Pilot program Design

The Office of the State Board of Education (OSBE) partnered with the Rebus Community—a non-profit organization that develops technologies and communities to promote open publishing—to enroll faculty in their new Textbook Success Program. Buoyed by a 12-session online course, faculty fellows received tailored, hands-on, professional learning experiences in the following digital publishing topics:

• Defining project scope and team management

• Marketing, communications, and recruiting contributors

• Accessibility and inclusive design

• Content creation and authorship

• Editing and peer review

• Formatting and publication prep

• Post-release considerations (e.g., adoptions, improvements, maintenance, etc.)

Rebus programming and support equipped faculty fellows with a keen understanding of what it would take to publish and maintain open course materials in collaboration with others. Beyond the direct support provided by Rebus, additional resources from OSBE staff, the Open Textbook Network, and other OER champions in Idaho helped the 12 fellows review, compile, write, revise, publish, and test open course materials to meet their pedagogical needs.

Incentives

Beyond valuable training from open education experts, each OPAL fellow received the following:

• A $2,500 travel stipend to attend at least one event related to open education
• The opportunity to peer review at least one discipline-relevant open textbook
• Early/extended access to new tools and services to improve OER creation and sharing
• Research support from OSBE for faculty who wish to evaluate the efficacy of their OER use
• Promotion of fellows as inter/state leaders who are well versed in open education
• A letter of recognized service from the OSBE Executive Director
• Additional recognition from institution and state education leaders
• And more!

A full report of outcomes for the cohort is currently in development.

Milestones