Thursday, November 07, 2013

Global Open Textbook Projects: Pathways to Adoption

Open Textbook bill
Open Textbook bill (Photo credit: opensourceway)
"Mary Burgess of the BC Open Textbook Project will discuss how she and her team are working to produce 40 Open Textbooks on a restricted budget and tight timeline. She will describe their work engaging faculty and student groups across the British Columbia Post Secondary System, efforts to make adoption and reuse easier for those groups, and how adoptions are being tracked.


They have seven speakers and three minutes each!
Producing 40 open textbooks in BC - they have done a lot of work on adoptions
4 workshops - on basic Open textoboks
Month long workshops - visited faculty - 15 meetings in departments and met with student groups and college administrators. Working with Libraries as well.
They created an advisory committee.
They have worked wiht communications to do pressreleases

Cable Green of Creative Commons will discuss how open policies, like those in British Columbia and California, are ensuring publicly funded resources are openly licensed. He will describe the global opportunity for governments and projects to collaborate to maximize the quality and quantity of OER.

David Harris, Editor in Chief, for OpenStax College will introduce the lessons learned from OpenStax College. OpenStax College has a rapidly growing adoption base of more than 175 institutions. David will discuss the strategies required for taking OER into the mainstream and the emerging interest in localized OER content.

Creating an ecosystem model - partnering with other groups to provide supplementary content.
Built an extensive database of faculty for communication and adoption
They go to tradeshows, conferences, etc.
Using social networks - faulty testimonials
Earned media - public relations through papers and magazines
Fear motivates but hope sells


Megan Beckett, Content Coordinator for Open Textbooks at Siyavula Education, will discuss their unique position as the South African government has printed the Siyavula textbooks for the whole country, thus jump starting the adoption of open textbooks in the K-12 sector. Megan will also discuss some ideas about engaging the community in the development of open textbooks which in turn feeds back into their adoption and widespread use.


Content creation in South Africa
The textbooks are collaboratively authored and backed by the government. 10 copies of their resources in SA. For some, this will be the first textbooks they will have ever seen. All the textbooks are mobile friendly and available online.Also available in print.
David Ernst, Chief Information Officer, College of Education and Human Development, and Executive Director of the Open Academics project at the University of Minnesota, will discuss common barriers to open textbook adoption by faculty and how the Open Academics project is working to help overcome those barriers.









Faculty often do not understand th cost of textbooks, the nature of the problem. They created engagement strategies - I need to contact him about these efforts. Created a repository.


Ethan Senack of the Student Public Interest Research Groups will discuss how students and other members of the campus community can drive OER adoption and advocacy through grassroots efforts.


Training student activists on campuses with the open textbook tool kit
Hold events to attract attention to the issue
Bring student testimonials to administrators

Connie Broughton of the Washington Open Course Library will discuss the project recently completed in which 81 open courses were created, including many open textbooks. She will detail their efforts to increase and track adoption during the creation of the resources and following the completion of that phase of the project."

Money from Gates and Legislature - hired faculty, instructional designers, and librarians. The outcomes were to produce course materials for $30 or less.  They spent $1.5 mil and saved $5.5 mil.
They started a two week online course for finding open resources. Running surveys on faculty barriers to adoption. All CC by.
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