How Pressbooks Supports Open Education
Pressbooks is an open source book publishing platform that makes it easy for anyone to create and share their ideas. Pressbooks allows authors to invite collaborators, quickly adapt and remix other openly-licensed material, and distribute their work however they see fit.
Open Educational Resources (OER) increase global access to learning opportunities, make education more affordable, and provide everyone with the freedom to combine, adapt, and improve content to meet local needs. You can see thousands of OER published with Pressbooks in the Pressbooks Directory.
Join hundreds of institutions using Pressbooks to create quality, accessible books and learning materials.
Ready to try Pressbooks?
Get Started with Pressbooks Self-Publisher
Pressbooks Self-Publisher provides book-based subscription plans that allow you to easily create and self-publish a book, working on your own or with others.
It’s easy to start a free 7-day trial of Pressbooks Self-Publisher. Simply create an account at pressbooks.pub, start a new book project, and explore the platform at your own pace. Our User Guide and YouTube playlist can help you learn more.
Request a Pressbooks Enterprise Demo
Pressbooks Enterprise Networks provide a professionally-hosted, branded Pressbooks network and all the tools and training needed to run your own institutional publishing program.
Learn More about OER
Under the UNESCO definition, OER refer to material that permits “no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others.” Another helpful shorthand is the formula OER = free + permissions, delightfully illustrated in the remixed artwork by librarian Michelle Reed shown at left.
Open education is transforming how institutions approach teaching and learning. We’ve developed an Open Education Reference Guide that presents an instututional maturity model along with relevant resources for each stage of your institutional journey.
Recommended Resources for Open Education Practitioners
Here are a few of the many excellent resources about Open Education that have been published with Pressbooks.
OER Starter Kit
An introductory guide for instructors on understanding and creating OER
OER Student Toolkit
An open education advocacy guide for student leaders at BC Campus
Open Pedagogy Approaches
Case studies describing open pedagogy collaborations
Open at the Margins
An curated collection of marginalized stances on a range of educational issues
From the Pressbooks Blog
Inside Fanshawe’s OER Design Studio: An Inspirational Model for OER Creation
What does it take to build a thriving open education ecosystem at a college? At Fanshawe College, the answer lies in a simple but powerful idea: support faculty and students, and give them the tools… Continue Reading Inside Fanshawe’s OER Design Studio: An Inspirational Model for OER Creation
Open Textbooks for the Trades: How Washington State’s Welding OER Transforms Vocational Learning
The creation of Washington State’s open welding textbook Introduction to Welding is a compelling example of how Open Educational Resources (OER) can transform vocational education. The first of its kind, this textbook was produced as… Continue Reading Open Textbooks for the Trades: How Washington State’s Welding OER Transforms Vocational Learning
Defining Forward Paths for Improving Accessibility: Insights from Ann Gagné
Imagine: A student discovers that a required open educational resource for their course, which relies heavily on visual imagery to instruct, has images with missing alt text. In order to learn effectively, the student requires… Continue Reading Defining Forward Paths for Improving Accessibility: Insights from Ann Gagné