Mary Burgess

Thanks so much for this thoughtful post Gina, I really appreciate the feedback. When I put the models down on "paper" I was thinking ultimately we'd end up with some kind of blend, but in the intial stages, I do think we need some pretty heavy centralized coordination (3-5 years is what I had in mind) to get the resources into the hands of groups like articulation committees and help them get set up for success. Long term I see BCcampus playing a role, but not as hands on as we are now, at least not with open textbooks specifically. 

I'd also like to see at some point a return to the creation of resources other than textbooks, but with a bit more focus than OPDF maybe - some kind of combo of OPDF and the way we've done OTs. I'm not sure what kind of funding would be available but like you I'd love to see the amounts we had for OPDF each year. If things progress as I hope they will, the ROI will be enormous. 

You are giving me some great ideas for the next Open Textbook Summit Dianne. Last spring and a couple weeks ago at the Open Ed conference in Utah we just had people who are actively working on open textbook initiatives on the project team side. If we expanded it to include faculty adopting and adapting and students who have been assigned open textbooks, that would be very informative for the project teams. It would also give developers the opportunity to share experiences and resources with each other. 

Great thinking Dianne, thanks for this. We are beginning to formulate research questions at BCcampus as are others in the field. Do you have anything in particular in mind with respect to a research agenda you think would be particularly valuable for the sustainability process? 

I'm really interested in your comment about data mining. Can you tell me a bit more about that? Are you referring to analytics of the ways in which the texts are used by students? 

Great questions as always Gina, thanks. I've asked Clint to respond to the ones about the technology.

With respect to the reviewers, we didn't do a formal process to get feedback but the conversations I've had with them haven't indicated it was overly onerous or technically challenging except in one case where we had some initial difficulty displaying formulas. We also had several of the reviewers from last time apply to review more texts in this round, and I'm assuming they would not have done so if they didn't like how it went the first time around. That all said, I'm now going to send a note to the people who completed reviews for us and see if they have any feedback, so thanks for the prompt!!

Please post any input you have about the development of 20 more texts here.