Open Education 2015

During our three years of experience with open textbooks at the University of Minnesota, we discovered several reasons why faculty don't adopt open textbooks. While the barriers might appear to be small, they are significant enough to stop faculty members from making the change. These barriers include:

* Faculty don't fully understand how financial stress impacts students academically.

* Faculty aren't aware that open textbooks are an option.

* Faculty don't know what open textbooks are or confuse them with electronic textbooks.

* Faculty don't know where to find open textbooks.

* Faculty are skeptical of the quality of open textbooks.

With the support of the Hewlett Foundation and the University of Minnesota Libraries, we were able to develop and deploy solutions and strategies to help faculty overcome these barriers. The Open Textbook Library, now hosting upwards of 175 complete open textbook titles, has built these titles' credibility and increased faculty exposure to open textbooks by incentivizing textbook reviews by faculty from institutions across the country.

Libraries have been at the core of our outreach and are our most integral partners in reaching faculty and building capacity on campuses for open textbooks. At the invitation of our partner libraries, we've visited dozens of schools to seed and support their open education programs. As a result, our partner institutions' data shows that nearly 40% of their faculty attendees adopt an open textbook. This small pilot group of faculty has saved students nearly $410,000 in textbook costs in less than three years. It took outreach, education, conversations, and strategies to engage faculty with the textbooks. And it works.

Today, libraries are developing programming to support OER and open textbooks at a dizzying rate. While workshops have shown to be successful, workshops alone are not enough. What is the next step for the Open Textbook Initiative and what can our growing community of faculty and libraries who visit the Open Textbook Library expect in the coming months? Enter the Open Textbook Network.

The Open Textbook Network (OTN) is a consortium of institutions working to:

* help faculty overcome barriers to adoption of open textbooks

* increase institutional capacity to support faculty adoption and use of open textbooks

* collaboratively develop new understandings and best practices of open textbook adoption and use.

This presentation will introduce attendees to the Open Textbook Network and present a vision for its future. Librarians from the OTN schools in attendance at OpenEd15 will share stories from their institutions of how open textbook programming supported their program development. The panel will also discuss the benefit a network-approach to open education has made on their campuses. Join us to hear these perspectives on the value of libraries working together to increase awareness and adoptions of open textbooks, demonstrate impact, and ultimately advance learning.