An API for open educational resources

A presentation at WPCampus 2018 in in St. Louis, MO, USA by Ned Zimmerman

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

Resources

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