Upcoming Webinar: How to Start Using OpenStax in Your College Course

OpenStax is a well established educational initiative out of Rice University that hosts a library of free digital textbooks. Their books are known for being peer-reviewed and excellent quality. Each textbook comes with its own instructor and student resources like test banks and lecture slides. OpenStax offers a collection of about 70 books including a bestselling Organic Chemistry textbook that the author decided to openly license rather than continue producing with their regular publisher. Recently Rice’s OpenStax received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for $90 million dollars to develop SafeInsights, a hub for inclusive learning and education research.

OpenStax is hosting a webinar tomorrow for faculty who are interested in learning more about OpenStax and potentially using open textbooks in their courses. The webinar will cover:

  • The OpenStax mission
  • What open educational resources (OER) are (hint: OpenStax is an example of OER!)
  • How to access OpenStax textbooks in a variety of formats (including online, PDF, and print)
  • How to access your book’s free instructor resources (e.g., LMS integration, test banks, and lab manuals)
  • How to find education technology — like online homework, courseware, and AI tools — to use alongside your book
  • How OpenStax textbooks are made and the 10 titles they have recently added

Register for the webinar here

If you cannot attend the webinar at Noon EST tomorrow, a recording will be emailed to all registrants.

Photo by Maran Wilson licensed under CC BY 2.0

Virtual Panel to Showcase the OER Work of UMassD Faculty

Open Education Week is March 4th – 8th, and one excellent way to celebrate is by attending this virtual panel. This is an opportunity for faculty to learn about OER Commons, a repository for Open Educational Materials (OER) and 3 exciting textbook projects at UMass Dartmouth. Open Educational Materials are teaching and learning tools such as textbooks, tests/quizzes, and classroom activities that are available free of charge. At UMass Dartmouth we have an OER Creators program through which 3 open textbooks were created in 2023. The textbook projects are E-Commerce and E-Business by Shouhong Wang, A Guide to Analyzing Arguments in an Academic Setting by Jackie O’Dell, Joshua Botvin, and Yuan Zhang, and Women’s & Gender Studies by Catherine Gardner. Each author will give an overview of the book they created. This panel will also include a demo of OER Commons by Repository Coordinator Rachel Oleaga. We welcome faculty who are curious about OER, open publishing, digital texbooks, open repositories, or who are just interested in the topics covered by these free textbooks. Register here: https://schedule.lib.umassd.edu/event/12057953?hs=a