Our OER Team
Authors and Contributors’ Biographies
Rachel Harris
Rachel leads Concordia University’s Open Educational Resources program and collaborates on open-access projects and services, including work related to our institutional repository, Spectrum, ORCID, and OA publishing. Working with and mentoring OER work-study students is one of the joys of open educational work at Concordia. A special thanks to Sana Ahmad and Lena Palacios for their work on our Pressbooks Guide, specifically for their keenness to learn new software and their desire to share insights on what optimizing Pressbooks looks like. Together, our aim is to help and inspire Pressbooks users in their open textbook projects in an easy-to-follow, multi-media, and interactive guidebook.
Sana Ahmad
Sana is an MA Educational Technology student at Concordia University. During her time as OER Instructional Design Assistant at Concordia Library (Sept. 2022-June 2023), Sana honed her education technology skills. Sana brings a passion for crafting impactful open educational resources and learning experiences from her current degree and her information-studies background. Learning about Pressbooks from multiple sources, especially YouTube videos, and receiving H5P questions from open-textbook grant recipients, led to Sana’s contributions to the overall design of this practical guide for users.
Rahil Kakkad
Rahil is an electrical engineering undergraduate student at Concordia University who worked as an OER Instructional Design Assistant at Concordia Library from May 2024 to December 2024. Passionate about open education, he contributed extensively to this guide while learning Pressbooks himself and documenting his insights to make it easier for others to learn. With a strong technical background, he excels at breaking down complex concepts into clear, user-friendly explanations. His experience with HTML and CSS also played a key role in refining the book’s design, enhancing both functionality and readability. The ability to communicate technical information effectively is something he hopes to carry forward into his future career in engineering, where clarity and accessibility are just as vital as innovation.
Zo Kopyna
Zo Kopyna is a multidisciplinary artist working towards their Bachelor of Fine Arts in Design at Concordia University. They have been a part of Concordia Library’s OER project as a work-study student since September 2024, contributing to the writing and design of various project elements such as this guidebook. Zo is passionate about accessibility and advocates for an intersectional approach to media in its design and consumption. They hope this guidebook inspires meaningful engagement with the concepts of accessible design and encourages authors to centre diverse users’ experiences when creating material with Pressbooks.
To Be Placed
Chhayhee Sok
Asifur Rahman
Lena Palacios, MA, PhD
Lena is pursuing a second BA in Creative Writing, First Peoples Studies, and Irish Studies at Concordia Studies. She/they enjoyed their time so much learning from and collaborating alongside the OER Team while working as an OER Instructional Design Assistant (Pressbooks). They now want to become an academic librarian specializing in User Experience (UX) design and specialize in critical race theory, ethnic studies, Indigenous studies, and women’s and gender studies.
