Authors: Delmar Larsen, Executive Director LibreTexts and Joshua Halpern, LibreTexts Team
Topic: Sponsor Session
Sector: Higher Education
UNESCO Area of Focus: Open Educational Resources
Session Format: Presentation
Abstract
The Libretexts project is a completely free, collaborative OER platform enabling global dissemination of existing OER and creation of new. It provides dynamic courseware and technologies that facilitate education. LibreTexts is a community of faculty with over 10 million site visits per month and over 1300 books across the curriculum, from humanities to physics and from secondary to graduate levels. About 40% of users come from the United States, the rest being distributed globally.Current libraries cover Business, Biology, Chemistry, Engineering, Geosciences, Humanities, Mathematics, Health Sciences, Physics, Social Sciences and Statistics, each subdivided. The Humanities Library, for example, has sections for Composition, History, Languages, Literature, Logic, Music and Philosophy. LibreTexts includes a Workforce library to support career and technical education and a Spanish library for students whose first language is Spanish. Textbooks can be created in any language for which Unicode support is available.
We are interested in collaborating with teaching faculty worldwide to develop multilingual content to support education in their countries. This would occur within LibreTexts sustainability plan which envisions a more formal network of institutions our non-profit entity retaining faculty focused services. Membership has a low annual fee of $500 but could also be satisfied by in kind contributions.
LibreTexts meets the UNESCO OER rules of no-cost access under open CC licenses. Accessible 24/7 via the internet, LibreTexts provides files allowing low cost print-on-demand of all and is developing a cell phone app and Raspberry Pi based LibreTexts in a Box for remote locations.
LibreTexts’ Construction Guide and “OER Remixer” empowers faculty to create custom textbooks for their courses within hours from content within the OER libraries. A team of faculty, librarians and students helps bring other open material into the system. Uniform formatting allows automation such as import into LMSs, accessibility optimization, inclusion of extensions including annotation (hypothes.is), computation (Jupyter hubs) and other features.
LibreTexts’ has a long record of growth, service delivery and technical excellence. We look forward to the future and seek others to join with us.
Keywords
Open educational resources (OERs), Open textbooks, Higher education, Technologies for open education
)