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Last week, Alana Harrington and I had the opportunity to travel to Houston, Texas for the 2012 Connexions Conference. This was our first time attending this conference, and let me tell you – it did not disappoint! The daylong conference was so chock-full of information and excellent presentations that it could have easily run across two days.

While I would love to provide you with every detail of every presentation, I’m sure you’d prefer a much shorter blog post. So instead, across two posts this week, I will highlight the areas of the conference that are most applicable to the Saylor Foundation: the OpenStax College Launch and Open Certification – Badges, Alternative Certification, and OER.

OpenStax College Launch
If you follow us on Facebook or Twitter, you may have seen a recent announcement that Connexions, with the help of the 20 Million Minds Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and the Maxfield Foundation, partnered to provide free, open source textbooks via OpenStax College for five common introductory college-level courses – with a release of twenty titles over the next 5 years.

We are absolutely thrilled for our friends at these organizations, especially as they have already secured confirmation of use from a number of universities. This sort of announcement – one in which OERs are going mainstream – is huge in the open education community. So you might imagine my excitement when I saw that an explanation of the OpenStax College Launch was on the conference agenda.

The 45-minute presentation included talking points from David Harris, Editor in Chief at Connexions; Phyllis Hillwig, COO of Words and Numbers, the group that managed the creation of these texts; peer-reviewer Eric Christensen of South Florida Community College (and one of the users of the Physics text!); and peer-reviewer Marie Wallace of Pima Community College.

As each of these individuals presented, one thing that really struck a chord with me was the effort that went into each of the 5 initial texts, the resulting level of quality found in each, and the flexibility of format for the students.

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Here at the Saylor Foundation, our mission is to make education freely available to all. Our primary focus is curating college-level courseware and making these courses freely available on www.saylor.org. However, we also want to ensure that individuals – students, professors, and anyone interested in polishing his or her knowledge in various subject areas – can access our resources through a multitude of websites so they can enhance their studies or remix and reuse our courses in an effort to drive down costs for students. As such, we’ve begun making Saylor.org courses and resources available on websites outside of www.saylor.org.

Saylor Archivist, Sean Connor, has been leading the effort to make these resources widely available. We chatted about  his work in the area, and here’s what he has to say:

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Late last week, we announced the fourth and final text to be accepted in Wave I of our Open Textbook Challenge! Mathematical Analysis I, a text written by the late Elias Zakon of the University of Windsor, was submitted by Dr. Bradley Lucier thanks to a joint effort between Lucier and Zakon’s daughter Tamara Zakon. Mathematical Analysis I will be used as part of the Saylor Foundation’s MA241: Real Analysis I.

Lucier and Tamara Zakon joined forces in 1998 to produce a series of Elias Zakon’s texts for electronic distribution by The Trillia Group, which is an Internet publisher Lucier established “to provide quality texts distributed at the lowest cost to the widest audience.”

Lucier told the Saylor Foundation that “Elias Zakon worked much of his professional life polishing his series of three texts on Mathematical Analysis, a series that was never published in his lifetime but was copied and distributed to students at the University of Windsor. I think Professor Zakon would have been thrilled to see the Saylor Foundation make it possible to distribute freely to students around the world this second volume in the series.”

The text joins three additional texts – Elementary Linear Algebra, Linear Algebra, and Computer Networking: Principles, Protocols and Practice – that were accepted under Wave I of the Challenge: all four textbooks are now available to students and educators around the globe for free on www.saylor.org.

If you missed out on the press release emailed out last week, you can read the full announcement here. (Haven’t signed up for our mailing list? Click here to do so now!) And, if you’ve written a textbook or course materials – or know someone that has – check out our Open Textbook Challenge page. We’ve extended the Wave II deadline and will now be accepting texts through May 31, 2012!

The image used in this post came from Flickr user shutterhacks and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.