OER/Open Textbooks: LibreTexts Awarded $5 Million Federal OER Pilot Program Grant

UPDATE: Here’s the U.S. Dept. of Education Announcement re: LibreTexts Award
From LibreTexts:

The LibreText Project [based at UC Davis] is fortunate to accept a $5 million Open Textbooks Pilot Program award from the Department of Education funded by Congress in the 2018 Fiscal Year omnibus spending bill.
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The mission of the LibreTexts project is to unite students, faculty and scholars in a cooperative effort to develop an easy-to-use online platform for the construction, customization, and dissemination of open educational resources (OER), particularly for courses relevant to academic programs, to reduce the burdens of unreasonable textbook costs to our students and society.
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LibreTexts currently encompass twelve widely used college-level disciplines from chemistry to humanities with over 68,500 pages. Used across the nation as primary course textbooks and as supplemental learning resources, LibreTexts have already recorded more than 250 million pageviews with 650 years of confirmed student reading—an impressive track record on which the grant-funded project will build.

Our proposal includes a broad national coalition spanning more than a dozen states. In total 62 faculty were part of the proposed team, including those from the University of California, Davis, University of Michigan, the University of Kansas, DePauw University, the University of Minnesota Rochester, the College of Saint Benedict/Saint John’s University, Mendocino College, Monroe Community College, and South Tahoe Community College.
Other institutions directly involved in the project are the California State University system through its Office of the Chancellor, the University of Washington, the University of Arkansas Little Rock, Hope College, St. Mary’s College, Prince George’s Community College, and two community college districts in California: the Contra Costa Community College District and the Los Rios Community College District.

Read the Complete Announcement
See Also: LibreTexts Wins Inaugural Open Textbook Pilot Grant (via U.S. PIRG)
See Also: Single Project Earns Federal OER Pilot Grant (via IHE)
on a Related Note…
U.S. Congress Renews $5 Million Open Textbook Pilot For Second Year (September 26, 2018)

Filed under: Awards, Funding, News