Penn State University has joined over 350 universities in becoming a member of the Open Textbook Network (OTN). OTN maintains the Open Textbook Library that provides students access to free textbooks.

 

According to The Huffington Post, college textbook prices have increased by 812 percent in 30 years, a rate that is higher than the increase in tuition, health care costs, housing prices, and inflation. Joining the OTN helps to further Penn State President Eric Barron’s agenda to make educational resources more affordable and accessible for Penn State students.

 

The textbooks in the Open Textbook Library are published under a Creative Commons license, which allows them to be available for free. All of the textbooks are peer-reviewed and complete. Many open textbooks are available online and can be distributed in print, e-book or audio formats. The variety of formats allows professors to adapt to their needs and the individual learning styles of their students.

 

The library contains books on a variety of subject areas, such as economics, journalism, law, medicine, science, engineering, business, language and more.

 

“Penn State’s membership in the Open Textbook Network supports faculty and students’ access to a large volume of free, openly licensed course content, available online, to help reduce students’ overall cost of attendance,” Joe Salem, the University Libraries’ Associate Dean for Learning, Undergraduate Services, and Commonwealth Campus Libraries, told Penn State News.

 

In order to implement the Open Textbook Library to support Penn State teaching and learning, an Open Educational Resources (OER) Task Force was created. This team will work on developing access to open textbooks and other learning materials. Several other universities, such as MIT,  Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley, Yale and Princeton, are openly sharing course content online.

 

The OTN, centered at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Open Education in the College of Education and Human Development, was established in 2015 and has since gained members such as the University of Iowa, the University of Minnesota, Ohio State, and Purdue. Members of the OTN agree to hold a workshop on campus led by the network’s experts to support and help train the faculty’s adoption of open textbooks. This also allows the OTN to measure the impact open textbooks have on students. The workshop will be livestreamed during the Open Access Week Oct. 23-29.

 

College Board’s Trends in Higher Education reported that the average full-time undergraduate student spent about $1,200 on books and supplies for the 2016-17 school year. With the cost of books continuing to rise, open-source textbooks could save students an average of $128 per course, according to a study published in 2015 by Ethan Senack with The Student Public Interest Research Groups.

By joining the OTN, Penn State has taken a step toward their goal of making higher education more affordable and accessible for the more than 70,000 undergraduate students that attend the university, according to undergraduate admissions.