October 2, 2018 | Mark Lieberman | Inside Higher Ed
The US Education Department recently awarded a $4.9 million grant to a 12-institution consortium spearheaded by UC Davis to create open STEM textbooks.
According to the abstract submitted by the applicant, UC Davis’s project will expand the institution’s existing LibreTexts project “into an expansive living library of content that can be customized to faculty needs.” The team will build over time a collection of publications on STEM and career and technical topics, with an early focus on chemistry textbooks that will add up to a zero-cost textbook option for a bachelor’s degree curriculum certified by the American Chemical Society.
The project team hopes its efforts will reach far beyond the consortium of participating institutions, according to Delmar Larsen, an associate professor of chemistry at UC Davis who serves as director and founder of LibreTexts.
“The project itself is a community-driven project, and the funding that we have will benefit faculty at multiple campuses,” Larsen said in an interview Tuesday. “Anyone who has an interest to get involved in the project can contact me directly. We will bend over backwards in order to make that successful for them.”
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