The path to faculty adoptions of open textbooks is complex. Faculty are often confronted with several common barriers. The Open Academics project is designed to address these barriers, improving the chances that faculty will successfully find and potentially adopt appropriate open textbooks.
This session will discuss how the Open Academics project has worked to overcome these barriers at the University of Minnesota, and how audience members can leverage two key resources developed by Open Academics to achieve similar success elsewhere: the Open Textbook Catalog and a toolkit for organizing campus-based open textbook review programs.
Barrier #1: Faculty don?t know that open textbooks are an option.
?Textbook companies have a sales force to promote and raise awareness of their textbooks. Open textbooks don?t have local sales people, so faculty often don?t know that open textbooks are an option. The Open Academics project proposes to empower staff on campus to help raise awareness of open options - to serve as the open ?sales force.? These local staff will be empowered with a toolkit of information and materials to help faculty find open options.
Barrier #2: Faculty don?t know where to find open textbooks.
?There are many sources of open textbooks, which can make it challenging for faculty to find open textbook options. The Open Academics textbook catalog (http://open.umn.edu) is a directory of over 135 open textbooks that span many disciplines. This single catalog gives faculty one place to go to find open textbook options for their students.
?Barrier #3: Faculty don?t know the quality of open textbooks.
?Faculty are often curious about the quality of open textbooks. The most trusted measure of quality for faculty is peer opinion. The Open Academics textbooks catalog provides a platform to collect faculty reviews of open textbooks, giving faculty a reliable start at gauging quality.
The goal of the Open Academics project is to provide campuses with the tools necessary to overcome the barriers keeping faculty from adopting open textbooks.
Nicole Allen is the Director of Open Education for SPARC. In this role, she leads SPARC’s work to advance openness and equity in education, which includes a robust state and federal policy program, a broad librarian community of practice, and a leadership program for open education professionals... Read More →
Dr. David Ernst is graduate faculty, Chief Information Officer, and Director of the Center for Open Education in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota. David is also the Executive Director of the Open Education Network, which works to improve... Read More →
