This is a guest post, written by our Digital Learning Assistant, Lucie Hopkins.
Welcome to the third Wander Wednesday blog post of the summer! I hope you are all feeling ready and excited to jump into the fall semester in a few short weeks. This week, I (DLA Lucie Hopkins) have the privilege to share with you some of my own personal insights and experiences with the Pressbooks platform, with which I have both technical and academic experience!
I am a rising senior, majoring in Neuroscience and French & Francophone Studies. I have served as a DLA on a Pressbooks project with Professor Eileen McEwan with the goal of creating an online, open educational resource elementary French textbook. I also served as a DLA during the Camp Design Online program of summer 2020. I have technical expertise in Pressbooks and Voice Thread, and personal experience with successful (or not) faculty and student presence in an online format.
Without further ado, allow me to share my thoughts about the Pressbooks platform as an online learning tool!
Pressbooks is a simple online book formatting software that is popular for Open Educational Resources. It offers many tools that aid creators in adhering to the principles of Universal Design (found here: http://universaldesign.ie/What-is-Universal-Design/The-7-Principles/) while constructing their online resources. Many Muhlenberg professors have taken advantage of this resource to use either as textbook material (see Prof. Leisawitz & Viale’s Elementary Italian textbook here) or as a collaborative tool in the classroom (see Prof. Mathews-Schultz’s poli-sci students cultivate a diverse book of research and arguments about the Political Year of the Woman here). Luckily, I have experience with both of these methods of using Pressbooks that I can share with you all today!
As a student, I participated in a Pressbooks project called “Paris à travers les pages” (Paris Through the Pages) with my FRN 427 classmates and Prof. Eileen McEwan. As a DLA, I worked with Eileen again on creating a textbook similar to Spunti (the Italian textbook), but for Elementary French. While Spunti was, to my knowledge, created from scratch, Eileen and I researched already-written Open Educational Resource (OER) French textbooks from which we could pull ideas and resources to create our own. What’s awesome about Pressbooks and OERs is that as long as you accurately understand the copyright agreement for the particular resource you’re using, you can typically share and utilize what’s in it freely (with attributions, of course!) and build off of it for your unique course ideas and goals. This project is ongoing for us, and we expect to make a lot of progress this fall as we work together with our first online elementary French class. I studied abroad in Aix-en-Provence last semester where Eileen is currently, so we’re aiming to incorporate new, day-in-the-life kind of resources about this region for the elementary students to get a more immersive experience in the culture and language. I could go on forever about the benefits of using OERs in the classroom instead of traditional textbooks, but I’ll just save us all some time and link you to the arguments made for Spunti in 2018 instead.
As a student, I really enjoyed exploring the Pressbooks platform as a new, highly creative medium for my ideas. I was halfway through college when I took the FRN 427 course, so I had become used to the typical essay format and process. While I still wrote my chapter of the book as I typically would a research paper, there was an added element of creativity that I really enjoyed when I had to then format it into the Pressbooks website and incorporate digital elements that I normally would not have the opportunity to use. As a part of the assignment, we were required to utilize photos, videos, or audio as supplemental elements to our chapter, attribute them correctly, and add “key takeaways” at the end–a Pressbooks specialty. It was a bit difficult at first technically, as I had never used the platform, didn’t quite understand the rules of OER and attribution of materials, and was sometimes frustrated by the finickiness of the formatting. However, working through these kinks led to a new skill on my resume and an expanded awareness of ways to express my ideas. Not to mention that my writing was now in the world as an OER, possibly to be used in French classrooms around the world, or even adapted and utilized by other scholars (a sentiment shared by a fellow student in this article about Muhlenberg OERs). This Pressbooks experience was an awesome upgrade to writing a research paper that I highly recommend.
As I said before, the platform itself is relatively easy to understand, but as students are typically used to Word documents as the medium for submitting papers, this new formatting can sometimes be difficult to work with, especially for those who are not particularly tech-savvy. However, we as a college are blessed with the wonderful Office of Digital Learning and all the student DLAs that are there to help your class with adjusting to the platform of Pressbooks! We were fortunate to have Jarrett and Jenna come to two of our classes to delve into the technical aspects of the platform and the rules of OER and copyright, which made the whole process as a student much easier.
All in all, if you are looking to utilize more online resources in your courses, shake up the writing process for your students, or create a beautiful, diverse work that can be shared with the world as an OER, Pressbooks is a simple, effective way to go about doing so.
If you have any questions, you can contact me at lehopkins@muhlenberg.edu. Thanks for reading!