We’re heading into the final six months of this four-year federally funded project! It’s both an exciting time and an uncertain time. Our wrap-up activities include:

• Moving manuscripts into Pressbooks, adding H5P interactives, and proofreading textbooks
• Moving aligned ancillary materials into course pack sites
• Collecting, cleaning, and analyzing the data that will show the impact of our work.

This final phase will lead to an open curriculum launch, when we’ll be ready to share widely so that others can adopt our course materials.

Explore more recent publications and news from this project:

• Raising Our Voices: Kim Puttman, Heather Blicher, and Heidi Esbensen take a deep dive into designing open textbooks and courses in Sociology with an equity lens through our grant-funded Targeted Pathways project.
• AI Pause: Amy Hofer and Veronica Vold share why we think it’s not a good use of resources to continue testing AI for use in our Open Curriculum Projects – for now.
• Doing the Work: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Open Educational Resources, by Heather Blicher, Abbey Gaterud, Valencia Scott, Veronica Vold, Michaela Willi Hooper, and Stephanie Lenox; and Equity-minded Open Course Design by Veronica Vold, won OEGlobal Awards for Excellence in the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion category. Congratulations!

Update from Anne Nichol

Anne Nichol, Portland Community College, is the lead author of Mental Disorders and the Criminal Justice System (visit this link to view the very nearly complete version of Anne’s book).

In the Fall of 2020 I first submitted a blurb about my OER idea to Amy Hofer, wondering if my disability-focused course materials might fit into a federal grant proposal for materials with an equity, diversity and inclusion lens. I wrote that I wanted to “create a textbook that covers the basics of mental disorders and the law, with a focus on the criminal justice system but contextualized by discussion of the broader legal system.”

I intended to touch on history and a little bit of psychology; to explore legal and social changes around the disability rights movement; to examine challenges in policing, courts, and corrections when mental health or disability is involved; and to address the broad problem of criminalization of mental disorders. I definitely felt conscious of the limits of my expertise, which is solidly in the legal field and less so in the adjacent fields that I wanted to introduce to my students.

More than four years, a million tiny details, and so much learning later, I just shared a near-final (so close!) Pressbook, titled “Mental Disorders and the Criminal Justice System,” with my current CJA 220 students at Portland Community College. I am incredibly proud of and grateful for the opportunity to provide my students with this information, at no cost to them, and in a format that is accessible and, hopefully, engaging for every single one of them. I really hope that other instructors may be interested in using the text, that they and their students will benefit from my commitment to this project, and that others’ feedback and experiences may inform a future second edition.

Testimony from Kim Puttman

On February 27, 2025, Oregon’s House Committee On Higher Education and Workforce Development held a public hearing on a package that would provide funding for Open Oregon Educational Resources. Kim Puttman, Oregon Coast Community College, is the lead author of Inequality and Interdependence: Social Problems and Social Justice (visit this link to view the very nearly complete version of Kim’s book). Kim testified in support of the package, drawing on her experience as an open textbook author, an open pedagogy educator, and a minister. Read an excerpt:

In one of my classes, OCCC students learned that they shared the experience of food and housing insecurity with other students across our state. We explored what other students were doing to fix these problems. And they decided to do something about it.

As part of their coursework and engagement with student government, they created the Shark Shack at OCCC, a basic needs closet. At the Shark Shack, our OCCC Sharks can pick up a toothbrush, a warm coat, or some spaghetti and tomato sauce to make dinner.

We were also able to discuss the devastation of the Echo Mountain Fire, part of Oregon’s Labor Day Fires of 2020. Student experiences and stories of our local community rebuilding became part of our open Social Problems textbook. Now, what we learned about recovery from natural disasters here can be shared with students and communities across the state.

Watch Kim’s complete testimony:

Updates from Veronica Vold

Veronica Vold, Open Education Instructional Designer, is coordinating the effort to share openly licensed ancillary materials that align with our open textbooks. She discusses including H5P interactive questions embedded in textbooks and creating Google Sites to share complete course packs that future instructors can adopt and adapt.

H5P Development

H5P is an authoring software that allows you to create interactives that integrate with a bunch of platforms, like WordPress or Canvas as well as Pressbooks. We prioritized H5P development in our books as part of our commitment to equity-minded design: we want opportunities for meaningful student interaction with the text! You can see an example of H5P in action under the header “Comprehension Self Check” on this page of Liz Pearce’s book, Contemporary Families in the US: An Equity Lens 2e.

While H5P has 40+ question types, our project primarily uses multiple choice and true/false because they are accessible, easily shareable, and relatively straightforward to ingest from a Google doc into Pressbooks. Our instructional technologist, Jonathan Poritz, is supporting this process.

Steps for H5P Development:

1. Author in Google Docs. Align each item with chapter learning objectives, key terms, and critical author interventions. Keep answer feedback to 255 characters including spaces.
2. Copyedit in Google Docs. Respond to comments and resolve confusing phrasing or inaccurate answers.
3. Format in Google Docs using markup language for easy ingest into Pressbooks.

H5P Summary:

• Our H5P questions aim to go beyond fact-checking or memorizing dates. We want to engage students in the higher level analysis that authors model in the chapter. We also want to prioritize the interventions that the author makes in their field.
• All our H5P include answer feedback. This way students sense instructor presence even at 2am when they may be reviewing a chapter. They can also be redirected to relevant chapter sections for review or further reading.
• Our H5P are low-stakes. Students can retake questions repeatedly. The content is directly drawn from the chapter itself. The goal is to reinforce critical thinking and equity-minded analysis.

Course Packs

Our instructional design team is preparing openly licensed course materials (also known as ancillaries) to share along with each book.

We know that instructors want relevant and practical resources that integrate with the textbook to support their own teaching. An instructional designer partners with each course pilot instructor to revise their piloted course materials and get them ready to share with an open license.

We designed our course pack sites after researching course collections shared by B.C. Campus and talking with Oregon instructors who already teach for multiple institutions and want to make their course materials easily shareable. We decided to use Google sites as our platform to make sharing easy.

Our course packs represent multiple learning pathways that instructors can use to teach with our books. Each course pack includes a course map, instructor guide, and weekly overviews, activities, and assignments. Everything carries a clear license statement so that users know in advance how to adapt each item.

Visit an example course pack: Mental Disorders and the Criminal Justice System (Google Site). This site includes three distinct courses that align with the textbook Mental Disorders and the Criminal Justice System (Pressbook): two fully online asynchronous courses taught at two different institutions in Oregon and one remote course with synchronous class sessions.

Course pilot materials can also be shared outside of course packs in OER Commons Groups for each textbook. Example: Mental Disorders and the Criminal Justice System (OERCommons Group).

Funding

Our grants drew from Governor’s Emergency Education Relief funding and the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) in the U.S. Department of Education (eighty percent of the total cost of the program is funded by FIPSE, with the remaining twenty percent representing in-kind personnel costs funded by Open Oregon Educational Resources).

The contents of this post were developed under a grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, (FIPSE), U.S. Department of Education. However, those contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.