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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

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Pressbooks

Bentley University has partnered with Pressbooks to provide faculty and students an authoring tool with which they can publish portable, interactive web content for a variety of use-cases. 

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.