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Announcing Pressbooks, a New eBook Publishing Platform at ISU

by Unknown User on 2021-08-26T14:11:00-06:00 | 0 Comments

Pressbooks logo with a red box around the letters "PB."ISU now has its own publishing platform for eBooks and online content! The Idaho State Board of Education has provided University Libraries with a license to Pressbooks, a publishing platform that will allow ISU faculty, staff, and students to publish online content for free. 

Pressbooks is intended to promote the creation, adaptation and use of Open Educational Resources (OER) at ISU. OER is openly-licensed educational content that can be re-used or re-mixed as needed to create free course materials. However, Pressbooks can also be used to create traditional materials under all-rights-reserved copyright. 

The Pressbooks platform will allow ISU faculty, staff, and students to publish material related to their courses or scholarly work on the web. Pressbooks users don’t need to have a full book ready in order to publish; users can create and publish any content on Pressbooks, even if it’s a short paper or chapter. Pressbooks content can be published for anyone on the web to view, or made private so that only those with a link may view it; instructors can use privately published materials by linking to their Pressbooks content in Moodle.

Users can also collaborate with others at ISU to create content within the platform. A common use for Pressbooks is for faculty members to collaborate with students during a course to edit existing content, or create a portfolio of student work. 

The Pressbooks platform allows users to embed videos or other content into their online text, and has an H5P option that will allow users to create interactive activities such as review questions, timelines, slideshows, flashcards, and more. If you’d like to know more about H5P, check out this video from the ITRC’s Instructional Technologists about using it to create active learning environments.

ISU faculty, staff and students have already started publishing or adapting content in Pressbooks! Existing ISU Pressbooks can be viewed in the ISU Pressbooks Catalog. A collection of eBooks from other institutions around Idaho is available in the Idaho Open Press catalog.

Anyone interested in creating content with an ISU Pressbooks account should contact ISU’s Pressbooks administrators using the Contact form at isu.pressbooks.pub, or emailing KristinWhitman@isu.edu to request an account.

To get notified of future Pressbooks trainings, ISU faculty and staff can self-enroll in ISU’s OER Moodle course to receive emailed announcements. Notifications will include Pressbooks trainings and other OER-related events around campus. You can find more resources for creating OER on our library subject guide.

Do you know someone at ISU working to make course materials more affordable? Nominate them as an ISU Textbook Hero!


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