We have been excited to partner with Pressbooks on a new webinar series this year called “OER Under the Hood”. The idea is an opportunity to share and admire the features open educational resources published in Pressbooks but also to “look under the hood” with their authors to learn more about how they were designed and built.
OEGlobal’s Director of Community Engagement, Alan Levine, explains the reason for the name:
Blame me for the metaphor, which may not be universal, perhaps elsewhere it is “under the bonnet”? And I am not a person who tinkers or refurbishes automobiles, but have seen in many places I have lived where people gather in parks who restore vintage cars or collect classic Mustangs. They admire the paint jobs, perhaps go for a test ride, but mainly they like to explore the interiors and open the engines to ask questions about the working parts. I suggested we approach Pressbook OERs the same way, from the outside and the inside.”
For the webinars so far, we have collaborated with Jennifer Martin from Pressbooks to choose titles that have made creative use of the Pressbook platform and designed OER that are perhaps a bit more than what people think of as open textbooks. And we appreciate Jennifer and Pressbooks for managing the zoom hosting and registration for the webinars.
The partnership between our organizations has been exciting to develop. Julie Curtis, VP Strategy & Growth at Pressbooks noted:
It is thrilling to dive deeply into some of the most interesting OER projects from around the world, to learn about where they came from, the visions that drive them, and the creativity of the authors and collaborators turning vision into reality. This webinar series is a generous gift to the global community.
Our first episode launched in March during Open Education Week explored Pressbooks as a portfolio. Terry Greene showed us My Learning Journey, a template for Trent University students to build their own Pressbooks portfolio for their educational experience. We were joined by Amber Hoye who had remixed the concept at Boise State University as a portfolio template for language majors.
In June this year, we took the webinar on the road to Australia, to look under the hood of OER created to support scenario-based and role play learning. This included Diagnosis: a Medical Education Game, a table top board game created by Nara Jones and Nora Leopardi for the University of New Castle and Deakin University’s Workplace Role Play Scenarios demonstrated for us by Sarah Steen.
The next OER Under the Hood is scheduled September 17, where we travel to Washington state, USA, to see a Pressbooks OER in a Vocational subject area, the Introduction to Welding open textbook published by Open WA (as we have learned the very first open textbook for welding). Thus it made sense to collaborate with the Community College Consortium for OER (CCCOER) and offer this as CCCOER’s first in their Fall 2025 series.
We hope you join us then for OER Under the Hood: Vocational Publishing with Pressbooks, where you can see up close with its authors, the exterior and the interior of an impressive OER.
Image Credits: Public Domain image from Open Clip Art modified by Alan Levine