Sustaining the Open Textbook Collaborative: Leveraging Partnerships and Relationships Statewide

Led by Middlesex College, NJ statewide partners were awarded $1.44 mil by the U.S. Department of Education OTP program for the Open Textbook Collaborative (OTC). This consortium, consisting of New Jersey’s community colleges and Rowan University with support from Rutgers University and New Jersey Institute of Technology, is in its second year of a project to create, disseminate, sustain, and incorporate open educational resources (OER) in high-cost STEM career and technical education programs. Partnering with the NJ Council of Community Colleges, we consciously aligned our goals with their New Jersey Pathways to Career Opportunities (NJCCC) initiative which will contribute to the post-secondary ecosystem providing on-ramps to career pathways in high growth occupations over the next 10 years. Focusing on four growth industries, we work with NJCCC to find collaborators across secondary and higher education, community and faith-based organizations, state and local governments, and business and industry. Moving forward together, our initiatives can remove economic and other educational barriers keeping many in minority and other underserved communities from accessing these high-growth, high-paying careers. This session will cover our approaches to creating an infrastructure to support the OTC, including resource allocation, knowledge building, and organizing to build a collaborative state-wide entity in a state without the centralized Higher Education System enjoyed by many of our peers. We welcome a discussion with members of other statewide OER projects to exchange ideas and find ways to continually improve our processes in such areas as recruitment, division of labor, infrastructure building, educational technology, and sustainability