This month’s blog post was contributed by Abbey K. Elder, Open Education Services Librarian at Iowa State University.

Textbooks are written, edited, and published for many different reasons. An author might have a genuine interest in sharing their knowledge and supporting their students, they might be approached to write a book to fill a gap in a publisher’s catalog, or their reasoning may be entirely different. Once they’re published, textbooks may be updated with a new edition every 3 years, or they might never see a new edition, if the market for the text isn’t compelling. This cycle is complex, but the standards and expectations of the field can be a problem for students and instructors alike.

Why does this matter?

New editions should serve a purpose: to address learning needs, stay up to date with policy and practice standards, or incorporate new and emerging technologies, for example. Traditional publishing cycles try to take this into account, with Mathematics textbooks seeing updates less frequently than Political Science or Economics textbooks, but new editions still typically fall across a 3-5 year cycle (Carbaugh, 2020).

In other cases, new editions may not be made at all. If a textbook for a niche field doesn’t meet a minimum threshold of profitability, a new edition may not be made for over a decade. If this happens and no new books are published to fill that gap, students are left with outdated information, and instructors must teach around that lack of context. See our webinar about an open textbook which was adapted because of a situation like this (Chung, 2024). In contrast, if a book is popular and new editions are released every three years without meaningful changes to the content, the limited availability of used books and rentals can harm students in precarious economic situations.

This does not mean that textbook publishing is without redeeming qualities. There are thoughtful publishers, authors, and decision makers in every field. With some textbook publishers moving to a primarily digital model, we may see a move away from traditional editions altogether. Nonetheless, the standard practices that have gone into the current publishing system can lead to inequitable outcomes for authors and students who want to engage in learning around niche, under-resourced, or quickly evolving fields.

How can we meet these needs?

This is an open education blog, so of course one potential solution I want to consider is how we could support the development and ongoing updates for open educational resources (OER). Because they are digital and openly licensed, OER can be customized to the needs of an individual course, updated iteratively over time, and they do not need to conform to a specific standard. This allows educators to tune their materials to their teaching style and their students’ needs, a practice that takes time, but one that is already common across K-12 and higher education alike (Blomgren, 2018).

In addition to supporting the development of instructional materials that are a non-standard scope or length, OER can also follow a non-standard update schedule. Platforms used in OER production, like LibreTexts and Pressbooks, have built-in tools for editing and accessibility review, alongside forums and guides on how to develop OER. These supports can help educators feel more confident in updating existing OER or developing their own custom materials. Additionally, other popular tools like PreTeXt and Manifold have engaged communities of contributors who can provide tips for authors to help them develop or update content. See our webinar on how to use Manifold for free through the Open Education Network (Gruber, 2025).

Over time, OER developed and updated this way can be made more interactive, accessible, and engaging. A case study by May, Segal, Piercey, and Chen (2020) outlines how, being inspired by existing materials for their field but disappointed in the lack of materials focused on their students’ needs, they built a new OER curriculum which evolved over time from Word documents hosted on a website to a PreTeXt-hosted OER with interactive homework available in GeoGebra and WeBWorK: Business Calculus with Excel

Update cycles for OER

Now that we’ve addressed some of the issues present in how textbooks are updated today and how OER might help with them, let’s talk about standards for how and when OER are updated. Updates to OER typically fall into one of three categories:

The Traditional Route

In this type of practice, an author works on updates on their own time and releases them all at once. For an open textbook, this update would be considered a new edition, whereas an interactive or alternative OER might call this a version update. This approach is popular for courses where immediate updates may not be necessary, or where larger updates may need to be planned out more methodically (e.g. when adding review exercises to the end of each chapter within a textbook or overhauling the design and presentation of all the figures on a course website).

Slowly making changes to a manuscript separate from a live open textbook can lessen the pressure on authors to make their edits “perfect,” and the final publication of the new edition can feel more satisfying when everything is complete. This sort of process may also be required for new editions of open textbooks if you are working with a university press.

Feedback-Driven Edits

For a less traditional route, an author might choose to make small updates to their materials each summer or winter based on comments from peers and students, with incremental changes accounting for the evolving needs and expectations for their course. This approach may be supported by student surveys or feedback from TAs or other instructors leveraging the materials in their courses. If an instructor is using a collection of OER including slides, readings, and interactive materials to support their course, this approach may be useful to update one piece of that content at a time (e.g. update the slides one summer and develop a new exercise or assignment the next).

In my experience supporting instructors who want to develop OER, I’ve found that this approach is particularly useful to accommodate the busy schedules of lecturers who may not have ample writing time to update or adjust their course materials. This approach also allows for updates to be driven by specific areas of need rather than assumptions about what students want.

Real-Time Iteration

Finally, an author might choose to update their OER in real-time as new research, best practices, and policy changes occur which could impact their course. For instructors who work in quickly evolving fields like User Experience Design, AI, or Public Policy, these sorts of quick updates may be necessary to provide students with the most up to date information available. Students might also be integrated into these updates as part of an open pedagogy project, locating recent news articles or case studies of interest and applying those practically to their course’s content.

A mixed-methods approach: One author I know chose to draft updates to their OER on a week-by-week basis as they taught with it, identifying pain points or deficiencies in their materials as they cropped up and setting aside time during their office hours to make incremental updates. Notably, these updates were held on a separate file to be uploaded into their live OER later. You could say that this approach was a mix of both an iterative and traditional approach. The author made changes in small bits over time, and waited until the end of the semester to collate, review, and apply the changes to their OER.

Conclusion

Of course, OER are not a panacea that can solve the world’s ills. They are materials, content that can be used in student-centered ways and adapted to teaching and learning needs. However, just as they do for any other instructional materials, instructors need the time and support to implement and design around the use of new content. Luckily, the flexibility of OER can be useful in this area as well.

One of the great strengths of the open education field is its flexibility to the needs of educators and their students. There are valid reasons why an instructor might choose to edit their work slowly and privately, in bursts, or as an ongoing process. The workload, discipline, and individual preferences of the instructor should always come first.

Today, many Iowa institutions offer services to help instructors approach that work, with support provided by librarians, instructional designers, and even campus-based publishers. To learn more about some of support available for open education on your campus, check out Iowa OER’s annual reports on OER across the state, and our data dashboard showing select data from that report: Iowa OER Annual Survey Data. Our latest report will be coming out early this summer!

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References

Blomgren, C. (2018). OER awareness and use: The affinity between higher education and K-12. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 19(2). https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v19i2.3431

Carbaugh, B. (2020). The decline of college textbook publishing: Cengage Learning and McGraw-Hill. The American Economist, 65(2): 284-299. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27129999  

Chung, D. (2024). Standing on the shoulders of giants: Adapting OER [YouTube video]. Iowa OER Webinar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2kixnQ5G4s

Gruber,  A.M. (2025). Publishing OER on a shoestring: Manifold to the rescue! [YouTube video]. Iowa OER Webinar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRfsxITIO08

May, M., Segal, R., Piercey, V., & Chen, T. (2020). Good teachers borrow, great teachers steal: A case study in borrowing for a teaching project. Journal of Mathematics and Science: Collaborative Explorations, 16(1). https://doi.org/10.25891/6xtf-bc16