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What is an open textbook?

Open textbooks are open educational resources (OER), which are instructional resources created and shared using open licenses. This means they are free for others to use, copy, distribute, modify, or reuse. Open textbooks can be a useful pedagogical tool, as their content may be modified and customized to meet the specific learning objectives of a particular course.

What is Pressbooks?

Pressbooks is a web-based authoring tool based on WordPress, and it is the primary tool that UTA Libraries Mavs Open Press (in addition to many other open textbook projects) uses to create and adapt open textbooks. In May 2018, Pressbooks announced their Accessibility Policy, outlining their efforts and commitment to making their software accessible.

Pressbooks Features

Using Pressbooks, content creators can easily import content from other files (e.g., a Word document); clone an existing open textbook; embed audio, image, and video files; and export Pressbooks to a variety of formats (e.g., PDF, EPUB, MOBI). Pressbooks also supports the integration of interactive features, such as quizzes and web annotation. Some of these features are described below.

Hypothesis Web Annotations

Pressbooks has built-in support for Hypothes.is, which is a web annotation tool. Users can highlight and annotate Pressbooks content right in the webpage itself leading to a more engaging and interactive experience.

Interactive H5P Content

Pressbooks has a H5P plugin that allows authors to create rich interactive content within the platform. H5P has a wide range of content types, which can be found on their website. Additionally, H5P maintains a list of each content type’s accessibility status measured against WCAG 2.0 AA standards.

Iframe Embedder

Pressbooks has the ability to embed content from an external website directly on a Pressbooks page. For an example of what this looks like, visit the crossword example in the Sandbox.

What is the Sandbox?

The OER Sandbox in  Pressbooks is meant to be an environment where anyone at UTA can experiment with Pressbooks and learn about the platform. Feel free to add, remove, or edit content while you’re in the Sandbox with the following exceptions:

• Sandbox users should refrain from deleting or modifying content included as front and back matter. Information included as front and back matter is provided by the Mavs Open Press team to help new users get started with Pressbooks.
• Sandbox users should refrain from making changes to content in the User Playgrounds part of the Sandbox unless they created the chapter(s). This part of the Sandbox is intended for users wishing to create protected content that they wish to reuse later. Chapters contained in User Playgrounds should incorporate the name of the content creator into the chapter title.

Content added to the Random Chapters part of the Sandbox may be freely  modified by any Sandbox user. Content may be deleted, expanded, revised, or otherwise adapted without warning.

You can request your own book hosted on Pressbooks by completing this form, but make sure you have finalized your project name as the URL cannot be changed once it has been created. You can also clone the content you have created in the Sandbox to your own book once your project name has been finalized.

Please note that all resources supported by  Mavs Open Press, which oversees Pressbooks publications, must be openly licensed. Learn more about open licenses on our open education guide.