Pressbooks is an easy-to-use online publishing platform that has become an industry standard in higher education for the creation and sharing of Open Educational Resources (OER), namely learning materials which are freely available and licensed in a way that allows them to be reused, adapted, and remixed by others. Texas State University Libraries subscribes to this platform to facilitate faculty efforts to adapt and create high-quality OER for the Texas State community and beyond. The Open Education Team at University Libraries is excited to support and uplift faculty as they contribute to the growing wealth of OER that are reshaping higher education to promote affordability and improved student success.
For more general information about the Pressbooks platform for its creators, visit the “About” page on Pressbooks.com
Mission Statement
The Open Education Team at University Libraries is committed to lowering the cost of higher education, particularly textbooks, to promote both affordability and student success. As codified by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, Open Education Resources are now considered a “high-impact” practice by virtue of their positive impact on student success metrics. The mandate of our team is to promote and support the creation of OER by faculty, staff, and student members at Texas State University. As defined by the Texas Education Code, Section 51.451, OER are “teaching, learning, or research resources that are in the public domain or that have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use, adaptation, and redistribution by any person.” We endeavor to foster the authoring and adaptation of OER – such as open textbooks and ancillary teaching materials – that evince a high level of production value, solid pedagogical underpinnings, and interactive elements that drive student engagement.
Our team also remains committed to promoting a high level of openness for the materials created with Pressbooks, so that these materials contribute to and circulate within the rich ecosystem of OER worldwide, thereby promoting access to higher education and allowing others to use, build upon, and remix the OER created at Texas State University. While licensing decisions lie wholly in the hands of authors, creators, and adapters, we encourage authors using Pressbooks to adopt a CC BY or CC BY-SA license, which grants students free access to these OER and allows other instructors to reuse, remix, and adapt them.
How to Get Started
If you are interested in creating an OER with Pressbooks, please fill out the Pressbooks Request Form to contact the Open Education Librarian who will follow up on the details of your proposed project for Pressbooks and determine the types of support the library can offer. Once your project has been defined and approved, a Pressbooks account will be created for you and the Open Education Librarian will either create a Pressbooks shell for you or clone another Pressbooks you want to adapt.
As part of the onboarding process for using Pressbooks, users will be directed to review the “Pressbooks Companion Guide and Resources” library guide, which offers both tutorials on the functionalities of the Pressbooks platform and guides for thinking through the various workflows that contribute to high-quality OER. For instance, there are frameworks and resources for supporting project management, curriculum design, accessibility design, finding openly licensed media, marketing your Pressbooks, and much more.
To gain more familiarity with OER in general and OER in Texas in particular, we also recommend that Pressbooks users work through the OERTX OER Core Elements Course, which provides clear explanations of OER concepts and workflows, while also linking out to useful resources for discovering, curating, adapting, and creating OER.
TXST Open Education Team and Support Services
The Open Education team and library are here to support faculty, staff, and students as they create OER and Open Pedagogy projects with Pressbooks. Every Pressbooks project is different, as are its support needs, and our team remains flexible to meet the needs of our Pressbooks users. Services we have offered in the past include the sourcing of open education resources and openly licensed media, consultations and trainings on how to use the Pressbooks platform, consultations on effective instructional and multimedia design in Pressbooks, guides and resources for designing accessibility, and much more. We also have hardware and software that can facilitate any technical work that may accompany your Pressbooks project, and on occasion our team includes student workers who can be trained and tasked to support a particular workflow in your Pressbooks project.
For more information about how the Open Education Team can support your Pressbooks project take a look at our Pressbooks Support page. You can also email your local Open Education Librarian or fill out our general “OER Ask Me” form. We look forward to working with the Bobcat community to create high-quality Pressbooks!
Pressbooks User Policies and Guidelines
Openly licensed materials created on Pressbooks remain open. Once a work has been given a Creative Commons license, this CANNOT be revoked.
Users need to make the work that they publish via the TXST Pressbooks instance accessible based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The University Libraries reserves the right to unpublish public-facing content that does not conform to WCAG. Be sure to consult resources for digital accessibility at TXST: The Information Security Office: Digital Accessibility.
To maintain the TXST Pressbooks network and ensure that its limited resources are appropriately allocated, the following policies regarding user and book management have been adopted.
- Private books for which there has been no user activity for the past two years will be deleted. Before deletion, the book administrator(s) will be contacted and given the possibility to appeal the deletion.
- Public books with fewer than ~1000 words and no user activity for the two years will be deleted. Before deletion, the book administrator(s) will be contacted and given the possibility to appeal the deletion.
- Public Books for which the author no longer works at TXST (and which are therefore no longer being updated) will be “archived” in Pressbooks, meaning that each page of the webbook will have a banner that announces to users that it is no longer being updated.