University of Minnesota

The Open Education Network is a community representing over 1,600 colleges and universities dedicated to improving educational equity through open educational practices. With this grant, it will develop four pathways to help higher education institutions build and sustain their own open education programs and advance educational equity. These pathways focus on OER adoption, open pedagogy, OER revision and collection, and open textbook publishing. This work ensures that educators will understand how to take advantage of the flexibility of openly licensed resources and are equipped with the knowledge and tools to customize materials for different students. (Substrategy: Sustainable Systems)

Over the past two years, faculty advocates within the University of Minnesota have successfully worked with their peers to encourage the adoption of open textbooks. Project funding would allow the university’s Open Textbook Initiative, which aims to help faculty overcome barriers to adopting open textbooks, to expand to eight partner institutions. By engaging faculty to conduct peer reviews of open textbooks, this project raises awareness and helps improve OER quality markers, two factors necessary to increase OER’s mainstream adoption.

The Open Textbook Network is a community of over 1,300 colleges and universities working to advance open education. Its focus of the last few years on building a community — both in size and common understanding — has positioned it well to leverage its collective resources to more directly focus on addressing issues of inequity and exclusion in higher education. The network will accomplish this through working directly with higher education faculty to develop and disseminate open pedagogies and practices, and by working with state and system leaders to support and encourage the systematic implementation of these practices.