Emerging Strategies for Open Textbooks: From Library to Network

Dave Ernst Sarah Cohen

@open_textbooks

What are the barriers that keep faculty from adopting open textbooks?

Barriers to Faculty Adoption• Faculty don’t understand the urgency of student financial stress,

and how it can impact students academically• Faculty aren’t aware that open textbooks are an option• Faculty don’t know what open textbooks are• Faculty confuse open textbooks with electronic textbooks• Faculty conflate free with low quality• Faculty don’t know where to find open textbooks• Faculty are skeptical of the quality of open textbooks• Faculty have limited time to engage in reviewing open textbooks

Educate

Engage

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39%Adoption rate of workshop attendees

(14% - 65%)

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1.0 - 1.5 1.5 - 2.0 2.0 - 2.5 2.5 - 3.0 3.0 - 3.5 3.5 - 4.0 4.0 - 4.5 4.5 - 5.00

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

0 05

1

8

41

6065

Ratings

Revi

ews

Faculty Reviews of Textbooks in the Open Textbook Libraryopen.umn.edu

Oregon Community

College Distance Learning

Association

Oregon Community

College Distance Learning

Association

20 partners

76 institutions

What are the barriers that keep faculty from adopting open textbooks?

How can we help other institutions build local sustainable open textbook

programs?

Membership Growth

• 10 new member institutions in the last three months.

• 3 systems requesting system-wide training.• New opportunities to:– Build relationships– Leverage expertise– Develop a community

OTN Summer Institute

Bring OTN institutions together to: 1. enhance open textbook program

development across OTN members, 2. envision the future of OTN with our

members, and 3. strengthen presentation capacity for future

open textbook workshops.

Attendees will:

• Explore and develop strategies to move forward their campus initiatives

• Participate in strategic planning for the OTN• “Hackathon” to tackle challenges• Certification from the Center for Open Education at the

Univ. of Minnesota on facilitating open textbook workshops.

The OTN hopes to:

• Deepen institutional commitment to data collection and reporting– Build a data set for member institutions– Preparing people to go back to their institutions for

that approval• Build a network of presenters and advocates to scale • Articulate network-based next steps through this input

group

Develop new strategies to scale

Open Textbook Research Fellows

• 5 faculty/year• 3 days together working with the OpenEd

Group to design research to deepen our understanding of the efficacy of open textbooks

Thank you.

Dave Ernst dernst@umn.edu@dernst

Sarah Cohensfcohen@umn.edu@thesheck

z.umn.edu/opencenter

@open_textbooks