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Press Room
Welcome to the College Open Textbooks Press Room!
College Open Textbooks (COT) is focused on driving awareness, adoptions and affordability of open textbooks to more than 2000 community and other two-year colleges. The organization thrives with funding from corporations and foundations, in-kind donations, revenues from affordable eReader and bound versions of textbooks, as well as margins on consulting.
COT is under the umbrella of the Open Doors Group. The ODG-COT Collaborative acts an advisory board on major strategy and spending decisions. The ODG-COT Collaborative is a collection of educational non-profit and for-profit 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, Eleven Learning, Flat World Knowledge, Florida Virtual Campus, Foothill-De Anza Community College District, Happy About, Inc., 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, OER Commons, Open Education Resources Center for California, Rice University Connexions, Silicon Valley Education Foundation, SoftChalk, Tacoma Community College, Textbook Media, Virtual Ability, and Words & Numbers.
Read the COT Annual Report for Mid-2011 to Mid-2012.
Media coverage of WOW award
Mountain View Voice: Nick Veronin's interview of Una Daly appeared in the Mountain View Voice Dec 3, 2010 on page 7.
It was reprinted in Palo Alto Online
The San Jose Mercury News and Sacramento Bee also reported on the award.
Join the Community
Reporters also can follow College Open Textbooks on Facebook, Ning and Twitter as well as listen to podcasts and read blog postings on our College Open Textbooks blog site.
Press Releases and Significant Blog Posts
Backgrounder
Educational Resources including textbooks are termed 'open' if their copyright holders have licensed them using a Creative Commons designation, a GNU free documentation license, a custom open license, or put them in the public domain. Typically copyrighters retain some rights while freely granting others.
Open Educational Resources (OER) including open textbooks can be found in many media including online text or offline text, photographs, illustrations, videos, sound recordings, assessments, games, and more. They can also be printed and even bound. It is the licensing that defines open resources, not the medium. Many digital resources are not open-licensed while many printed books are open-licensed. Digiital and open are not the same!
College Open Textbooks' generous supporters include:
- Bridgepoint Education and other consulting clients
- DynamicBooks
- MentorCloud
- ODG-COT Collaborative members who donate their time and expertise
- Sales of affordable eTextbooks and bound textbooks
- The Silicon Valley Education Foundation
- Volunteer copy editors
- Volunteer managers and other staff
- Volunteer mentors
- Volunteer peer reviewers
- Anonymous donors
Our past supporters include some of the above as well as:
- Accurate Learning Systems
- California Digital Marketplace
- Chalk Institute
- Dozens of advocate/trainers at college campuses
- FieldDay Solutions, Inc.
- Flat World Knowledge
- Foothill De Anza Community College District
- Happy About
- Macmillan Dynamic Books
- SoftChalk
- The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
- Workplace Learning Resources Center