UW Libraries Blog

August 8, 2024

UW Libraries in the Classroom: Co-Creating and Publishing Books in Class

UW Libraries

What is a knowledge family? How could architects redefine the #Hatch-Mark? What is the place of sports at a university?  These questions reflect some of the insights revealed in three new online books created by students, in partnership with UW Libraries, utilizing Pressbooks. In Spring 2024, Open Education Librarian, Lauren Ray, worked with faculty and instructors to introduce students to the Pressbooks platform, and worked with their classes to co-create and publish these unique Pressbooks: 

Knowledge Kapamilya 2024 –  by Gabbie Mangaser; Madison Calma; Charisse Vales; Delano Cordova; Sierra Paine; and Jay Lundgren. This book was created as a final project for the 2024 cohort of Knowledge Kapamilya, a knowledge family for Filipino/a/x American students at UW. The cohort met on Coast Salish lands at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, using cultural collections from the Philippines to make connections to their personal heritage.

2024 Innovation in the Construction Industry: Case studies by students in CM515: Virtual Construction Management, Spring 2024by Prof. Carrie Sturts Dossick’s CM515 Spring 2024 Class. This book provides a collection of case studies about how people adopt new technologies and change practices in design, construction, and operations of the built environment. This is the first open pedagogy project we (UW Libraries) have worked on with the College of Built Environments, as well as the first Pressbooks projects by graduate students in Construction Management.

Stories From The Place of Sports in The University, 3rd Editionby Students in Professor Jennifer Hoffman’s UW EDUC 200 course.  This book provides a collection of case studies about how people adopt new technologies and change practices in design, construction, and operations of the built environment. This is the first open pedagogy project we have worked on with the College of Built Environments, as well as the first Pressbooks projects by graduate students in Construction Management.

In this blog post we talk more with Lauren Ray and Gabbie Mangaser about these projects, the student experience and how others at UW can work with the Libraries to utilize Pressbooks in their courses.

What is Pressbooks?

Pressbooks is a publishing platform used to create open textbooks or other openly licensed online course materials. This is available for all current UW students, faculty and staff interested in publishing Open Educational Resources through the UW Libraries. The UW Libraries offers personal consultations and Pressbooks offers monthly training webinars. 

Origin stories: Tell us more about the history of these books and how they came about?

UW Libraries Open Education Librarian, Lauren Ray: What is particularly special about Knowledge Kapamilya 2024 is that the facilitator of the project, Gabbie Mangaser, Collections Assistant for Oceanic and Asian Arts and Cultures at the Burke Museum, was an undergraduate student in Rick Bonus’s UW AAS360 course in 2019, when we created the first UW student-authored Pressbook, Critical Filipinx American Histories and their Artifacts! She was inspired by her work in Prof Bonus’s class and wanted to bring open publishing to this important student-led learning community. I worked with our Copyright Librarian, Maryam Fakouri, who provided guidance for the students on cultural heritage, copyright and intellectual property, while I provided help with Pressbooks and the context of their book as an OER.  The students created the cover artwork and collaboratively decided on how they wanted the book to be structured, formatted and licensed.  

With 2024 Innovation in the Construction Industry, Professor Dossick learned about Pressbooks through an Open Pedagogy workshop I led last year through the Center for Teaching and Learning. She decided to revamp the class syllabus, having students research an innovation in the construction industry and develop case studies that can be built on in future quarters. The book includes 18 chapters dealing with Innovation, BIM (Building Information Modeling), Robotics, AR/VR/MR, Project Management and Sustainability with additional chapters to be added this summer. Students created the cover artwork, learned about image licensing and IP, and created a contributors section with biographical information. 

“I really enjoyed working with these students, who were very motivated to see their hard work made public in this collaborative open publication.” 

Stories From The Place of Sports in The University is the third in a series of student-authored books in Prof. Hoffman’s course, The Place of Sports In the University. It’s been incredibly rewarding for me to work so closely with Prof. Hoffman and her students over the years, and to continually improve how we scaffold in lessons on Creative Commons, open publishing and digital scholarship tools (not an easy feat in a class of 60 undergraduate students)! We (along with doctoral student Regena Pauketat) wrote about this work and the course in an article, published in Sports Innovation Journal last year.

“It has been incredibly rewarding for me to work so closely with Prof. Hoffman and her students over the years, and to continually improve how we integrate lessons on Creative Commons, open publishing and digital scholarship tools.”

 This year, we took a somewhat different approach, collaborating with UW Libraries Archivist John Bolcer, and Librarians Theresa Mudrock and Anne Davis, to incorporate materials from our digital collection that cover the history of students and sport at UW. During the in-class workshop, students were able to research historical photos from our digital collections, utilizing a class guide that included links to primary source material for the student chapters. I look forward to continuing to work with this class and expanding its connection to UW Libraries Special Collections.

How did the Libraries support your class?  What do you think students learned from the experience?

Gabbie Mangaser: The Library team helped us to think about all things to consider when publishing something publicly, and it was a great learning experience regarding copyright. I think it also helped them become more engaged in the course material and topics, since not only are they working toward a final product, but it is accessible globally—their peers, friends, family, future employers even, can view and refer to this project.​ 

Would you recommend a UW Libraries/Pressbooks collab to others? 

Gabbie Mangaser: I’ve recommended Pressbooks and working with UW Libraries to so many people since we began working on it. Pressbooks is a great and easy tool to provide accessible content and it’s a wonderful opportunity for students to learn about what goes into publishing. 

“I will continue recommending it to folks that are looking for alternative platforms to get their work, their research, and their projects published. It’s such a unique way to disseminate information, which I think a lot of different fields are aiming for. It is easy to use, and working with Libraries is always great!”

Community Response

Gabbie Mangaser:  The feedback on the book has been incredible (and it helps that we have such creative and engaged students!). For kapamilya, this is the first year we’ve been able to host a group for Filipino/a/x students focused on Philippine-American history at the Burke. My hope is that kapamilya can continue for years to come, and it certainly helps that now, anyone can look up “Knowledge Kapamilya” and the first search result they see is the ebook!

Learn More

Current Huskies who are interested in learning more about how to utilize this resource can take advantage of  monthly Pressbooks trainings and UW Libraries  consultations with Open Education Librarian, Lauren Ray.  You can find this book and other UW works in our Pressbooks Featured Titles catalog as well as the Pressbooks Directory.

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