This is part three of our Pressbooks Results Series, where we’re sharing the stories of four faculty members who have used Pressbooks Results in their classroom to achieve unique pedagogical goals including reducing withdrawals, empowering faculty, and scaling personalized learning.
Quick Overview
Faculty member: Rebecca Lindsay, Instructional Designer & History Instructor, Utah Valley University
- Rebecca is both an instructor and an instructional designer focused on faculty empowerment.
- She is working to build institutional capacity through the use of Pressbooks: helping UVU faculty create, customize, and maintain their own textbooks and activities.
- She addresses both student engagement and faculty autonomy, providing cost-free resources while giving faculty creative control over their content and assessments.
Background
At Utah Valley University, Rebecca Lindsay, an instructional designer and adjunct History instructor, has adopted Pressbooks Results in order to address multiple challenges faced by faculty and students in general education history courses. Through her use of Pressbooks Results, she has created a flexible, cost-effective learning environment that allows students to access course materials from day one, while empowering faculty to easily create and track interactive content for their students.
Course Context and Adoption
As an instructor, Rebecca teaches general education History courses at UVU. For her, the primary draw of using Pressbooks was that it allowed her to provide students with free access to course materials from the start of the semester, eliminating the financial burden of traditional textbooks. Her use of Pressbooks Results also provides her with a seamless integration into Canvas, UVU’s learning management system (LMS), allowing her to link Pressbooks content directly in her courses, track student progress, and monitor activity completion.
Addressing Key Challenges
In her history courses, Rebecca faced several key pedagogical challenges, which she addressed through the use of Pressbooks Results and H5P:
Encouraging Deep Engagement with Reading Assignments
Because reading historical texts is a core skill required for her courses, Rebecca wanted to find better ways to ensure students were truly engaging with assigned readings. To accomplish this, she incorporated frequent knowledge checks within the Pressbooks content, allowing her to quickly gauge student understanding and hold students accountable for completing assigned readings.
Creating and Updating Interactive Content Easily
Putting on her instructional designer hat, it was also important to Rebecca that the solution she adopted in her courses be easy for other, less technical colleagues to adopt and use in their teaching. One of the reasons Pressbooks Results appealed to her was that creating and modifying both course content and interactive H5P activities was both simple and intuitive for her and her non-instructional designer colleagues.
Adaptability has also been essential: if knowledge check questions become too easy or she finds that answers are widely available online, she is able to easily update them and maintain the effectiveness of the assessments.
Empowering Faculty to Build and Track Custom Content
Beyond her own courses, Rebecca supports other faculty members in developing their own custom textbooks with embedded interactive activities. Using Pressbooks Results, instructors are able to independently create and adapt their own resources. They can integrate knowledge checks, interactive elements, and student progress tracking without constant instructional design support. In an era where budgetary pressures and staffing challenges abound, Rebecca values the autonomy this gives the instructors she supports, noting:
"Faculty can develop their own textbooks, they can bring in OER materials... and they don’t have to depend on an instructional designer to build it for them. They can do it for themselves."
Impact
Using Pressbooks Results, Rebecca has brought graded interactive reading assignments directly into Canvas, allowing her to track student progress at a more granular level and make timely instructional adjustments based on performance trends. In the past two yearsl there have been nearly 3,000 students who have used Pressbooks across four different history courses.
Her efforts have also empowered faculty creators and helped foster increased instructor choice and autonomy at UVU. By providing instructors with access to Pressbooks Results, she enables them to create and customize their own course content without needing as much external support as before. Not only has this increased instructor agency and creativity, but the flexibility and adaptability of the platform has allowed instructors to better tailor the learning experiences they design to meet the specific needs of their students.
Watch Rebecca’s story on YouTube 👇
More about Pressbooks Results
Are you interested in learning more about how you can enhance student success with Pressbooks Results? Let us know by filling out the form on this page and we’ll contact with you the information you need to get started.
Read the other blogs in the series: