By Clint Lalonde, Director, Open Education, BCcampus
In the world of open education and open source, collaboration isn’t just an ideal—it’s a necessity. When organizations with aligned values come together to support shared goals the results can be transformative, not only for the partners involved, but for the community that depends on their work.
One recent example of this kind of impactful collaboration is the ongoing partnership between BCcampus and Pressbooks, two organizations working to expand access to open educational resources (OER). Our most recent collaboration demonstrates how mutual support, open-source development, and a common interest in improving accessibility can yield broad, lasting benefits for both organizations and for the wider open education community.
A Shared Commitment to Open
BCcampus is a non-profit publicly funded organization that supports the British Columbia post-secondary system in the areas of teaching, learning, and open education. A core part of its work involves enabling the creation, adaptation, and adoption of open textbooks through the B.C. Open Collection. Since 2013, BCcampus has relied on Pressbooks, a Canada-based, open-source publishing platform, to support this initiative.
Used widely across the higher education community, Pressbooks provides its digital publishing software both as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering and as an open-source project. This dual model allows Pressbooks to pursue a stable and sustainable funding model while still allowing organizations like BCcampus to host and customize their own instances of the platform.
A Common Need for Better Offline Access
In recent years, many in the open education community have been exploring how to make open textbooks more engaging for learners. Increasingly, authors are choosing to include interactive content using H5P, a simple-to-use tool that enables the creation of rich, multimedia learning activities such as question sets, interactive slides, drag-and-drop activities, and more. For some time, BCcampus heard feedback from its community that these interactive elements didn’t translate well to PDF or printed formats. Learners using these offline formats were unable to view the interactive activities or use this content to test and enrich their knowledge.
Since offline access remains an accessibility priority for many learners, especially those with unreliable internet access, there is a clear need for the ability to print high-quality, readable versions of H5P activities inside the open textbooks created with Pressbooks.
Thanks to a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, BCcampus worked with Pressbooks to improve this functionality. While both BCcampus and Pressbooks prioritize accessibility in their work, it makes a huge difference when outside contributions can expedite progress in this area.
Collaborating Toward a Shared Goal
BCcampus hired Oliver Tacke, a third-party developer familiar with H5P, and Alan Levine, a freelance education technologist, as project managers to work on enhancing the print rendering of H5P content within Pressbooks. From the outset, they approached the project with a spirit of reciprocity and collaboration. They worked closely with the Pressbooks development team to ensure that the code being written would meet Pressbooks’ technical standards and align with the needs of the broader Pressbooks user base.
This wasn’t just a custom fix for BCcampus—it was a contribution to the open-source core. By co-developing the improvements in close coordination with Pressbooks, BCcampus increased the likelihood that the changes would be accepted into the main Pressbooks codebase. This in turn would make the enhancement available to improve offline accessibility for all users of the platform.
Mutual Benefit and Community Impact
The result? A win-win-win.
- BCcampus met its goal of improving offline access to open textbooks for learners across British Columbia.
- Pressbooks received a high-quality code contribution that addressed an accessibility feature many users had requested, with development costs covered through external funding.
- The global Pressbooks community now benefits from better support for printing interactive H5P activities thereby improving accessibility and usability of open textbooks for all.
This kind of collaboration showcases what’s possible when mission-aligned organizations invest in shared infrastructure—not just for their own benefit, but for the good of the ecosystem.
The Power of Reciprocity in Open Source
Like the open education movement as a whole, open source thrives on reciprocity. When organizations like BCcampus contribute to the tools they rely on, they help ensure the long-term sustainability of those tools. And when developers like Pressbooks embrace community contributions, they strengthen their product, provide increased value to users, and deepen relationships with partners who share their vision.
By working together transparently and with mutual respect, BCcampus and Pressbooks have solved a common, real-world accessibility problem. At the same time, we they have modeled how collaboration, driven by the principles of open sharing, can scale benefits far beyond the boundaries of a single organization and benefit an entire community.
This post was drafted with the help of ChatGPT.