What is Pressbooks?

This book (or website, depending on how you are reading) is an actual example of an open-sourced book built in Pressbooks!  Pressbooks is an authoring tool used by colleges and universities, or really anyone, to write and publish mainly openly-licensed books and course content.  With Pressbooks, you may adopt or adapt previously existing open educational materials, or create your own openly licensed educational materials from original works.  In the case of this book, we created it by cloning an existing openly-licensed book that was written for readers in a different college system.  It was written to help those readers understand how they might use Pressbooks in their specific campus context, and the attribution for that book is in the Attribution section of this book. Because of that book’s open license and its existence in the Pressbooks catalog, we at Cascadia College have been able to clone it and customize it to suit our campus.

This kind of open use is exactly the point of Open Educational Resources, where content may be shared freely, openly and where content may be added to, or subtracted from in order to create something new and appropriate, in this case, for Pressbook users on our campus. More on that in the chapters that follow.

The short (3:18) video below goes into a bit more detail and invites you to think about how you might use Pressbooks.  Watch the video and see if you can identify a feature that was added to it to enhance engagement.