• According to research done on the matter, 50% of institutions in the U.S. are using OER in at least one class.
• Unfortunately, this could be misleading, as a teacher could assign one OER article and be counted as using OER.
• Much of the outreach with OER has been with community colleges, especially, it seems, in California.
• Last year, the state of Washington opened their new Open Course Library that contained textbooks, syllabi, readings, activities and assessments for 42 community college courses.
• University of Massachusetts has spent $10,000 in the past year on developing courses that do not use traditional textbooks, but use OER, instead.

Many OERs are their own textbooks, so, unfortunately, learners usually cannot search for textbooks that match the textbooks that are assigned to them by teachers, for example. This would be fixed by teachers adopting the textbooks that are on these sites and teaching out of them.

Most of the sites researched have articles that have been reviewed, but sometimes the fact that anyone can make their own resource makes it hard to know which OERs are legitimate.

MIT Open Courseware (OCW)

Organizational Structure (Who does what and what does it cost)

• "How much does it costs to run OCW?"
• 3.5 million annual budget, 12 publishers, 2 intellectual prop, 5 admins & media comm etc ppl, 4 production staff
• Hours: 100 hours to complete 1 course, 5 hours of faculty time
• MIT puts content from a majority of their actual courses online, so that people who are not students can follow along and basically take the class alongside students.

Who’s using MIT OCW?

• Averages 1 million visitors a month
• +500,000 using the translated versions
• -42% of users are students
• -43% of users are self-learners

What all does this website provide?

• Contains almost all of MIT’s courses’ content (2150 courses total)
• Users can enter a topic into a search bar, and relevant articles, lecture notes, assignments, videos, and more pop up.
• Users can browse MIT courses by course number, department, or topic, and relevant courses will pop up.
• You can download everything to your computer, but it basically just links you to the website.
• Includes a syllabus.
• Online lectures
• Downloadable with iTunes U and Internet Archive
• List of required readings (textbook information that one would have to buy on Amazon and citations for the other required readings).
• Lecture notes
• PDFs that include PowerPoints or word documents with necessary vocab and concepts for the course.
• Assignments to complete (including reading responses and papers, activities and more.
• Study materials (include study guides and reviews).
• There are more widgets that can be added:
• Some had calendar, demonstrations, exams and quizzes that you can download and take.
• Offers courses in 8 different languages; there were a large number of courses offered in each language, too.
• Licensed under (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US)
• Can edit, shift things around, and add content.

University of Minnesota Open Textbook Library

Overview

• "Organization How To" to providing OET.
• This article reviews a $500-1000 stipend program that gets faculty to review and adopt OET in their classes.
• This website has many open textbooks that anyone that goes onto their website can access.
• The only people that need to register are professors looking to change content or customize a pre-existing open textbook.

Who’s using it?

Not many professors at University of Minnesota have adopted books yet. Some professors are in the process of reviewing the open textbooks to make sure they are legitimate. Other Big Ten universities have been wanting to get involved, too. This is a fairly new project, however.

What all does this provide?

• The College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota has collected 84 open textbooks that have already been used and are being used in classrooms across America.
• Visitors can choose one of ten University subjects and browse through the available books on each one.
• Visitors can search a book or subject name and relevant books will pop up.
• Depending on the book, there are online versions, pdfs, and versions downloadable to kindles and the like.
• Online: There are links to click on that will take you right to where you want to go in the book.
• PDF: Can save as pdf and get all the annotational features and go to specific parts of the textbook by clicking headings in the table of contents.
• All books also have a print option, usually for under $40.
• Instructors can edit and add their own content to the available books.
• Also licensed under the (CC BY-SA) license.
• Working on getting some of the books reviewed by faculty to make sure the books are legitimate and correct.

References

Textbook Alternative, Inside Higher Ed, May 10, 2012
U creates Open Academics textbook catalog to reduce student costs, Discover, University of Minnesota, April 23, 2012