Session: An API for open educational resources

Date: Friday, July 13, 2018
Time: 4:15 - 5:00 pm (CDT) (UTC-05:00)
Location: Simon Hall 122
Format: General Lecture Session

Session description

In spring 2017, the team at Pressbooks began work on an Open Publishing Infrastructure project with funding from Ryerson University. Our goals were to build a full-content REST API for Pressbooks and use it to power a new feature for users and institutions creating Open Educational Resources: the ability to clone openly-licensed books for reuse and remixing. We shipped this feature in September 2017 and have continued to iterate and improve upon it in the months since.

This session will explore:

  • How we extended the WordPress REST API to provide endpoints for book contents and metadata and a catalogue of books in a given network
  • How we built a PHP class to handle cloning books or portions of books from one Pressbooks network to another
  • Challenges we encountered while working with the WordPress REST API
  • Opportunities and future goals for the Pressbooks REST API

Presenter

Ned Zimmerman

Headshot of Ned Zimmerman
Lead Developer, Pressbooks

Ned Zimmerman has been working on Pressbooks since 2011, and has been lead developer of the project since 2015. He's been working with WordPress as a hobbyist and as a freelancer since 2011. When he's not coding, he runs an artist residency on a remote island off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada. Ned is based in Halifax.

Sessions

  • General Lecture Session: An API for open educational resources

Session video