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P116T180029

Lead Applicant: The Regents of the University of California (Davis)

Consortium Institutions: University of California, Davis (CA); Hope College (MI); Saint Mary's 

College (IN); University of Arkansas, Little Rock (AR); Prince George’s Community College 

(MD); Contra Costa Community College District (CA): Contra Costa College, Diablo Valley 

College, and Los Medanos College; Los Rios Community College District (CA): American 

River, Cosumnes River, Folsom Lake and Sacramento City College. 

Award: $4,949,843 Project Period: Up to 48 months

Expanding the LibreTexts Project into the Next-Generation Hub for Construction, 

Dissemination, and Usage of Open Educational Resource Textbooks

Summary:

“Expanding the LibreTexts Project into the Next-Generation Hub for Construction, 

Dissemination, and Usage of Open Educational Resource Textbooks” will create an open online 

set of textbooks and other materials that can be used across the undergraduate and career 

technical education curriculum

Our effort will build on the best practices that we established over the past decade in the

development of the LibreTexts. These are the same efforts that make LibreTexts the largest,

highest ranked, and most visited open educational resource (OER). To this end, we propose to

expand the LibreTexts into an expansive living library of content that can be customized to 

facultyneeds.

We will expand the library with a new "trade" library dedicated to career and technical

education (CTE) fields. While we intend to pursue a "no gap left behind" policy of broad

construction across both academic and CTE fields, priority in the construction effort will first be

focused on chemistry, where we will complete the OER textbooks to enable a zero textbook cost

(ZTC) option for an American Chemical Society ACS certified curriculum for a Bachelor's 

degree.

This will be the first comprehensive set of ZTC OER textbooks for a STEM Bachelor's degree

curriculum. Given that chemistry is a “central science” and plays a supporting role to many other 

degrees, the complete Chemistry LibreTexts will have broad impact and will be a powerful

example for other fields to follow. Simultaneously we will be expanding LibreTexts Libraries in

Physics, Mathematics, Biology, Statistics, Psychology and Neuroscience.

In-depth assessment and analysis of student use on a large scale will provide feedback to
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instructors and developers for improve their courses, and will provide feedback to students so 

they can improve their learning. We will disseminate our OER materials nationwide and 

internationally.

Our project includes a consortium of 12 campuses, of which five are independent institutions and

seven are part of two large community college districts in California. The independent 

institutions are University of California, Davis (CA), Hope College (MI), Saint Mary's College 

(IN), University of Arkansas, Little Rock (AR), and Prince George Community College (MD). 

The two community college districts are Contra Costa Community College District (CA) and 

Los Rios Community College District (CA) that encompass the seven community colleges, 

Contra Costa College, Diablo Valley College, Los Medanos College, Sacramento City College, 

American River College, Cosumnes River College, and Folsom Lake College. The California 

State University system is also a partner.

The project organization entails effort in five teams: (1) Construction new materials, (2)

Harvesting for inclusion of materials developed by others under open license, (3) developing 

new leading edge technology to guide student learning, (4) dissemination of LibreTexts OER and

recruiting new collaborators, and (5) formative and summative assessment and analysis