“Try it, Make it Better, Perfect It.”: Implementing a statewide textbook affordability initiative

This report focuses on the Ohio Open Ed Collaborative (“OOEC”), a statewide initiative which recruited and supported inter-institutional teams of faculty to develop open and affordable college course materials. Across its first two years, OOEC developed 23 freely-available modular course packages that were aligned to statewide learning outcomes and were designed to be engaging and appropriate for students of diverse backgrounds attending two-year and four-year colleges and universities across the state. In this report, we focus on OOEC’s structure, its first two years of implementation, and early indicators of OOEC package adoption, to provide other regional or statewide collaborative approaches with concrete examples for good practice, as well as “lessons learned” and opportunities for improvement. We also examine motivators and barriers to adoption among instructors across the state.