lively discussion and many resources shared by attendees.
Register for the next webinar in our open education series, Cost Savings and Beyond: Demonstrating Impact and Effectiveness with Open Education.
The Pressbooks Directory
A great place to get started with open educational resources is by adapting some of the many openly licensed texts that already exist. If you are looking for openly licensed books you can adapt to help support your OER goals, check out Pressbooks’ referatory Pressbooks Directory.
This free, searchable catalog provides access to over 6,300 books from 170+ publishers that have been created with the Pressbooks platform. Books cover a wide range of topics, including curated collections like those featured below. The vast majority of books in the directory are freely available and openly licensed, meaning they can be copied, revised, remixed, and redistributed, and many feature multimedia and interactive learning activities.