Introduction
Welcome to our
Guide to Pressbooks
for Open-Textbook Grant Recipients
Our Guide to Pressbooks at Concordia University supplements Pressbooks’ official Pressbooks User Guide. Designed by the Library’s Open Educational Resource (OER) Team, we are building upon our experience working with open textbook grant recipients at Concordia University, Montreal. We have drawn inspiration from existing projects and best practices in publishing in order to create a support tool for current and forthcoming grant recipients. Our local user guide is primarily meant for educators and their research assistants working on or interested in our open textbook grant projects using our local instance of Pressbooks. We also hope the broader OER community will benefit from our guide.
In what follows, we include inspiration from pedagogical innovation in our Concordia OER program and the broader open education community. We show the ease of including interactive content and adding multimedia to benefit students. We have time-stamped how-to videos with descriptions to help you find the most relevant sections of Pressbooks’ how-to videos.
We also offer resources for those wanting to test out advanced customization. We illustrate how you can customize your content by adapting, customizing, and creating in Pressbooks and applying custom styles by adding CSS to your book’s style sheet and design plan.
We will update our guide annually based on current examples, lessons learned from troubleshooting with open-textbook grant recipients, best practices in publishing, and your feedback.
For further details on managing your account, the authoring dashboard, making your book, producing exports, and more, consult Pressbooks’ Pressbooks User Guide and related how-to videos.
Please consider offering your feedback.
Are you considering using an open textbook in your courses?
- If so, you may be interested in our OER Discipline Resource Guide: Concordia University Library—2nd edition, which will help you learn about available open textbooks, often in Pressbooks form.
- Learn about Open Educational Resources and current and forthcoming open-textbook projects.
- You might also be interested in applying for an open textbook grant.