Open Educational Resources at SAIT: Pressbooks at SAIT

Open Education Alberta (OEA) is a collaborative, no-fee publishing service for open textbooks and other open educational resources that was developed by institutional representatives from Mount Royal University, MacEwan University, University of Calgary, University of Lethbridge and the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology.  This initiative allows SAIT faculty and staff to adapt existing open textbooks or to create new openly licensed resources using Pressbooks, a well known publishing software.  New resources may be featured in the Open Education Alberta library website.

Members of the SAIT Community who are interested in obtaining a Pressbooks account should complete the form below and email it to Jessica Norman. You will then be contacted by a member of the Library who will outline the features of the software and your responsibilities as a user. All users must sign and agree to the terms of the publishing agreement below before an account will be issued.  If you have any questions, please contact Jessica Norman.

If you currently have an OpenEducation Alberta Pressbooks account and are experiencing a service outage, please contact library.publishing@ualberta.ca.  For all other technical support or training on the OpenEducation Alberta Pressbooks site, please contact Jessica Norman, the administrator at SAIT.

Pressbooks is a publishing tool that is frequently used to create, adapt, and publish open books. It makes it easy for authors to copy existing open books and adapt them to their own context, or to create new openly licensed books from scratch. Some of the advantages of Pressbooks are:

• Provides out of the box chapter formatting and other features which make it easy for authors to structure their content
• Allows readers to view books online or download the content in a variety of file formats
• Compatible with tools like H5P which allow authors to embed interactive elements in their texts

Here are some examples of open books that have been published using Pressbooks:

• Research Methods in Psychology, 2nd Canadian Edition (example of book adapted from an existing US version)
• Web Literacy for Fact Checkers
• OER Activities Source Guide
• Environmental ScienceBites (example of project involving student authors - see Open Pedagogy section for more information)

• Português para principiantes (language text with embedded sound clips and embedded activities)

There are many guides and tutorials available to support Pressbooks. 

• Pressbooks video tutorials - BC Campus
• Pressbooks guide - BC Campus