Supporting Open Education with the Wind at Your Back: Lessons for OER Programs from the Open Textbook Toolkit

What does it take to move open education from idea to practice? In this session we led a discussion about what supports instructors need to engage with open education and how we can make adoption and adaptation easy and inviting. We set the stage with an overview of findings from our IMLS-funded research (LG-72-17-0051-17) on the needs and practices of psychology instructors for adopting or creating open textbooks and OER. We then shared some lessons on what faculty say they need and where they feel we can do better, as well as offered some insights from our research on student needs and desires in learning resources. Next, we opened a conversation about how transferable these lessons are and the unique needs of other academic communities. This paper describes the project and documents our discussion about these issues.