Open Education 2014

Partnerships are necessary to maintain, improve and broaden adoptions of OER in education. Yet, many open textbook authors consider these models both unsettling when they do not receive royalties and also contrary to the spirit of using open educational resources. How do we solve this dilemma? Join this panel as it shares models for authors, non profit organizations, and for profit corporate collaborations.


The Author Perspective:
Barbara Illowsky is co-author of the newly released Introductory Statistics by OpenStax College, the updated version of the "best seller? Collaborative Statistics in the Connexions collection. She will share how and why she and co-author Susan Dean continue to work with outside companies on developing partnerships, even when "they? earn money but the co-authors earn kudos. Barbara will also discuss the how these partnerships can drive forking of basal content to create high quality OER options.

The "For Profit" Perspective:
Mark Santee is the VP of Product and Marketing for WebAssign, a commercial online homework and assessment application that supports hundreds of textbooks from every major traditional textbook publisher. He will discuss how the support of OER fits into WebAssign's overall publisher partnership model and why OER continues to be a strategic imperative for the organization. Mark will also demonstrate how these types of partnerships can hasten positive disruption by fixing the broken economic model that currently exists in the market.

The "Non Profit" Perspective:
Daniel Williamson, Managing Director OpenStax College, now manages the day-to-day operations of OpenStax College using his extensive experience in academic e-publishing to guide content development, technology integration, and overall project coordination of OpenStax. Daniel shares OpenStax's sustainability goal's that will ensure the continuation of the program beyond grant funding. Daniel will also provide perspective on "open" when fees are involved.