Flipping Textbook – Specifying a WordPress Toolkit

On 18 Mar, 2016 By Simon Knight With 8 Comments

One of the new projects I’ve joined (as a late addition) is the ‘flipping textbook‘ project – a collaboration between CIC/MDSI, the library, and IML at UTS. The idea is to work on a ‘flipped textbook’ – getting students to write textbook elements in their course, going through the editorial process, and creating the textbook as a resource for that course. The team has looked at some of the existing platforms for open book writing, e.g.:

But I’m also wondering about wordpress, in part because (in another project) students will be engaging in a community-based wordpress multisite installation, and writing there already. For this extra purpose of creating a collection of written resources for publication, I’m imagining that ideally we’d want students to be able to:

Collaborate on posts, and track their contributions (this is basically native through revision histories). This collaboration might be realtime e.g. with etherpad integration (participad) but I guess people can always move between real-time editors and wordpress
Fork content, so that posts can be built on and expanded year-to-year or across cohorts (e.g. post-forking plugin and persistent-forking plugin)
Arrange content into collections (e.g. with anthologize)
Possibly editorial review workflow (e.g. with oasis or edit-flow ) and other project management elements
Obviously citation (which we already do with zotpress)
License content as appropriate (I use Creative Commons Configurator)
Include code snippets (e.g. with Crayon Syntax Highlighter) and multimedia (native in wordpress, although the ImageInject plugin is pretty useful for creative commons material)
Cite individual posts, and create posts as citeable objects (I use ScholarPress Coins to embed metadata in my posts)
Give feedback – perhaps through an editorial ‘submission’ process (per above), or perhaps in a more community-driven way (e.g. using the Inline Comments plugin)