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Open Educational Resources (OER)

Find out what open educational resources are, where to find them, and how to use open licenses

Bentley Pressbooks

Logo for Pressbooks

 

 

Pressbooks

Bentley University has partnered with Pressbooks to provide faculty and students an authoring tool with which they can publish online, interactive textbooks that will be openly accessible to their students and the world. 

Click here to access the Bentley Pressbooks directory (Access will be available soon). 

The Pressbooks Directory is a free, searchable catalog that includes over 8,000 open access books published through a variety of universities, colleges, and specialists in educational fields. 

Cost

Access to Pressbooks is at no-cost to all Bentley faculty, staff, and students. Publishing via Bentley University Pressbooks is free-of-charge to faculty, but first needs approval from the Bentley University library.   

Key Features

  • Easy interface: Add your textual, audio, and video content through an easy-to-use interface or import your pre-existing content from Microsoft Word and more with the click of a button.
  • Adding multimedia: Textbooks can easily be embed with videos, pictures and interactive learning content such as H5P. 
  • Grade passback: Send students’ scores from interactive Pressbooks chapters to the Webcourses gradebook. Privacy control: Make content public (for the world to see) or private (for a specific audience of students or colleagues). \
  • Portability: Permit students to download and print the content (in PDF, ePub, Word, etc.) for offline reading.
  • Instructor/Student Annotations: Leave personalized notes to expound on compelling topics (Hypothes.is).

Pressbooks in Practice

The table below provides examples of how faculty and students are using Pressbooks at Bentley University:

  Faculty Students

Academic

 Write educational content in Pressbooks to supply students a zero-cost alternative to publisher textbooks and/or courseware. Work published in Pressbooks may serve as a professional credential, offering public evidence of authorship and expertise through a stable, openly accessible publication.
Professional Create content to submit for a class project or assignment. Author and maintain ownership of personal work (e.g., via open license) and list it on a resume or CV as a publication.

How Do I Get Started?

  1. Contact James Thibeault, the Open Educational Resources librarian, and inquire about Pressbooks and your proposed open textbook.

  2. Once approved, Bentley Library will grant you access to a Pressbooks blank textbook. 
  3. Develop and design your textbook using the Pressbooks interface.
  4. Publish the textbook and have it fully accessible to your students and the world.