Pressbooks
Pressbooks is an open access company that supports individuals to create digital resources for free and are freely accessible for learners to use. Pressbooks offers various plugins and applications on the site that can enhance your content, including an H5P plugin which can help you to create a virtual gaming simulation. Your Pressbooks site can be open to the public through the addition of a Creative Commons license. Or, you can make the Pressbooks site private, and invite specific learners to view the resource as a whole or chapter-by-chapter.
Pressbooks is “passionate about open source, open content, open knowledge, open education”. To learn more about Pressbooks you can go to their website, about their accessibility statement, and if interested, open your own account.
If you choose Pressbooks as your open authoring platform, they have supportive resources for new users, a directory to use and adapt other open resources created by both students and educators, and a blog to learn what is happening in the Pressbooks community.
Insights from the Student Team
“In total, I’ve worked on three different VGS projects using Pressbooks over the course of four years. Like most platforms, there is a definite learning curve as you create and navigate through the development process. Amusingly, it felt that each VGS project was spaced out in such a way that there was just enough time between projects to forget how to navigate the site. Fortunately, great resources are available to help with all things Pressbooks (see examples below). One idea is to create a practice workbook, a sandbox for students to play around when developing content without fear of completely messing something up. Content from the practice workbook can then easily be copied into the actual project.”
~ David Beazely
If you would like to learn more about Pressbooks, you can watch an Introduction to Pressbooks by Stephen Wilfeard from eCampus
Additional Resources
For additional Pressbooks resources:
Pressbooks User Guide.
Pressbooks YouTube page.
BCcampus OpenEd also has a Pressbooks guide that builds on the information published in the user guide published by Pressbooks.
BCcampus OpenEd also has a helpful set of Pressbooks tutorial videos.
