7 How Do I Build My OER in Palomar Pressbooks?

This Chapter Is for Faculty Using Palomar Pressbooks

You have developed the content of your OER. Now you need a place where students can access it and where you can continue to edit, maintain, and share it.

Palomar College provides Pressbooks as one option for publishing OER. If you plan to use Palomar Pressbooks, this chapter will help you move your developed content into the platform and turn it into a well-organized book.

Why Use Palomar Pressbooks?

Pressbooks is designed specifically for creating and publishing books. Palomar provides its own Pressbooks network, giving faculty an institutionally supported environment for developing and sharing OER.

With Palomar Pressbooks, you can:

• create a web-based book that students can access without purchasing a textbook;
• organize content into parts and chapters;
• continue revising and updating the resource over time;
• produce the resource in multiple formats;
• adapt and build upon compatible openly licensed Pressbooks resources;
• request that your finished resource be included in the Palomar Pressbooks Catalog; and
• receive local support from the Academic Technology Resource Center (ATRC).

You do not need to become a Pressbooks expert to create a book. This chapter focuses on the overall process. When you need step-by-step help working in Pressbooks, Palomar has additional guidance and support available.

You Don’t Have to Start With an Empty Book

Palomar has created a Palomar Pressbooks Book Template that you can use as the starting point for your OER.

The template gives you an existing structure and design to build from rather than requiring you to make every decision from scratch. You can bring the template into your Palomar Pressbooks account and then replace, revise, add, or remove content to fit your project.

Choose the Best Way to Get Your Content Into Pressbooks

Once you have a Pressbooks book to work in, the next question is how to bring in the content you developed.

The best strategy depends largely on where your content currently lives:

• Existing Pressbooks book: clone the book if you want to use most of it;
• Selected content from Pressbooks: import the portions you want to use;
• Developed manuscript or other existing content: import a structured Word document or use the Pressbooks Page Creation Assistant to transform your content into Pressbooks-ready HTML; or
• Content from several sources: use a combination of approaches that makes sense for your project.

You do not have to use one method for the entire book. For example, you might begin with the Palomar template, bring in openly licensed chapters from another Pressbooks book, import some of your own chapters from Word, and use the Pressbooks Page Creation Assistant for content you want to quickly format using the Palomar Pressbooks design.

If the Book Is Already in Pressbooks, Start There

If you found an openly licensed Pressbooks book that closely matches what you need, you may be able to bring the existing book into Palomar Pressbooks and adapt it rather than recreating it.

Clone a Book When You Want Most of It

If an existing Pressbooks book will serve as the foundation of your OER, cloning can give you your own copy to work from. You can then remove what you do not need, reorganize the book, revise content, and add your own material as permitted by the resource’s license.

This is often the simplest pathway when the existing book already provides much of the structure and content you want.

Import Content When You Only Want Certain Pieces

If you only need selected chapters or content from another Pressbooks resource, you may not need to clone the entire book. Pressbooks also provides ways to bring selected content into an existing project.

This can be especially useful when you are remixing material from several Pressbooks books into one resource.

If Your Content Is in Word or Another Document, You Have Two Good Options

If you already developed your OER content outside of Pressbooks, you do not have to manually rebuild every chapter in the platform.

Two useful approaches are importing a structured Word manuscript or using the Pressbooks Page Creation Assistant to transform your existing content into Pressbooks-ready HTML.

Neither approach is inherently better. They simply place some of the production work at different points in the process. Choose the approach that makes the most sense for your project and the way you prefer to work.

Strategy 1: Import Your Word Document

If you have a long, well-structured Word manuscript, importing the document can be an efficient way to get a large amount of content into Pressbooks at once.

If you followed the Word guidance in the previous chapter, each title that you want Pressbooks to recognize as a separate chapter should use Word’s Heading 1 style. Pressbooks uses those Heading 1 markers to identify chunks of content during the import process.

When you import the Word document, Pressbooks will process the file and allow you to choose which sections you want to bring into the book. You can then identify imported sections as appropriate content types, such as front matter, chapters, or back matter.

Plan to Add the Pressbooks Design After You Import

Importing a Word document is primarily a way to bring your manuscript and its basic structure into Pressbooks. It is not intended to create all of the Pressbooks-specific design elements you may want in the finished book.

After the import, review the chapters and make your design decisions in Pressbooks. For example, you may want to:

• add Pressbooks textboxes for examples, activities, key takeaways, or other recurring features;
• adjust heading structure;
• review lists and other formatting;
• check images, media, and links;
• recreate special formatting that did not transfer; and
• create consistent design patterns across chapters.

This approach may make the most sense when your priority is getting a substantial manuscript into Pressbooks efficiently and you are comfortable doing the final design work once it is there.

Strategy 2: Use the Pressbooks Page Creation Assistant

If you already have your OER content written, the Pressbooks Page Creation Assistant can help you move that content into Pressbooks more quickly.

This GenAI app is designed to take your existing OER textbook content and transform it into formatted HTML that you can add to Pressbooks. It follows the structure and design used in the Palomar Pressbooks Book Template, helping you create consistent pages without manually building all of the HTML yourself.

Which Strategy Should You Use?

Organize the Book Around the Learning Journey

Once your content is in Pressbooks, take another look at the organization of the finished book.

Pressbooks allows you to organize a book using elements such as front matter, parts, chapters, and back matter. Use that structure to make the resource easy for students to navigate.

As you organize the book, ask:

• Can students easily tell where to begin?
• Does the order of the chapters reflect the way students will encounter the content in the course?
• Would grouping related chapters into parts make the book easier to understand?
• Are chapter titles descriptive enough that students know what they will find?
• Is important introductory information easy to locate?
• Are references, appendices, glossaries, or other supporting materials located where students would expect them?
• Is anything included simply because it came from the original source rather than because your students actually need it?

Remember the principle that guided the earlier chapters: the book should reflect the learning experience you designed for your course, not the organization of the textbook you happened to start with.

Create a Consistent Experience Across Chapters

Pressbooks gives you many formatting options, but more formatting does not necessarily make a resource easier to use.

Instead, establish a small number of consistent patterns that students can learn to recognize.

For example, chapters might consistently use:

• the same heading structure;
• a predictable opening or introduction;
• consistent styles for examples, activities, definitions, or key ideas;
• similar approaches to images and captions;
• consistent terminology; and
• a predictable way of ending or summarizing a chapter.

If you started with the Palomar Pressbooks Book Template, use its existing structure and design as a foundation. You can customize it for your project while maintaining enough consistency that students do not have to relearn how the resource works from chapter to chapter.

Use Pressbooks Features When They Add Value

Once your core content is in place, you can decide whether additional Pressbooks features would improve the resource.

Depending on the needs of your book, you might use features for:

• textboxes and callouts;
• images and media;
• footnotes or endnotes;
• tables;
• glossary terms;
• mathematical notation;
• interactive content; or
• additional information about the book and its contributors.

You do not need to use every available feature. Use features because they make the resource clearer, more useful, or more engaging for students, not simply because the platform makes them available.

If you want to learn how to use a particular Pressbooks feature, refer to the ATRC Getting Started with Pressbooks resources rather than trying to figure it out on your own.

Preview the Book as a Student

It is easy to spend so much time working in the Pressbooks editor that you stop seeing the resource the way a student will see it.

Periodically leave the editing environment and view the actual webbook.

Move through it the way a student might:

• start at the beginning and navigate between chapters;
• scan the table of contents;
• look at the page without editing controls;
• follow links;
• view images and media;
• look for sections that feel overly long or difficult to scan; and
• notice whether the organization and recurring design patterns make sense without explanation.

If you plan to make additional formats available to students, those formats will also need to be reviewed as you move toward publication.

Your Book Looks Finished. Is It Ready to Publish?

Not quite.

At this point, you may have a book that looks complete in Pressbooks. The chapters are organized, the content is formatted, and the resource may already feel like a finished textbook.

Before you publish and share it more broadly, there are two important stages remaining.

First, review accessibility. Accessibility should have been considered throughout development, but now you need to review the finished resource and address any remaining barriers.

Second, review the completed OER. Check its accuracy, completeness, organization, attribution, licensing, links, consistency, and overall quality. Bring in other people where their expertise can strengthen the resource.

Only after those steps will you be ready to publish and share the OER more broadly.

Where Would You Like to Go Next?