Driving Awareness and Adoption
Saylor Foundation to Launch Multi-Million Dollar Open Textbook Challenge!
Writing about the rising costs of textbooks here would be a classic case of preaching to the choir. So I will not waste time rehashing what you all know and will instead jump right to what we hope will be a valuable contribution to the efforts of this site and the OER community to provide cost-free textbook alternatives to students: the Saylor Open Textbook Challenge.
The challenge aims to license open texts for over 200 courses currently residing on Saylor.org used in twelve of the most popular college majors enrolled in by U.S. students. Before we delve into some details of the Challenge, let me give you some background on our Foundation.
Our Mission:
The Saylor Foundation is a 501(c) (3) nonprofit organization working to drive the cost of higher education to zero. Working with over 150+ credentialed professors and peer-reviewers from higher-education institutions, we are compiling open-licensed course content styled after a traditional academic program.
In deciding which courses to offer, Saylor first devoted resources to develop courses that would fit under traditional college majors in popular, high-enrollment areas of study. We then engaged professor consultants to build course blueprints to fill out the majors. These courses are designed to route a student through the material he or she would need to know in order to earn credit from an accredited institution in the U.S.
The Saylor OER Approach:
We decided that we could best make a unique contribution to the OER movement by developing a structured content aggregation and curation process, by which our professor consultants seek, vet, frame, and—where appropriate—add to existing resources in order to yield complete courses, hosted on a central site and tied to user outcomes, assessments, and predefined learning taxonomies. Each course is also peer reviewed for further fine tuning.
Importantly, in addition to utilizing OER materials, we decided to include and link to copyrighted materials in our content aggregation process. Through our Permissions Initiative, many copyright holders are allowing us to host their materials on the site within the relevant course context. When permission to host is NOT granted (and when OERs do not exist), we work to paper over the gaps in each course and/or replace the linked resources by stimulating the development of original content and the Creative Commons re-licensing of complete and newly open texts.
Back to the Open Text Book Challenge:
To spur authors to openly license their work, the Saylor Foundation will offer a $20,000 award for submitted textbooks accepted for use in our course materials after a round of peer reviews. To be eligible for the award, the author(s) must agree to license the text under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY) license. We plan to formally launch the Challenge just after Labor Day so please visit our site at that time and keep your eyes out for more information. If you have questions or suggestions, please comment below – we would love to hear your thoughts!
The Open Textbook Challenge is fantastic! I know faculty who have developed open textbooks but lack the skills to move them into some of the more complicated repositories. We need to continue to make it easier to share.
I love the Saylor OER approach — the permissions initiative as well as the “fill-in-the-gaps” approach to open content creation. Why build it when you can use an existing, high quality OER?
I think we also need a place where teachers and learners can communicate needs. A place to request content and identify the gaps we find as we work with OER. Does something like this already exist? As a very basic first attempt, I created the OER matrix using Google Spreadsheets: http://bit.ly/oer-matrix.
Thanks for kind words Tom! And, great idea on creating a place where teachers and learners can communicate needs. We’re poised to publish our own “Content Matrix” to identify OER resources and needs for the current Saylor courses. Maybe we can work together to broaden our approach and host a larger matrix and forum?
Great challenge! I hope lots of faculty authors accept the challenge.
Thanks Barbara, feel free to share the Challenge with your colleagues and De Anza and beyond!
This is absolutely fantastic!!! I think getting students involved is the key to making this project a success. Turning open textbook creation into a sort of competition, where students and professors from different schools can form teams and both collaborate and compete against each other in real time is a marvelous idea. It would also make a great lesson plan for professors looking to do something fun and exciting with their students.
Great idea! Would be very interested to learn more details on how that could work.
It’s great to see more funding and coordination going on around open textbooks. I know that you’re still in the midst of sorting out the details of the Challenge and it’s focus is around popular US college courses but will it be open to non-US writers?
I’m wondering if it’s something that some of academics who have been involved in the UKOER programmes might want to take a look at but I don’t want to promote it to them if they aren’t eligible!
@John Robertson We’re double checking the US nonprofit rules and will get back to you on whether it is open to non-US writers. Good idea on UKOER so let me check it out and comment back here. thanks!
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@Jeff Davidson have you been able to confirm the rules? (there’s an end of programme meeting for this phase of UKOER on the 14th and it would be a good opportunity to mention the Open Textbook Challenge if internationals are eligible).
Hi John – Yes, non-U.S. residents are eligible to participate in the Textbook Challenge! All the criteria will be posted at http:www.saylor.org/otc – it would be great if you can mention it at the UKOER meeting!
best,
Jeff