University of Minnesota

Over the past two years, faculty advocates within the University of Minnesota have successfully worked with their peers to encourage the adoption of open textbooks. Project funding would allow the university’s Open Textbook Initiative, which aims to help faculty overcome barriers to adopting open textbooks, to expand to eight partner institutions. By engaging faculty to conduct peer reviews of open textbooks, this project raises awareness and helps improve OER quality markers, two factors necessary to increase OER’s mainstream adoption.

The Open Textbook Network is a community of over 1,300 colleges and universities working to advance open education. Its focus of the last few years on building a community — both in size and common understanding — has positioned it well to leverage its collective resources to more directly focus on addressing issues of inequity and exclusion in higher education. The network will accomplish this through working directly with higher education faculty to develop and disseminate open pedagogies and practices, and by working with state and system leaders to support and encourage the systematic implementation of these practices.