In 2020, Iowa OER helped coordinate with colleges and universities across the state to arrange for a discounted membership to the Open Education Network (OEN), a consortium of colleges and universities working to advance open textbook initiatives.

The OEN offers several other tools to help institutions support instructors interested in open educational resources. For example, they oversee the Open Textbook Library, a searchable online catalog of open textbooks available for faculty and students to freely use, adapt and distribute to best meet the needs of their courses. Open textbooks can be downloaded at no cost or printed inexpensively.

Benefits for Consortial OEN Members

All Iowa institutions can benefit from a very low consortial membership rate to the OEN. Consortial members receive the following benefits from membership:

Workshops and reviews of open textbooks in the Open Textbook Library

Consortial members have access to OEN workshop slides and may receive support managing faculty workshop invitations and other communications via the OEN data dashboard. Through this process, faculty at consortial institutions can be invited to write and submit reviews for textbooks found in the Open Textbook Library. Please contact Abbey Elder (aelder@iastate.edu) for more information about this process.

Professional Development Opportunities

Consortial members can also request access to the OEN Community Hub and Events calendar to keep up to date. Contact Abbey Elder (aelder@iastate.edu) to request access.

In addition to the Community Hub, consortial members are able to access:

• Free professional development opportunities and community events hosted by the OEN
• Discounts on some fee-based programs, including the Certificate in OER Librarianship

Mediated Manifold Access

Manifold, an open source publishing tool, has been used widely to develop and share OER. People use Manifold in a variety of ways, including to publish open educational resources, create open pedagogy projects, and as an open repository/curation tool. You can also form public and private reading groups.

Consortial members who want to develop an OER using Manifold may request access to the tool through the Iowa Manifold Project Request Form. Finished projects will be added to the Iowa Colleges & Universities Collection.

If an institution is a direct/institutional member of the OEN, they can have their own designated Manifold Admin/Project Creator to work more directly with faculty as opposed to having mediated access at the consortial level. Additional information about Institutional memberships is provided below.

Benefits for Institutional OEN Members

Iowa institutions can also elect to join the OEN through an institution-level membership at a substantial discount.

This membership includes:

• Access to an institutional Data Dashboard
• Access to the OEN Community of Practice Google Group
• Access to the OEN Community Hub and events calendar
• Access to an institutional instance of Manifold for open textbook publishing
• An institutional discount for PressbooksEDU for open textbook publishing

Institutional members are able to join the OEN at a discounted rate of $638 (normally $1,914). Note that the OEN membership cycle is July 1 – June 30. The OEN welcomes Institutional members at any time, but they do not prorate memberships.

See the OEN website for more information about membership types and pricing.

Current OEN Member Institutions

The following institutions are part of the Iowa OER consortial membership (Institutional members noted in bold):