Who are we?

The Community College Open Textbooks Collaborative is funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. This collection of sixteen educational non-profit and for-profit organizations, affiliated with more than 200 colleges, is focused on driving awareness and adoptions of open textbooks to more than 2000 community and other two-year colleges. This includes providing training for instructors adopting open resources, peer reviews of open textbooks, and mentoring online professional networks that support for authors opening their resources, and other services.

The initiatives and leadership of College Open Textbooks are driven by member organizations including Benetech Bookshare, California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, Carnegie Mellon University, Community College for Open Educational Resources, Foothill De Anza Community College District, Flat World Knowledge, Florida Distance Learning Consortium, Happy About, Inc., Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), League of Innovation, Macmillan Dynamic Books, MERLOT, Open Education Resources Center for California, Rice University Connexions, Textbook Media, Virtual Ability, and Words & Numbers.

The formation of the College Open Textbooks coincides with the growing international interest in open educational resources and the need to move to open digital textbooks as a way to help financially distressed states such as California reduce the cost of public education.

The focus of these efforts could save students millions of dollars by increasing the number of open high-quality textbooks available online as alternatives to expensive printed textbooks sold by publishers.

Key highlights of the initiative include:

• A campaign to raise the awareness about open textbooks among community college instructors, students and authors as well as to state legislators.
• Increasing the role of advocacy by providing online and peer communities that will provide Train the Trainer programs and a repository of reusable training and marketing materials for them to use in their roles as evangelists and advocates at their colleges.
• Increase the use of open textbook adoptions in key disciplines such as math.
• Create an easy-to-use central repository for toolsets that can be shared amongst the peer communities and initiatives created to promote and support open textbook adoption.

College Open Textbooks has peer-reviewed more than 100 open textbooks for use in community college courses and identified more than 550: College Open Textbooks has already peer-reviewed several new open textbooks for use in community college courses and identified more than 250 others for consideration. Open textbooks are freely available for use without restriction and can be downloaded or printed from web sites and repositories.

 The College Open Textbooks program is led by Jacky Hood, Director; Una Daly, Associate Director; Judy Baker, Administrative Director, Monica Sain, Administrative/Web Assistant, and Barbara Illowsky, Director Emeritus. Other key individuals are Alice Krueger, Bill Buxton, Clare Middleton-Detzner, Jim Huether, Kathi Fletcher, Micheline Isaac, Liz Yata, Mitchell Levy, Randy Fisher, and Sharyn Fitzpatrick.

To join the Ning Communities supported by this initiative, go to: http://collegeopentextbooks.ning.com/ and  http://opentextbookadvocatetrainers.ning.com/