The Open/Alternative Textbook Initiative encourages faculty experimentation and innovation in finding new, better and less costly ways to deliver learning materials to students. Please contact us if you are not sure what is available in your field or are not sure where to start. Our contact information is at the bottom of this page. 

Below is a list of some sources where you might be able to open educational resources that might be suitable for your application.

Open Textbook Libraries or Collections

Open Stax College - Through grant funding, Open Stax College is producing free open textbooks for high enrollment college courses using the Connexions platform. Currently available are: College Physics, Introduction to Sociology, Biology, Concepts of Biology, and Anatomy and Physiology.

The University of Minnesota Open Education Initiative - UM created a catalog of open textbooks and is providing $500-$1000 stipends for faculty members to review and adopt these resources.

The American Institute of Mathematic Open Textbook Initiative - Contains links to open textbooks that meet AIM’s evaluation criteria.

The Orange Grove- Florida’s digital repository, contains links to a variety of open textbooks.

Open Course Library - Textbooks, syllabi, assessments, in 81 high-enrollment college courses created by a Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges (SBCTC) grant.

College Open Textbooks Collaborative - A collection of twenty-nine education non-profit and for-profit organizations, affiliated with more than 200 colleges, is focused on driving awareness and adoptions of open textbooks to more than 2000 community and other two-year colleges.  This includes providing training for instructors adopting open resources, peer reviews of open textbooks, and mentoring online professional networks that support for authors opening their resources, and other services.

Wikibooks - A collection of open-content textbooks built on a Wikipedia like  platform.

BCcampus OpenEd - Find or adapt textbooks that are openly licensed for reuse in 40 subject areas.

Textbook Accessibility Resources

BC Open Textbook Accessbility Toolkit - The Accessibility Toolkit provides the needed resources for each content creator, instructional designer, educational technologist, librarian, administrator, and teaching assistant to create a truly open and accessible textbook -- one that is free and accessible for all students.

Open Textbooks Created by K-State Faculty

• Communicating in Everyday Chinese (Li Yang), Chinese 101 - 502

• The K-State First Guide to College Student Success: The Essentials for First-Year Students at Kansas State University (Tara Coleman, Gregory Eiselein, Kylie Kinley, Emily Lehning, Mandi McKinley, and Mariya Vaughan

• Principles of Biology (Robert Bear, David Rintoul, Bruce Snyder, Martha Smith-Caldas, Christopher Herren, Eva Horne) Biology 198

Open Educational Resources Repositories

Both of these repositories contain open textbooks along with a wealth of other open educational resources.

• Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT)

• Open Educational Resource (OER) Commons

Courses

"Adopting Open Textbooks" Peer-to-Peer University, 2015. (Not an active course, but content is archived.) Includes the following learning outcomes:

1. Find, evaluate, modify and adopt an open textbook
2. Build your network by finding and connecting with educators interested in open education and open textbook
3. Define and describe the following terms: open education, open educational resources (OER) and open textbooks
4. Explain why open education is important
5. Identify problems that open textbooks may address
6. Correctly identify Creative Commons licenses and use them appropriately in the context of open textbooks
7. Identify common challenges for faculty who want to use open textbooks and define strategies to help mitigate those challenges.

For more information or to discuss a potential fee application please contact: