Pressbooks Examples

We use this section to showcase innovations and practical examples from the wider national and international Pressbooks community and from here at Concordia across disciplines.

A streamlined approach can be impactful, especially if that means adopting or customizing an open textbook for free and tailored learning. Consider adopting a relevant open textbook and having your students critique it, find gaps, and additional resources, as Salinda Hess exemplifies in Explorations: An Open Invitation to Biological Anthropology for ANTH 203: Culture and Biology. There are plenty of open textbooks that exist already, and because of the iterative potential of open education, these textbooks do not need to be perfect before they get adopted in a meaningful way. Letting your students get involved in the process is one approach.

Pressbooks projects can be as elaborate as they need to be, which is one of the advantages of create-grant or design-intensive customization-grant projects. JOUR 443: The Digital Magazine, led by Cristina Sanza and Andrea Hunter, is a capstone open textbook and an excellent example of departmental collaboration. The book is replete with rich audio-visual content, interactive learning components, and links to student journalism work in the field. Meanwhile, Creating the Modern: Intersections of Art & Society in the Nineteenth Century for ARTH 388, led by Loren Lerner and Karine Antaki provides hundreds of text-image pairings suited to visual studies in the age of mass digitization of public domain artworks.