Posted on by cindyklassen

DEU EdTech Quick Tips – Issue 33

In this Issue: Pressbooks Publishing in your Class

    • What is Pressbooks and How Might I use it in my class?
    • Announcing the Pressbooks Directory, Find an Open Textbook that meets your needs
    • USASK Open Textbook Catalogue
    • How DEU can support your Pressbooks Project
    • DEU support and contact information

What is Pressbooks and How Might I use it in my class?

Pressbooks is an open textbook authoring and publishing platform based on the popular WordPress blogging platform. With Pressbooks, users can adapt existing OER, create new material, and enrich content with accessible math notation, videos, audio, web annotation, and interactive elements. USask has been using Pressbooks for several years at https://openpress.usask.ca/. DEU acted as the incubator for this learning technology at USask and has been actively working with faculty and instructors to design and develop open textbooks and interactive eText content since the beginning.

Beyond the ability to author new or adapt existing eTextbooks that can be downloaded in a variety of formats, users can also embed media and create interactive H5P content into their books making the pages come alive for students.

Here are just a few ways you might use Pressbooks in your class:

    • Adopt an open textbook from the Pressbooks Directory for use as the primary text in your class
    • Adapt an existing open textbook from the Pressbooks Directory and customize its contents for your class
    • Adopt portions of existing open textbooks to customize your course content with web-first resources, or provide complimentary explanations of critical concepts in your class
    • Adopt, adapt, or create new ancillary activities and resources such as test bank questions, interactive activities, PowerPoint slide sets, labs, or other additions to an existing textbook
    • Create a new open textbook based on existing lecture notes or other original written content
    • Create a collaborative assignment where students contribute to a book, collection, or class journal together using Pressbooks
    • Develop interactive H5P content in Pressbooks including Branching Scenarios for Case Studies, drag and drop activities, memory games, questionnaires, interactive videos, audio recorders and much, much more.

Contact deu.support@usask.ca for support with your open textbook or interactive activity ideas.

Announcing the Pressbooks Directory, Find an Open Textbook that meets your needs

This directory provides an index of over 1600 open textbooks, course outlines, monographs, lab manuals, works of fiction, and more, published across 75+ Pressbooks networks. Search and filter resources by keyword, subject matter, license, and more. Many of the books listed in the Directory are available under a Creative Commons License, which enables you to make your own copy of the resource, combine resources, and customize the resource for your specific class or project. Take a look at what the Pressbooks Directoryhas to offer you.

When searching for books, you can filter the results by license, subject, network, last updated, word count and more. The search filter that the Instructional Designers at DEU are especially excited about is the H5P Activities filter, limiting the search to works that include interactive activities that support student learning. If you have questions, don’t hesitate to contact deu.support@usask.ca

Photo by Gabriel Sollmann on Unsplash

USASK Open Textbook Catalogue

Instructors at the University of Saskatchewan have been using open textbooks, and Pressbooks specifically, for about five years now. You can view the current catalogue available on Open Press (note: this is a selection of resources on our public catalogue).

One helpful book in the collection is the USASK Open Textbook Authoring Guide. This book is a practical guide to adapting or creating open textbooks using the PressBooks platform. It is continually evolving as new information, practices and processes are developed. The primary audience for this book are faculty and  instructors who are developing, adapting, or adopting open textbooks at the University of Saskatchewan. However, there may be content within this book that is useful to others working on similar Open Educational Resource initiatives.

Usask Open Press Highlights

The Distance Education Unit has collaborated with several USask faculty and instructors to develop and publish open textbooks on our Usask Open Press network, and have provided project management, technical, copyright, and instructional design support for adapted, remixed, and original open texts. Here are a few highlight examples of books that the DEU has directly supported:

Introduction to Psychology (2019) by Jorden Cummings & Lee Sanders was created from a combination of original content and materials compiled and adapted from a number of open text publications. Cumming & Sanders selected key materials from their favourite OERs, edited them to fit the needs of their PSY 120 and PSY 121 students, and then supplemented those materials with additional study resources (including chapter introductions and summaries, a comprehensive glossary, and interactive chapter self-tests built using H5P technology). Additionally, OER funding available through the Gwenna Moss Centresupported the hiring of graduate students to aid in the development of ancillary resources for this text (namely, a comprehensive test bank and instructor slide deck). The uptake of this book by instructors across all of the various sections of PSY 120 and PSY 121 represents 35% of students benefiting from the use of OER at USask, and 2,697 (non-unique) students who did not need to purchase a commercial textbook for those courses in the 2019-2020 school year. Wow!

Strategies for Academic Success (2017) by Liv Marken is an adaptation that saw significant rewriting and reformatting of the original 2010 and 2016 texts, replacement of images and figures, and deletions and rearrangements of chapters and sections. Only the chapters relevant to the course were rewritten. In that way, it was an interesting adaptation because Liv only revised the parts that were needed for the specific course purposes, rather than the entire textbook.

Strategies for Academic Success accompanies the first-year University of Saskatchewan College of Arts and Science online course by the same name.  The textbook has a reader-friendly format arranged to help students develop the essential skills and provide the information students need to succeed in university. Aside from being able to read the text online this book is also available in three digital formats: ePUB, Digital PDF, and Print PDF.

Undergraduate Diagnostic Imaging Fundamentals (2017) by Dr. Brent Burbridge and Evan Mah is an original work constructed from original text, case examples, and a rich image repository. Working with the Distance Education Unit, the authors imported their content, rearranged and formatted the work with web and various file formats for distribution in mind, and created custom diagrams.

In this resource, Diagnostic Imaging principles and concepts are augmented by the presentation of images for common clinical conditions. Guiding principles related to minimizing radiation exposure and requesting the most appropriate imaging examination are addressed. Static images are enhanced by the ability to access images stored and displayed on an HTML5 compatible, Dicom image viewer. This book is also available in three other digital formats: ePUB, PDF (regular print and large print).

How DEU can support your Pressbooks Project

The Instructional Design Team at the Distance Education Unit have been using Pressbooks for more than 5 years now and have supported many USask adoptions, adaptations, creations and collaborations using the Pressbooks platform. Let us know what projects you have in mind that might put the Pressbooks platform to good use.

Writing an Open Textbook

Writing an open textbook can be a lot like designing and developing an online course. Great care and attention should go into the organization and structure of the book design. Working collaboratively with an Instructional Designer can help to avoid many pitfalls and offer best practices and innovative approaches to modern digital text developments.

Adapting an Open Textbook

Adapting an existing textbook might include rearranging content, combining more than one open textbooks, writing a new chapter you feel has been overlooked, providing a Canadian context to chapters, creating ancillary resources such as test banks, slide decks, or interactive lab components. The Instructional Designers at DEU can help navigate the technical and pedagogical work around these types of adaptations and more.

Use Pressbooks capabilities in your Canvas course

As mentioned previously, the Pressbooks platform allows for the integration of H5P interactive elements within the pages of your eTextbook. But you may want to leverage these interactive elements in your Canvas course without developing an entire textbook. The Instructional Designers at DEU can help you to design and develop a variety of interactive activities and tools using the Pressbooks platform, then embed the activities seamlessly within the pages of your Canvas Module content.

Collaborative Student Assignments

Collaborative tools for group work can be limiting, but with Pressbooks, students can be given a variety of roles which empower them to showcase their learning together by developing rich content and contributing to a living knowledge pool. From undergraduate research projects and online FYRE presentations, to graduate level project-based and experiential learning collections, Pressbooks can be a great platform to organize and showcase competencies together. Ask an Instructional Designer from DEU to talk through some options that might work for your class assessments.