The Office of the State Board of Education maintains a consortium of Pressbooks networks where Idaho’s academic community may publish and openly license its work for use by others. Visitors of this and affiliated sites gain access to various educational resources—all published under open licenses to encourage educational use. Effectively, all Idaho Open Press publications may be considered open educational resources (OER).
Board Policy III.U. defines Open Educational Resources (OER) as, “teaching, learning, and research materials that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license, such as a Creative Commons license, that permits free use and repurposing by others.” Members of Idaho’s academic community have increasingly harnessed OER to not only remove financial and access barriers for students but also to tailor instruction to more local contexts. Open licenses allow anyone to transform educational content through the following five affordances:
- Reuse – Content may be reused in its entirety, wherever
- Retain – Copies of content may be retained for personal archives or reference, forever
- Revise – Content may be modified to suit specific needs (e.g., translating content into other languages)
- Remix – Content may be combined with other original or open media to new ends
- Redistribute – Content may be shared broadly in both original and altered formats
For more information about OER or how to publish with Idaho Open Press, contact Dr. Jonathan Lashley, Academic Technology Program Manager for the Idaho State Board of Education
Idaho Open Press was built on the popular Pressbooks platform—used by educators around the world to publish digital textbooks, scholarly monographs, syllabi, fiction and non-fiction books, white papers, and more in multiple formats including:
- MOBI (for Kindle ebooks)
- EPUB (for all other ebookstores)
- designed PDF (for print-on-demand and digital distribution)
More information about Pressbooks may be found, at their website.
Initial funding for Idaho Open Press came through a one-time appropriation from the Idaho Legislature to support open educational resources.