22. Integrating Pressbooks with Canvas

Piloting your book

Integrating your OER within an online classroom, or a Learning Management System (LMS), can be an effective way to keep students engaged in their digital coursework without distractions from the internet. Many schools within NMOER use Canvas, which has the ability to integrate Pressbooks OER materials directly within the virtual classroom, so students do not have to leave the LMS to read their course work. Institutions with a Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) integration,  allow students and teachers to open third-party tools within their LMS safely without having to use extra passwords or leave the LMS.

The directions below show faculty how to integrate Pressbooks’ OERs within their Canvas modules.

Step One: Go to modules

Within Canvas, you will locate the module that you would like to include your OER material. Once you identify the module in which you would like to insert your Pressbooks material, click the plus sign in the upper right hand corner.

Step Two: Choose your item

This dropdown menu allows you to add assignments, quizzes, and more to your module page. At the bottom of this dropdown menu,  you will want to choose “External Tool.” Pressbooks is an external tool that is integrated with Canvas.

Step Three: Select your content

In this area of Canvas, you will see all of the available integrated software programs you can embed in your course with an LTI integration. Scroll down until you see the Pressbooks Content Selector, and click on it.

Step Four: Choose your chapters

On this Canvas page, you will see a long list of all the books available on the NMOER Pressbooks platform. The bold  titles are the names of whole OER books, and the indented titles below that are titles of chapters. You will click on either the whole book or an individual chapter. If you click the whole book, it will insert each chapter individually into your module, and if there are a lot of chapters, that means your module will become very long. Consider only inserting the specific chapters you will cover in each module.

Step Five: Select your content

You will need to scroll to the bottom of the page and “Select Content” in order to add it to your module. The Select Content button can be very far down this list, but if you miss this step, the material won’t embed.

Step Six: Add your item

There is still one more step. The following box comes up directly after you select your content. You have to click “add item.” Once you do that, your book’s chapter will be integrated into your course module. Your students will now be able to read your Pressbooks’ OER chapters without leaving the LMS.

Privacy and Security Settings

If you are ready to pilot a book with your students before it is shared publicly, the privacy settings within the book will need to be changed. If you are an administrator on the book, you can do this yourself. If you are not an administrator, then you will need to request this change. You can email oer@unm.edu for help. But if you do have administrator privileges on the book, first thing you will need to do is navigate to Settings, shown in Figure 22.7, on the left hand side of your screen.

After you get to settings, there are a few options. It is important to do two things on this page. The Pressbooks directory has 70 million site visits annually, and as soon as you make your book available on the Pressbooks directory, it will begin to get traffic and you could possibly start to receive questions about your OER from people around the world. If your book isn’t ready to be viewed and potentially copied because it is in a beta form, exclude it from the Pressbooks Directory. Figure 22.8 shows you which buttons to press. Choose Public to allow your students to see the book in Canvas, but also choose to exclude your book from the Pressbooks directory until it is ready to go live to the entire world wide web.