Friday, May 10, 11:15am-12:15pm
Room: Barrick Gold Lecture Room (1520) 
Presenters: Karen Bjork, Portland State; Karen Lauritsen, Open Textbook Network; Kathy Labadorf, University of Connecticut; Amanda Larson, Penn State University ; Emily Frank, Affordable Learning LOUISiana; Maira Bundza, Western Michigan University; Corinne Guimont, Virginia Tech; Anna Craft, UNC Greensboro; Carla Myers, Miami University
Description: Following up on last year’s LPF presentation about the inaugural cohort of the Open Textbook Network Publishing Cooperative, this panel will continue the conversation. We’ll share what we’ve learned and applied in the last year of working together as a community to establish publishing infrastructure, processes and support to expand open textbook publishing in higher education. In short, we’ll talk about the reality of what it takes to start and sustain an open textbook publishing initiative.
The Co-op’s vision is to support campuses in owning educational content production and distribution, and members are supported throughout the entire publishing process. Now in its second year, the Co-op has grown to include additional members, including consortia. Together we’ll discuss the strength of the community model to grow publishing expertise, and increase the availability of open textbooks across a diverse network of institutions.
In this presentation, a panel of new and returning Co-op members will discuss successes and challenges of running an open textbook publishing program within their institutional and consortial contexts, and how they’ve designed their publishing programs within the Co-op environment. We’ll explore each member’s expectations around the Co-op experience, including how local program programs and services may have been imagined at the outset, and how those expectations have evolved with experience and time. We’ll hear from small programs with one person at the helm, as well as from programs that include teams of people with diverse library and publishing backgrounds. We’ll also learn how institutions work directly with Scribe, our partners in the Co-op. In addition, we’ll talk about how member feedback continues to shape and improve the on-boarding experience and related publishing curriculum, which is now openly available.