Brad getting excited for next weeks Open Textbook Summit. CC-BY BCcampus

Covering the past 2 weeks.

• Prep for next weeks OT Summit and authors thank you event. We have over 150 people coming for the Summit and another 70+ to the authors thank you event. Super happy with these numbers as this is the first year that we have run the Summit more like a conference with session proposals. It is also the first year that we have charged a registration fee for the event, and I was very concerned that would hurt our numbers. But we’ve surpassed last years numbers and I expect we will still have more once the final numbers are collected.
• Met with the Noba project, an open textbook Psychology project. Noba co-sponsored the testbank sprint last summer and now have a copy of the textbank for faculty who use their open textbook. We’ve both been fighting with Respondus trying to use it to make our testbanks. It;s a beast. If anyone knows of a better tool to make test question pools for numerous LMS, please let me know. I am dying to find an alternative that will make multiple testbanks for multiple LMS’s from a single source.
• Completed a first draft of an open textbook sustainability plan and a draft three year tactical plan for open textbooks & circulated to a few BCcampus team members for feedback.
• Working on a video project with Rajiv. My editing skills are rusty and I hope I can pull this off in time for the OT Summit cause his idea is very funny and I want to do it justice.
• Saw a noticeable upswing in number of faculty review requests this week, which is fantastic. We are always looking for faculty to review open textbooks, and it looks like a few BC faculty are adding an open textbook to their summer reading list.
• Met with our Faculty Fellows. They are going to be busy over the next few weeks at various events around BC. We are planning to meet f2f with Beck Pitt from the OER Research Hub next week in Vancouver to start working on a report with the findings and recommendations from our open textbook faculty survey that wrapped up this spring. I am hoping we will be able to release this report this summer.
• Met with Nicole Allen from SPARC last week. Nicole and SPARC were involved in organizing OpenEd in Washington last year, and she had some good tips for us as we continue planning OpenEd 2015 in Vancouver this fall.
• Mucking around with embedding interactive Excel spreadsheets in Pressbooks. Also had some PB frustration tracking down more security headaches. This one actual affected an author who lost a few hours of writing after he was inadvertently locked out of PB. Took the better part of a morning figuring out what happened and seeing if we could recover his stuff.
• Updating & reconciling OTB budget.
• Was Victoria Day in Canada last weekend and I took some extra time around the weekend to hang out with family and friends, do some biking & bbq’ing.