Textbook costs have skyrocketed in recent years, putting them beyond the reach of many students, but there are options which can mitigate this problem. Open textbooks, an open educational resource, have proven capable of making textbooks affordable to students. No educational development has likely been as promising as the development of open textbooks to lower costs for students. While the last five years have witnessed the development and dissemination initiatives of several successful open textbooks, open textbook learning analytics has until now remained unstudied even though information regarding how learners interact with open textbooks is crucial for their evaluation and iterative improvement process. This paper presents a development process and function of a new open digital textbook learning analytics system which tracks individual learners’ interaction with open textbooks in electronic publication (EPUB) format both online and offline and focuses on access, time spent during each session, pages viewed, hypertext links accessed, and annotations made. A distinctive feature of this system is its ability to synchronize online and offline data on a central database, allowing both instructors and designers to generate dashboard-style displays. The paper concludes with a presentation of future work, in line with the nature of this paper, which is work-in-progress. The content of this working paper is intended for two research communities – Open Educational Resources (OER) and Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK).
