The open textbook project about mentoring

At this web site you will find more information about the open textbook project about mentoring. The goal is to develop a high-quality textbook about mentoring in different languages.

The work is supported by Norway Opening universities and is part of the OER (Open Educational Resources) movement. We wish to create texts that others can reuse and modify. We are also trying to create a learning community through the collaborative text production. By developing open textbooks we think we strenghten the collective knowledge about mentoring in education. It is therefore important to stimulate the development of sustainable communities that can continue to develop these textbooks

We hope to involve contributions from several different stakeholders. We are therefore encouraging contributions from experienced teacher educators, student teachers (only to some degree) and teachers. In this way we are challenging traditional production of textbooks and the notion of teachers and student teachers as only being “textbook consumers”.

Wikipedia articles about topics related to mentoring seem to lack content and quality assurance. Through this project we will try to create a better overview over mentoring as a research area. The textbooks aim to give the readers an user-friendly introduction to this topic. The textbook "Mentoring. A Scandinavian perspective" has students as a target group.

At the same time these resources are published openly so they can be reused in different contexts in other countries. In this regard, one goal is to maximize distribution by facilitating the translations of the textbooks into different languages. The project therefore supports the development of basic (1.0) versions and the support of the development of communities that might be interested in continuing to work with the book. The Norwegian text has therefore been translated into English and we also wish to translate the text into Turkish, Chinese and Swedish.. Our goal is to translate and modify the book into several different versions.

The textbook market is mostly dominated by commercial publishers. The intention is to create an international community that can continue to create open textbooks in this way. If you want to participate as a reviewer or contributor in this project, please contact Rolf K. Baltzersen at Østfold University College (email: rolf.k.baltzersen(at)hiof.no)

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