Earlier this year, we were thrilled to announce that we had added four openly licensed textbooks to Saylor.org, thanks to our Open Textbook Challenge. We couldn’t be more appreciative of all of the individuals who submitted their texts for consideration under Wave I of the Challenge – and we’re certainly looking forward to reviewing each Wave II submission with hopes that we will be able to add even more freely available textbooks to our site this summer.

In late January, as we were notifying the Wave I winners, we were shocked when we received the following message back from Dr. Olivier Bonaventure, author of Computer Networking: Principles, Protocols and Practice and professor at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium:

“I would like to use the award to encourage the development of open textbooks at Université catholique de Louvain.”

We were shocked – and excited – by his message! Not only has Dr. Bonaventure helping to promote learning by making his text openly available via our Open Textbook Challenge – but he requested that his $20,000 award go to the Fondation Louvain – a non-profit Foundation managed by UCL – a to fund the development of other open textbooks by Dr. Bonaventure and his colleagues.  In an email correspondence, Dr. Bonaventure mentioned that he’s interested in using the award to develop materials for a K12 Computer Science course.

Inspired? Want to know more about how you can help make more textbooks openly available? Check out our Open Textbook Challenge webpage to learn more – we’re currently accepting submissions through May 31, 2012!