Over the past three years, the ROTEL (Remixing Open Textbooks through an Equity Lens) project has supported faculty across Massachusetts as they reimagined course materials to better serve their students. Through professional development, peer support, and a strong equity focus, ROTEL helped over 70 educators adapt and remix open educational resources (OER) — and publish…
This year has been momentous for my family and me, as our twin boys graduated high school and started college. These are exciting milestones for any family. For me, having worked in higher education technology for over two decades, there is a noteworthy twist. I’m now encountering higher education in a new capacity, not as…
Every month we highlight a public book from the Pressbooks community that is a great example of high quality, open content across a range of different subjects and use cases. These are the books we highlighted in 2024, all of which can be accessed for free on the Pressbooks Directory. Most of these texts are…
In a recent webinar, experts from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand shared insights on four collaborative publishing projects that showcase how partnerships across disciplines, cultures and institutions can lead to impactful open educational resources. Here’s a closer look at each project and the unique collaborative publishing approaches that shaped them. 1. Legal Research Skills: An…
Working as part of an evolving field, open education advocates often find themselves fighting to solidify the future of their initiatives. They need concrete evidence to prove how their programs are moving the needle on strategic priorities like student cost savings and equitable access to learning materials. Dashboards can be a valuable tool in this…
It’s December. With the year’s end comes reflection: what have we accomplished during this latest orbit around the sun? What has been the impact of our work? At Pressbooks, we can measure impact in a variety of ways. For example: the total number of platform users (18,000+), the number of books available in Pressbooks Directory…
As 2022 comes to a close, we’re taking a moment to look back at a year gone by. One of our goals for the past year was to give publishers more tools to help showcase the variety of outstanding work they’ve published. Along with the release of our newly redesigned network catalog, we’ve also been…
STEM education is pivotal for solving some of the biggest challenges facing the world today. Despite this, students face many barriers to pursuing these fields. Open educational resources (OER) present an effective way to make STEM education more accessible to students.
Liberated Learners is a guide to prepare post-secondary students for almost anything academic life can throw at them. University life can be difficult to navigate at the best of times. The stress of deadlines, heavy workloads, interpersonal conflicts, and shaky finances can feel overwhelming, especially when you don’t even have time to figure out a…
The transition to online learning has brought with it a host of challenges for both instructors and students. I’ve heard many instructors lament Zoom classrooms, feeling like they’re teaching into a void. With students’ cameras typically turned off, there are no easy back-and-forth exchanges or even nods of recognition to reassure them that students are…