Presented at the BCcampus Open Textbook Summit on May 28, 2015 by David Ernst and Sarah Cohen.

1. Emerging Strategies for Open
Textbooks: From Library to Network
Dave Ernst
Sarah Cohen
@open_textbooks

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

3. 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
EducateEngage

6. +
+

8. 39%
Adoption rate of workshop attendees
(14% - 65%)
+
+

9. 0 0
5
1
8
41
60
65
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
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 - 5.0
Reviews
Ratings
Faculty Reviews of Textbooks in the Open Textbook Library
open.umn.edu

10. Oregon
Community
College Distance
Learning
Association

11. Oregon
Community
College Distance
Learning
Association
20 partners
76 institutions

12. What are the barriers that keep faculty
from adopting open textbooks?
How can we help other institutions build
local sustainable open textbook
programs?

13. 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

14. 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.

15. 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.

16. 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

17. Develop new
strategies to scale

18. 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

19. Thank you.
Dave Ernst
dernst@umn.edu
@dernst
Sarah Cohen
sfcohen@umn.edu
@thesheck
z.umn.edu/opencenter
@open_textbooks