4.15 Pressbooks FAQs

A: In the Pressbook request form, you can add all of the courses in which you plan to use the OER, separated by a comma.

A: Styles are built-in word formats in a text editor. For example, in Microsoft Word some styles include Heading 1, Heading 2, and Body text. These aid in screen reader navigation and graphic organization of text.

In Pressbooks, the styles (and fonts) are embedded within the Theme you choose. Each theme includes Paragraph (similar to Body font in Word), Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, etc. By default, the title of the chapter (which appears in the red box at the top of the chapter in Edit mode) will appear in the Table of Contents and is a Heading 1 style.

Ideally, you want to set your headings in a hierarchical manner (Chapter title is Heading 1, Major section titles of the page are Heading 2, subsections of each section are Heading 3, etc.). This supports screen reader accessibility.

A: You might check your Spam folder of your email. If you cannot find the email from Nataly, please reach out, and we will ensure you get access.

A: The OER Instructional Designer (Theresa) is always here to help you with all the technology and instructional design support for your OER. She can offer training on the platforms and technologies, mock-up examples of technology uses, and troubleshoot issues you run into. She can also offer guidance for best practices for making your OER accessible, instructionally sound, and interactive. However, the actual content creation belongs to each faculty team, and the stipend offered through the grant is in part to cover the time and effort involved in the work of creating an OER.

Suggestion: It’s always ok to set up one-on-one trainings for individuals and teams to ask if Theresa has time to mock-up something or streamline a process.

Discuss with your team if the workload can be organized so that those who would prefer to work more in one area of OER development (formatting the Pressbook, writing content, creating videos, uploading images, etc.) can hand other areas of OER development to others on the team.

Consider offering some of the manual work (copy/pasting/formatting to student workers for pay and/or as co-creators and co-authors of the OER.

A: Not necessarily. Both Word and Google docs can include formatting that will not copy/paste neatly into Pressbooks. Word docs can be imported/uploaded directly into Pressbooks, but Google docs cannot. However, you can copy/paste from either.

Suggestion: A best practice for bringing in text-based content is to select all of the content in the Word or Google doc and remove the formatting. This will get rid of any formatting in the html (backside) of the document that might get messy once brought into Pressbooks. Once pasted into Pressbooks, the formatting (headings, tables, etc.) can be added using Pressbooks’ text editor.

A: This has to do with the role of “Editor” rather than “Administrator”. Once your Pressbook for your OER has been created, Nataly will add each team member to the Pressbook and give them the “Administrator” role. This will allow you to see and edit the Appearance of your Pressbook.

View the different roles and their abilities 

A: Yes, the color schemes and other Themes or Theme Options can be changed at any time. Changing these should not alter your content.

Read more about Appearance – Pressbooks User Guide

A: You can have more than one administrator in a Pressbook. As a team, you can decide the role you wish each member and/or other collaborators to have.

View the different roles and their abilities

A: You can change what is being referred to by default as “Parts” and “Chapters” for your students. Keep in mind, this will only show to your students once the Pressbook is published. While you are building your Pressbook, you will still see “Parts” and “Chapters”. View the video below for steps on how to change the names.

For more information, see the Pressbooks User Guide under Global Options < Parts and Chapter Labels.

A. More than one person can edit within a Pressbook at a time. However, within a chapter, only one person can edit at a time. If you try to edit a chapter in which another person is currently editing, you will see the message “[Team member’s name] is currently editing this chapter. Do you wish to take over?” If you choose to take over, the other person’s work may be lost.

Suggestion: To mitigate the risk of losing your work, you can create your text on a Word document or Google doc saved to your desktop or team’s Google folder. Pro tip from one team: type your content in a Google doc and link the Google doc into your team’s Table of Contents or OER Content and Assessment map in your Deliverables spreadsheet.

A: Pressbooks is supposed to autosave every 60 seconds. However, it is always a good practice to save your page often. The red Save button is located at the bottom of the page. You can also see all of the different saved and autosaved versions in a list at the bottom of the page and can choose to revert to one of those at any time. If you try to navigate away from a page without saving, Pressbooks will pop up a message asking you if you want to leave without saving.

A:  While both support accessibility for users, typically the Alt Text is a very brief description that describes the purpose of the image while the image description deeply describes (paints a picture of) the image for blind/low vision folks.

More on the difference between alt text and image description

Suggestion: Arizona State University has a great AI tool that can help you and your team immediately create Alt text, image descriptions, and captions for your images. Simply upload the image and select Create Image Details. Once the AI generates your Alt text, image descriptions, and captions, you will (as will all AI output) want to check if for accuracy. Then, you can simply copy/paste each into the metadata areas of the images you plan to use in your Pressbooks

More on adding images to your Pressbook

A: The title of an image would be the title the creator gave to it (it is the “T” in the TASL which you will want to gather for any image you plan to use in your OER. Sometimes the author did not give its creation a name, and the name is just the name of the file (Example: mydog.jpg). If you created the image, you can give it a title yourself and choose a CC license if you’d like.

Suggestion: You can add a figure number to your caption. You could add another column in your Images and Figures spreadsheet to keep a primary list of images and associated numbering that aligns with your table of contents.

A: You can make QR codes with H5P. Since H5P is built into your Pressbook, and you’ll likely want to keep all of this in one place, I would recommend using H5P to create your QR code. This will also allow you to maintain/sustain the QR code link. In H5P, they are called KewAr. Once you create it in your H5P Library, you can place it on any page of your Pressbook as an H5P. Alternatively, you can also take a screenshot of it and bring in the image in your Media library. You can also print it off and use it digitally wherever you want, either as a screenshot image or an H5P.

To create a KewAr H5P, you’ll need to give it a Title. You can add optional Introductory Text, if you like, to guide users as to its purpose.

Next, you’ll choose the type of content to which the QR code will be tied from the drop down menu. As you can see from the image above, KewAr allows you to tie it to many different types of content. In the above example, I chose URL, as this QR code will be tied to the OERFSJ Faculty Handbook.

For whichever content you choose, you’ll be given a field to place information. For this example, I pasted in the URL to the OERFSJ Faculty Handbook.

Finally, you can alter the Behavioral Settings, if you like, for things like the color, size, and alignment of the QR code.

Note: You can view and play around with the above example in the H5P Content Library of the OERFSJ Pressbook Sandbox.

A: Yes, you can set anchors on a page in Pressbooks to enable your viewers to jump to or from a particular place on the page or to any other spot in your Pressbook. The Pressbook User Guide offers guidance for setting up Internal Hyperlinks (under Create Custom Internal Links Using Anchors).

A: We created a short video showing how to alter one piece of html in your Text editor to fix this:

More on Formatting Ordered Lists from the Pressbooks User Guide

A: We created a short video showing two ways to add space between lines of text in your Pressbook page:

A: Yes, with a few changes to the html in the Text editor, you can alter the way a list and its subpoints appear in your page. The Pressbooks User Guide offers guidance on formatting ordered lists.

A: Pressbooks enables us to easily embed some common elements that require an iframe:

• • • • PhET Interactive Simulations
      • knight lab Timeline
      • Brightcove
      • Google Forms
      • Google Maps

Typically, you could add the embed code to the Text (HTML) editor (the tab next to Visual on the top right of your editing screen).
If you want to embed interactive elements but notice the provided embed code is not working, we suggest using H5P Iframe Embedder. Within Pressbooks, select H5P Content from the navigation menu on the left. Select Add New at the top of the H5P Library. Then, find and select the Iframe Embedder type. There you can add the URL for your interactive figure and the display dimensions. The only restriction: the max width must be 720 px or less. The figure below has a width of 670 px with a max width of 720 px and a height of 525 px.

This is known as a Two-Level Table of Contents, and it is a two-step process. View the video for step-by-step guidance.

For more information, see the Pressbooks User Guide under Global Options < Two-Level TOC.

A: Yes, using a little html, you can add these show/hide collapsable boxes to your page. This show/hide feature is a native HTML5 element called <details>, and it offers a simple, powerful way to make expanding text boxes in your Pressbooks web book.

The details element is very simple and starts and ends with the standard HTML tags: <details> and </details>. Whatever you type within the <summary>will be used as the label for the show/hide box. Here’s some sample code for a very minimal show/hide disclosure widget:

Want to make these accordions stand out a bit more?

Consider adding a Alex’s Accordion CSS to your Pressbook. If you decide to change the font or background color in the CSS, use the color contrast tool to choose and adjust colors to ensure they meet accessibility requirements.

View the video to see how to add the Alex’s Accordion to your Pressbook. The CSS code is below the video.

Alex’s Accordion CSS

/* Alex’s Accordion */

details > summary {

padding: 6px 10px;

font-size: 1em;

text-indent: 0.5em;

background-color: #000;

color: #fff;

border: none;

cursor: pointer;

margin-bottom: 2px;

border-radius: 20px 20px 20px 20px;

}

details[open] > summary {

background-color: #000;

color: #fff;

}

.collapsed {

border-radius: 0 0 10px 10px;

background-color: #e8eff4;

padding: 10px 10px;

margin-bottom: 10px;

border-radius: 15px 15px 20px 20px;

}

/* # The Sliding Summary # */

@keyframes details-show {

from {

opacity: 0;

transform: var(–details-translate, translateY(-0.5em));

}

}

details[open] > *:not(summary) {

animation: details-show 750ms ease-in-out;

}

/* End of Accordion */