About this Guide
Welcome to the MarylandOnline Residential Program, and welcome to Pressbooks!
Pressbooks is a versatile, user-friendly digital publishing platform used by 500+ institutions and 10,000+ authors to share knowledge.
Educators rely on Pressbooks to create and adapt interactive learning materials, including digital books and learning modules, open educational resources (OER), professional learning curriculum, learner e-portfolios, and more.
How Pressbooks Supports the 2025 MOLLI Residential Program
For this year’s Residential Program, the MOLLI team is using Pressbooks as a platform for knowledge-sharing, reflection, and collaboration. As a Residential Program participant, you will have the opportunity to share insights, and co-develop and publish useful resources using Pressbooks. Together with your program cohort, you will collaborate on projects, document and share your work by contributing to the 2025 Residential Program Handbook.
This Quick Start Guide
The goal of this guide is to help you quickly dive in and feel comfortable creating, editing, and publishing information using Pressbooks. It outlines the basic, simple steps for using Pressbooks, including how to make your work accessible and interactive. It also points you to our well-documented Pressbooks User Guide if you want to go deeper into any dimension of using this tool.
Your User Role in Pressbooks
What you’re allowed to do in Pressbooks depends on your user role. For the purposes of the Residential Program, most participants have the role of Collaborator, and they are associated with particular chapter(s) in the Program Handbook. As a Collaborator, you may:
- Add and edit your own content in your assigned chapter(s), including text, images, videos, multimedia, etc.
- Add comments, suggestions, and questions to other people’s content using the Hypothesis social annotation tool.
Your work will be published after it has been previewed by a book administrator. In a Collaborator role, you will not have permission to add, delete or reorder chapters. You will not be able to edit other people’s content or publish content on your own.
However, if you choose to use Pressbooks for other projects, you may have broader permissions to create, edit, adapt, and remix digital content as you see fit.
This Quick Start Guide includes two major sections.
- “Add to an Existing Book” provides how-to information as a user with the Collaborator role to a Pressbooks book.
- “Create and Share Your Book” contains information about how to use Pressbooks when you have broader permissions as an author or editor to create, edit, and publish a whole new digital book.
