Name: Beyond the PDF: Finding and Remixing Living OER with the Pressbooks Directory
Start: 2026-10-07T17:30:00-0400
End: 2026-10-07T18:00:00-0400

All sessions are available online except round tables, special activities, and workshops.

Beyond the PDF: Finding and Remixing Living OER with the Pressbooks Directory

Wednesday October 7, 2026 5:30pm - 6:00pm EDT

5 DR3

ID: 31580

Educators around the world are hungry for open educational resources, but too often what they find are static PDFs locked behind clunky repositories, difficult to discover and even harder to adapt. The Pressbooks Directory represents a fundamentally different kind of OER repository: a free, open, and searchable collection of over 8,500 open access books, built not just to be read, but to be remixed, localized, and made your own.This hands-on session will introduce participants to the Pressbooks Directory as a discovery and adaptation platform that goes well beyond traditional static repositories to offer rich, interactive, and genuinely reusable content. Unlike PDF-based repositories that can feel like a dead end once downloaded, the Pressbooks Directory surfaces books that are alive: structured into chapters, embedded with H5P interactive activities, and filterable by license, subject area, interactivity level, and contributing institution. Whether you're an instructor building a course in sociology, a librarian curating resources for an allied health program, or an instructional designer looking to scaffold learning in a second language context, the Directory gives you the tools to find what you need. Critically for a global audience, the Directory empowers localization. Participants will see examples of how educators have adapted content for specific national contexts, and other instances of tailoring resources to their learners. This session directly addresses one of the most persistent barriers in open education: discoverability and reusability. Where many national and institutional repositories remain siloed, metadata-poor, and technically inaccessible to non-specialists, the Pressbooks Directory offers a community-powered alternative spanning hundreds of institutions worldwide. And with new texts being added every day, the collection grows continuously — a living ecosystem rather than a static archive.Participants will leave this session knowing how to search and filter the Directory to find high-quality, openly licensed content; how to evaluate books for adaptability based on license type, interactivity, and structure; and how to begin remixing that content immediately using Pressbooks' built-in tools. Pressbooks’ built in cloning tool makes it incredibly easy for educators to adapt content to fit their needs.In a landscape where digital infrastructure remains fragmented and individual educators often carry the weight of OER adoption with limited institutional support, the Directory lowers the barrier to meaningful adaptation — not just downloading, but genuinely remixing content to fit local languages, curricula, and contexts.No prior experience with Pressbooks is required. Whether you are brand new to OER or a seasoned open practitioner looking to discover a powerful new repository, this session offers practical, immediately applicable skills for finding and building with open content at scale.

Speakers

John McLeod

Sales Team Lead, Pressbooks

John McLeod, Sales Team Lead, brings over four decades of experience in higher education. From his early days supporting students at the University of Alberta Bookstore to his current role guiding institutions through the evaluation and adoption of Pressbooks, John plays a vital role... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 5:30pm - 6:00pm EDT
5 DR3 MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality Online
Track (Re)Inventing our Shared Global Vision Together

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OEGlobal 2026

John McLeod

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OEGlobal 2026

John McLeod

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