Introduction

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 on our experience working with open textbook grant recipients at Concordia University in Montreal. We have drawn inspiration from existing projects and best practices in publishing to create a support tool for current and future grant recipients. Our local user guide is primarily intended for educators and their research assistants working on or interested in our open textbook grant projects, which utilize 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 demonstrate the ease of incorporating 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 tailor 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.