Resources for Building OER: Word, Google Docs, PDF’s and Pressbooks

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How Do You Know the Best Resource to Build Your OER?

There are many resources or programs you can use to help build OER for your course. What tools you will use to create your version of the textbook will depend greatly on what format you find the original textbook in and what you feel comfortable working with. We will briefly look at the different aspects of the most common resources used to build OER.

Microsoft Word

Many people are already comfortable using Microsoft Word. You can make Word accessible and it can look professional with a little extra work. However Word is not a design program and does not have the capability as other publishing software. If you want to share anything you make using Word, you will probably need to covert it to another file type such as a PDF so students can download the document without being able to make changes.

Google Docs

Google Docs is extremely easy to use and is available anywhere there is internet access. Documents can be shared and are easily accessible with a link. With Google Docs you have a place to access and store your document. However, like Microsoft Word, Google Docs is not a design program and does not have the capability to do anything other than basic functions for text, images, etc.

PDF’s

It is common that open textbooks may only be available as a PDF document. It is easy to redistribute PDF files. However, PDF documents are not easily editable. If you want to modify an open textbook that is only available in PDF format, you will need to convert the PDF document to one of the formats above.

Before you consider converting a PDF version of the textbook, you should contact the original author to ask for a copy of the textbook source files. Converting a PDF document to an editable format is a difficult, time consuming and imprecise process.

Pressbooks

Pressbooks allows users to create professional online books. If you are comfortable using Canvas or have perhaps created a blog before then you will like using Pressbooks.

Here are some pros and cons for Pressbooks:

Positives

Professional looking ebooks
Low cost of $19 or $99 (one time fee; regularly have coupons)
Downloadable in a variety of formats (two main e-reader formats, online, printable PDF ($99 version)
Customizable
Used for OER at many top universities
Embedding video or audio link will transfer correctly to non-web/PDF formats
Visual placeholders for multimedia content