Welcome to
College Open Textbooks!

January 2012 Featured Open Textbook: SmartHistory, an award-winning Art History online textbook by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker. VIsit our SmartHistory web page.  From there you can reach the textbook. Read the Peer Review by Professor Kate Jordahl. Join the Art History Community and attend the Art History Meeting on January 20.

Funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, College Open Textbooks is a collection of colleges, governmental agencies, education non-profits, and other education-related organizations that are focused on the mission of driving the awareness and advocacy for open textbooks. This includes providing training for instructors adopting open resources, peer reviews of open textbooks, and mentoring online professional networks that provide support to authors who open their resources. Through our community outreach, we have found that open textbooks should be:

• easy to use, get and pass around,

• editable so instructors can customize content,

• cross-platform compatible,

• printable,

• and accessible so they work with adaptive technology.
  

That's just the short list.

Help us shape and continue to define what open textbooks turn out to be. Your voice will help create open textbook standards and guide development. We really need your help gathering information about open textbook usage! Please enter your information in the first blank row of this Google doc about textbooks (commercial or open) that you are using or plan to use. You may enter the information anonymously if you prefer but please remember your row number. Also, please ask all the people who attend your workshop to enter data in this form.

For organizations and community colleges interested in joining - Please contact us.

For individuals - please join the College Open Textbooks Professional Network and participate in the conversation and development of open textbooks that benefit all college students.