Open and Affordable Course Materials

Minnesota State

There is a formal process to submit textbooks as an official OER resource through the MinnState system. MinnState offers access to full featured Pressbooks using Pressbooks EDU. Note that:

• Minnstate is only allowed 30 of these textbooks to be created a year
• There is an approval process before the textbook can be created
• Pressbooks EDU may have additional plugin integrations with H5P for embedded media and interactive content

Through this process, there are currently 25 texbooks from multiple MinnState schools in the directory from both two-year and four-year institutions.

How about a local example?

Librarian Kendall Larson used Pressbooks to compile student book chapters for the Leadership Education and the Education Doctorate Programs. They were then uploaded to OpenRiver:

• Leadership Education Books: A collection of books organized and written by the graduate students in Leadership Education-Graduate Studies at Winona State University
• Education Doctorate Books: The Education Doctorate Books collection is composed of graduate student writing in the form of a book. Each book compiles chapters written by graduate students in the Winona State University (WSU) Education Doctorate Program.

Kendall Larson also presented at a conference with several other librarians about how to use Pressbook software and what other resources might help in the creation of a Pressbooks publication. More about the panel is available through Digital Commons @ Macalester. 

Minnesota Libraries Publishing Project (MLPP)

There is an additional statewide purchase of the Pressbooks software through the Minnesota Libraries Publishing Project (MLPP), utilized by multiple types of libraries. It is:

• Available to be used for broader purposes (novels, dissertations, poetry collections, children’s books, etc.) without prior approval
• Available to Minnesota residents based on geolocation IP authentication
• Not equipped with the H5P plugin capability

While used for broader purpose, this subscription still allows for more options than just using the Pressbooks software from the site itself.

You may ask yourself, "Why should I store my OERs in an institutional repository (IR), if I am already hosting them on Pressbooks or in other OER digital commons?"

There are many benefits to doing this, but the most significant when it comes to OER materials are safeguarded digital preservation and discoverability. 

If your goal is to make your materials findable and usable, inclusion in institutional repositories makes it easier for your creations to appear in search engines and open education aggregators. Then, with spare copies preserved by your institution, you have additional ways of sharing that work immediately should your other host locations face unexpected technical (or economic) issues. 

Additionally, if you have contributed chapters of a work to a larger collection and would like to upload your individual chapter to your institutional repository, that can be an option. 

OpenRiver (Winona State Institutional Repository)

The Institutional Repository (IR) for Winona State University is OpenRiver. Coordinated by the Darrell W. Krueger Library, OpenRiver collects the research and creative output of WSU under one umbrella. The aim of our IR is to provide access those research and creative endeavors. OpenRiver's collections flow beyond campus borders, too, as the Library selectively partners and collects items relevant to the history of southeast Minnesota. 

Examples of the types of works that can be published in OpenRiver include but are not limited to: 

• Working papers or copies of published articles
• Conference papers
• Recordings
• Oral histories
• Open educational resources (OERs)
• Books
• Creative works
• Presentations
• Senior theses

Take a look at the Author FAQ for more to help you get started. Note that because OpenRiver is part of the Digital Commons Publishing network, works preserved in the IR are more likely to appear in searches done on Google. 

Opendora (PALS, Minnesota State)

Not to be confused with OpenRiver, there is a Minnesota State Institutional Repository developed by PALS called Opendora. Opendora "is a digital archive for open educational resources that serves as a central repository for Minnesota State faculty and librarians to leverage licensed open educational resources (OER) with the ability to access, load, and share material. Opendora allows the storage of or linking to, course content including textbooks, lecture notes, syllabi, reading lists, and videos." 

Not all Minnstate universities and colleges have their own IRs, and so this option through the PALS Office offers a space for faculty or staff to upload their materials. For the sake of ensuring preservation of your works, and increasing their findability, we recommend first submitting them to OpenRiver. Then, provided that it is allowed under any contractual agreements you may have with publishers or other licensing agencies, you may want to consider submitting them to Opendora as well.