Who are we?

The College Open Textbooks Collaborative, a collection of twenty-nine 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 AcademicPub, Benetech Bookshare, Bridgepoint Education, Bronx Community College, California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, Carnegie Mellon University, Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, Flat World Knowledge, Florida Virtual Campus, Foothill-De Anza Community College District, Houston Community College, Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), League for Innovation in the Community College, Link-Systems International, Macmillan DynamicBooks, MathScore, MentorCloud, MERLOT, Open Assembly, Open Education Resources Center for California, OER Commons, Rice University Connexions, Silicon Valley Education Foundation, SoftChalk, Tacoma Community College, Textbook Media, THiNKaha, 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 Mitchell Levy, Executive Director; Jacky Hood, Jim Huether, and Charles Key, Directors; and Glenda Clark, Keith Dick, Kathy Hooper, Mike Pouraryan, Dolores Priegnitz, Rekha Raman, and Marguerita Sasser, Senior Managers. Other current staff members are Bill Buxton, Jim Hood, Yoram Rubin, Peggy Ruse, Bob Sawyer, Melody Sepehri, Deepa Sinha, Lynda Vaughan, and Melanie Weil. Past contributors include Judy Baker, Una Daly, Randy Fisher, Sharyn Fitzpatrick, Kathi Fletcher, Marie Highby, Barbara Illowsky, Micheline Isaac, Kalin Khemka, Alice Krueger, Clare Middleton-Detzner, Monica Sain, Liz Tadman, and Liz Yata.

To join the Ning Communities supported by this initiative, go to: http://collegeopentextbooks.ning.com/ and http://project-management-on-tap.ning.com/