About the fund

The high cost of commercial print textbooks is a major concern for both students and their parents. The goal of the initiative is to encourage faculty experimentation and innovation to adopt and/or develop texts that provide cost savings for students while improving the quality of the learning process. Through the initiative, faculty can receive a stipend up to $5,000 to develop or adopt an alternate to a traditional textbook.

The funds can be given to either an individual faculty member or a team of faculty teaching multiple sections of the same course. A proposed project may include: 

• The use or adaptation of an existing open access textbook
• Combining library resources and/or high quality open educational resources (OER); and/or faculty-authored materials.  The project may also involve any media (articles, audio, video, web sites, etc.)

If you have questions about what material to use or would like to know if the material you would like to use would qualify please do not hesitate to contact us.

Two of the co-developers of the initiative, Drs. Andy Bennett and Brian Lindshield, have successfully developed and implemented open textbooks. Dr. Bennett's Elementary Differential Equations textbook features algorithms that create problem sets for students to practice. Dr. Lindshield's Kansas State University Human Nutrition (HN 400) Flexbook was a finalist for the 2012 Education-Portal.com People's Choice Award for the Most Open Resource.

More examples can be found on the Open Textbook Resources page.  Faculty who create their own open access textbooks are encouraged to deposit their textbook to New Prairie Press (NPP), the Libraries' publishing press.