The University of Alberta invited us to be part of a provincial Pressbooks pilot project, in which we will gain access to the EDU Pressbook publishing service the UofA library will be hosting.

What that means for you is the easy and free adoption and modification of existing open textbooks or the new creation of media-rich open teaching resources. These also include interactive quizzing elements in addition to video, photo and simulation embeds. Furthermore, you can activate Hypothes.is – a web annotation tool  that will allow your students to (collaboratively) annotate and highlight specific parts in your resource. Once you have created the digital resource, it can easily be updated, shared online as well as in print. For those of you teaching using specific characters and languages, Pressbook allows for a multitude of those including LaTex, phonetic alphabets and many languages worldwide.

Pressbooks is a user-friendly tool that doesn’t require a steep learning curve.

BC campus has worked with this educational Pressbooks installation for a number of years and all Higher Education educators in the province have free access to it. Thus, they can easily vet, adopt and modify existing open textbooks in their disciplines or create their own if nothing suitable exists. The creation of resources often happens in collectives where a team lead invites contributions from other academic content experts in the discipline. The BC campus collection currently holds 270 textbooks and you can have your resource added to the  collection as an online resource or a document that can then be bought as a printed book for a (low) printing fee.

Please do reach out to me or the Teaching Centre if you are now curious to learn more and have an interest in the free access to the EDU software! 

I hope that this project will eventually turn into a government-funded constant to which all Higher Education professionals in the province will have free and easy access. With your help, this can become a reality.

Please note that you can also apply for an Open Access Learning Resources Fund to help offset some of the cost involved in the creation process! Spread the word among your peers!

For inspiration, please browse some of the following resources that have been created with Pressbooks.

1. PCC OER: A Digital Workbook for Beginning ESOL

2. Teaching in the Digital Age
3. Introduction to Theater – Interactive Learning Content (a student-instructor co-created resource)
4. Introduction to Sociology 2nd Canadian Edition
5. [http://The Simple Math of Writing Well]The Simple Math of Writing Well – Writing in the 21st Century
6. Mathematics for Elementary Teachers
7. Antología abierta de literatura hispana
8. Essentials of Linguistics
9. Nature of Geographic Information
10. Knowing Home: Braiding Indigenous Science with Western Science, Book 1
11. Foundations of Learning and Instructional Design Technology
12. An Urgency of Teachers
13. Pressbooks Guide