In an effort to reduce the cost of textbooks, Cyril
Oberlander, director of the library at State University of New York (SUNY)
Geneseo, devised a grant program called SUNY Open Textbooks that asked SUNY professors to write their own
textbooks.
Professors apply for grants to write textbooks that are
peer-reviewed by other faculty members. If the work is accepted, the university
publishes the title and grants students free access to it.
The project started with a $25,000 grant to publish
four textbooks, but then spread to other SUNY libraries, which added another
$40,000 to the coffers and increased the number of textbooks to 15. Oberlander
received 38 proposals from professors and has already published four titles,
with the remaining 11 expected to be released in June.
Oberlander received a further $60,000 in funding for
the project and 46 manuscripts have been proposed. This second batch of
proposals will undergo a new review process that provides professors with blind
abstracts that are evaluated on whether the content can be used by the entire SUNY
system.
Oberlander is now considering ways to integrate texts
with different learning styles, such as embedding audio into electronic
versions or adding analytics to allow professors to track how well students are
learning.
