2018 Keynote Presentation

Resistance is Futile: The Oncoming OER Revolution and How the Libretexts can help you Navigate It

Delmar Larsen
Founder and Director of LibreTexts libraries
Associate Professor
Department of Chemistry, UC Davis

It is becoming ever clearer that new and innovative educational efforts are required to facilitate the greater creativity, flexibility, and increased learning capability needed for post-secondary education in the future. Unfortunately, rapidly rising undergraduate fees and textbook costs are serious factors that impedes access to higher education for many students; many of which do not have the funds to benefits from these new advances that are often commercialized. Growing textbook costs are a serious barrier for under-served, at-risk students and open-access resources (OER) textbooks are a growing approach to address these issue. The Libretexts project (http://LibreTexts.org) is designed as a collaborative OER platform to simultaneously enable the dissemination and evaluation of existing resources and as a dynamic “courseware” to facilitate new education developments and approaches, with an emphasis on data-driven assessment of student learning and performance. Since its inception ten years ago, the Libretexts has been exponentially growing and currently reaches over 60 million students per year and is the most visited chemistry website and online OER textbook resource in the world.