Introduction

The Library’s Open Educational Resource (OER) Team’s Pressbooks User Guide: Concordia University Library builds upon our experience working with open textbook grant recipients, draws inspiration from their projects, and is a support tool for current and forthcoming grant recipients. It is meant primarily for educators and their research assistants working on or interested in our open textbook grant projects. We hope that the broader OER community might also benefit from our guide.

Our user guide complements Pressbooks’ Pressbooks User Guide and related how-to videos.  Pressbooks’ in-depth manual provides further detail on managing your account, the authoring dashboard, making your book, and producing exports. With a local instance of Pressbooks at Concordia, the OER Team at Concordia University Library provides administrative and technical support to grant recipients, who work with their research assistants as they implement their projects in our instance of Pressbooks. Our user guide is one of the tools that we provide to support current and prospective grant recipients.

In what follows, we include inspiration from pedagogical innovation in our Concordia OER program and the broader open education community. We show how easy it is to include interactive content and add 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.

We will update our guide annually based on innovative examples, lessons learned from troubleshooting with open-textbook grant recipients, and your feedback. Please consider offering your feedback (see Appendix A)!