This blog post is a follow up to an earlier post regarding the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) to ensure students have access to high quality online content while reducing the time that faculty spend creating or re-creating materials for the online portion of a blended/hybrid course. In this post I will be focusing on a tool called Pressbooks that is available to all PSU faculty and staff.
What is Pressbooks?
Pressbooks is a WordPress based e-book publishing software. PSU has our own instance of Pressbooks that is provided by Unizin. Learning how to use Pressbooks is very straightforward. If you have used Sites at Penn State, which is also a WordPress based software, you will see the interface is very similar.
Why use Pressbooks?
Creating and re-creating online content for a blended/hybrid course can be very time consuming. Adopting and adapting OER can help to save time as opposed to creating your own online content, however we have noticed that faculty often want to modify and adapt OER content to better meet the needs of their students. Pressbooks provides a way to do this without any steep learning curve of new software.
While the main purpose of Pressbooks is to function as an e-book publishing software you don’t have to use it solely for that purpose. Pressbooks allows you to import files and then format them within Pressbooks. There are many possibilities. For example you can create:
- a customized version of an open textbook
- an organized collection of open articles or online content
- adapt OER content and/or add original content to create a new resource
Pressbooks also provides an easy way to create interactive online content. One of the plugins that is part of Pressbooks is H5P. H5P is an abbreviation for HTML5 Package. H5P is a free and open-source collaboration framework based on JavaScript.
The H5P plugin allows you to easily create interactive content directly on a page from a library of content types, such as drag and drop, multiple choice, interactive video, fill in the blank, and flashcards, and many more.
The online content you create in Pressbooks can easily be shared with your students via a URL or exported into PDF’s for print or digital distribution, EPUB for Nook, iBooks, Kobo etc. or MOBI for Kindle.
How are Faculty Currently using Pressbooks in Blended/Hybrid Courses?
Adaption of an Open Textbook
OpenStax is a nonprofit organization based out of Rice University. They provide high quality, peer reviewed, up to date, open textbooks. A faculty member had been using openly licensed articles as part of their face to face class and wanted to include them as part of the online content for new blended/hybrid offering of the course. They were looking for other resources that could be part of the online course components and found three chapters of an OpenStax textbook that fit in very nicely. They also wanted to include self-checks as part of the online content. In working with them we realized that an easy way to get all of these pieces organized and delivered online would be to use Pressbooks. We imported the articles from Word Doc. files into Pressbook and then formatted them so that they would each be a chapter within the book. Next we imported the three chapters from OpenStax, again formatting in Pressbooks to make them each a chapter. Finally we incorporated a number of interactive content types from using the H5P Plugin.
Re-Mixing Open Content
A faculty member wanted to use an open online simulation during the face-to-face portion of their blended/hybrid course. There were open articles and portions of an online open course that they wanted the students to read prior to coming to class. After the class students were to complete an activity where they discussed the experience of using the simulation by using an online discussion forum. In working with the faculty we realized that not only would it be helpful to discuss the experience after the face-to-face class but that having some discussion around the online content prior to the simulation experience would also be beneficial to students. We took the open articles and the modules from the open course and put them into Pressbooks as chapters. We then utilized a plugin called hypothes.is in Pressbooks. This allows students to be able to highlight and annotate within the pages of the book and add comments that are visible to everyone viewing the book. The pre-class discussion took place by way of comments on pages of the book. H5P content types were also used so students could do a self-assessment prior to coming to class to ensure they were prepared for the simulation. After class students went back to their comments and added their thoughts on if their assumptions about the simulation came true as well as how their views changed after the in class experience.
Authoring OER
A faculty member had been creating original content for a number of years but never had the time to put it all together into a cohesive whole. While working with them on transitioning from a face-to-face class to a blended/hybrid format we discussed options for taking all of their content (some word docs., some simple html pages they had created in ANGEL, practice problems, and short instructional videos from Khan academy) and putting them into a cohesive package. They also worked with another faculty member and had permission to incorporate some of their content into the online portion of their course. Pressbooks came up as a possible solution and when I showed the faculty member how to set up chapters and pages within a book as well as the possible uses for the H5P plugin they were sold. They imported the Word Doc files and wrote additional pages directly in Pressbooks. They were not familiar with Word Press but found Pressbooks very easy to use. Students used the online book to prepare for the face-to-face sessions. During class students participated in small group discussions and referenced notes they had made in the e-book using the hypothes.is plugin. After class students watched videos that were embedded in the pages of the e-book and utilized the interactive video H5P content type to assess their understanding.
Want to check out Pressbooks?
Do any of these uses sound like something you would like to explore in Pressbooks?
The first thing you’ll want to do is get an account. Please contact Julie Lang at jel141@psu.edu. Pressbooks has a great online community with many helpful resources: https://pressbooks.com/help/ If you are looking for a step by step guide on how to get started, University of Wisconsin has put together a wonderful getting started guide: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/pressbooks101/