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Introduced in 2026, Pub101 for Authors is a free, online orientation to open textbook publishing that complements our openly available curriculum. Colleagues share what they’ve learned so that faculty authors can get started with writing an open textbook. The synchronous experience is open to the extended Open Education Network community. In this inaugural session, Karen Lauritsen, OEN Senior Director, Publishing, introduces the Open Education Network, defines what to expect at Pub101 for Authors, and helps participants begin to consider their capacity for publishing.
Watch the video recording of this March 25, 2026 session or keep reading for a full transcript.
Speaker:
Karen: Welcome, everyone, to Pub101 for Authors, brought to you by the Open Education Network. This is an orientation to publishing open textbooks, and we're really glad you're here. We're so excited to get started. This program has been in the making for a few years, and so it's very exciting to kick off with all of you today. My name is Karen Lauritsen. I am Senior Director Publishing with the Open Education Network. When I am not coming to you via Zoom, I love to be in my garden. This is a photo from a spring a couple of years ago. These are Native California wildflowers that had a very happy year that year.
I would also like to welcome you on behalf of the Pub101 Committee. This is a group of librarians who have been working on bringing this event to you for some time. They have been editing a curriculum and inviting guest presenters. They will also be facilitating the sessions over the next several weeks, and so you will get to know each of them. I would also like to point out Amanda Larson. She is the chair of our committee, and she will be managing chat today. So you'll have the chance to get to know Amanda a little bit better as we move through the hour, and then meet all of our committee members as we move forward.
Our agenda for today is a little bit different than the following seven sessions. I'm going to be doing a lot of talking, but we will take some breaks and take some time to check in with each other. I'm going to introduce you to the Open Education Network. This may be the first OEN event that you've ever been to. So I'm just going to talk a little bit about who we are and what we do and why. I'm also going to give you an overview about what to expect with Pub101 for authors, what we're hoping to accomplish, the feedback that we want from you. Since this is our first time out with this program, we're really looking to engage with you to understand what it is that you need, what will be helpful, and how we can continue to improve this experience for your colleagues in the future.
And in addition, we're also going to begin to consider your capacity for publishing. This is something that we're going to talk about over all of our meetings, and we'll just get started today looking around at where you are in your context at your institution, because of course you're coming from all different places, all different types of institutions. Some of you may have a lot of support that you can turn to. Some of you may decide to move forward without any support and go it alone. It can be done. There are so many different ways to write and publish an open textbook, and we're always going to try and keep in mind how we can adapt different resources and suggestions that we give you for your context.
If you feel like we don't quite get it right and you're wondering how you can take a suggestion and apply it to your situation, please let us know in the chat. We're always going to leave time for Q&A, and we want to hear from you if you're like, "Okay, this sounds great if I were at a well-resourced institution with all the things that I need, but I don't, how could I do something like this?" We want to help you think about that.
A little bit more about the Open Education Network. We are based at the University of Minnesota, and we are a community of people, primarily university librarians, but also instructional designers and other administrators who work together to make higher ed more accessible, more affordable. We do that through open educational practices, creating resources, and supporting one another in different techniques to move towards open. For example, one of the things that we do is encourage people to adopt an open textbook, consider using one instead of a commercial textbook.
We have a whole suite of programs to support that particular step. We also talk about open pedagogy, and of course, we're here today talking about open publishing. And a lot of these things overlap with each other, they compliment each other, but that's a snapshot of what it is we're about. All of those librarians, all of those people together represent more than 1,800 institutions. Most of them are in the United States, but we also have people who are working in Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia, and it's really fun to talk together and think together about how these programs can be adapted to different contexts.
You may be familiar with the Open Textbook Library. This is a referatory where you can find almost 2,000 open textbooks. We also oversee something called the Open Pedagogy Portal, examples of open pedagogical exercises and products that students have made. So these are examples of the work that the OEN does at the University of Minnesota. Of course, what we're really doing is creating a collective and a community, a network across all of these institutions. And what we're able to accomplish together is much greater than what those of us based at the University of Minnesota could do alone.
What is Pub101 for Authors? Well, although this is the first time we've offered Pub101 for Authors, it's built on a very successful foundation, and that's Pub101. Pub101 was created for that librarian audience that I've mentioned, and it's been offered for several years now, both in person and online. And as we offered that to librarians, we realized that one of the things that may support their work and take something off their plate is adapting it and offering it directly to you as a potential author or an author of an open textbook. And so we want to support librarians and we also want to support you. You might be at an institution where you don't have a librarian you can turn to but you're still interested in creating an OER. And so we want to support you in that effort as well. If somebody wants to write an open textbook, we want to find ways to be there for them.
What we're here to do is introduce what's involved with writing and publishing an open textbook over the next several weeks. We're going to share lots of resources that you can adapt and use and also connect you with one another so that you don't feel as alone as you might if you are going it by yourself. We're going to provide a broad publishing foundation that's platform-agnostic. What I mean by that is there are 32 participants in this call right now, and potentially there could almost be 32 different ways that you decide to publish in terms of what tool you use, how you share. And so we're not going to get into the nitty-gritty of how you use a particular publishing tool. We're just going to lay a foundation that can be applied regardless of that. As I mentioned, we're also going to think about your institutional context, your connection, and how to look after yourself when you engage in this work, because it can be taxing.
It's sometimes also helpful to clarify what something is not, and Pub101 for Authors will not be how-to lessons on how to write a book. We're not going to go step-by-step and talk about how to do an introduction or how to create your chapters, but there is content related to that within the curriculum, and I'll talk more about the curriculum later. We also won't demo how to use different publishing tools, how to create a file, how to create a header, but we will have a session on creating an accessible book, which will discuss some of those things. So again, we're looking for big picture stuff that you can apply however you choose to write your book.
And finally, Pub101 for Authors is meant to be flexible and informal and meet you where you're at. So feel free to drop into the sessions when it works with your schedule. You don't have to let us know if you can't make it. There are suggested assignments or readings that we offer to you, but no one's going to be checking up on you and there's not a certificate involved. So it really is just meant to be something that works for your schedule and fits into your busy schedules.
Okay. So taking a further step back, let's start with the definition. What is an open textbook anyway? Well, it's free to the reader. The student does not have to pay to access that content. Now, that may mean, just to get into the weeds for a moment, you may choose to offer your open textbook in a variety of file formats, and sometimes people will choose to charge a nominal fee for a print, copy, for example. But that is not the only way to access the material. Somebody could read it online, somebody could down the PDF, and all of that would be for free.
In addition to being no cost for the reader, for the user, there are permissions on an open textbook, and typically those permissions are given through a Creative Commons license. And in a couple weeks, we will talk more about Creative Commons licenses and copyright and how they work together, but that is an important definition to open textbook, free to the reader with permission to edit through the Creative Commons license. And all of you are familiar with textbooks more broadly. You know that they're different from monographs. They have structure. The content is organized in a hierarchical way. There are pedagogical elements that are consistent in every chapter. For example, a chapter opens with a bulleted list of key points that will be covered, and perhaps every chapter ends with reflective questions that the students can ask themselves. Those are the kind of things that we're accustomed to seeing in a textbook, and these are the assumptions or the definition that we'll be operating with as we talk about open textbooks throughout the next few weeks.
I've already mentioned the Open Textbook Library. If you would like to browse and look at more examples of open textbooks and see examples of creative commons licenses and different structures, there are almost 2,000 examples in the OTL freely available for you to check out, adopt, and edit if you wish.
Okay. Now we've talked about what open textbooks are. Now we're going to spend some time talking about why we think open textbooks can be useful and why we spend all of this energy and effort in the OEN, supporting their development. Well, you know, and I know that everything continues to get more expensive, and that's true of education, and that's also true of the students' share of tuition. In Minnesota in 2024, students paid almost half, about 48% of their tuition cost compared to 1980 when they spent about 18%. So the financial responsibility that students feel for their education is increasing, and it can be a barrier to people continuing with their education, getting a degree, and moving through the system.
We can see here that when asking students, in your academic career, has the cost of textbooks caused you to not purchase the required textbook, slightly more than half said that was the case, 44% said, "I've taken fewer courses." Around 39% have decided not to register for a specific course. 32% have earned a poor grade. They think because they probably didn't buy the book or haven't used it, or about 24% have dropped a course because the cost of a required textbook. Now, all of these slides will be shared with you and the details in terms of the research, and where you can find it is in the notes of these slides as well, but this is a snapshot of some of the impact that high textbook costs have on students. And one reason why we've decided to focus on it as a means to make higher education more accessible to more people.
So thinking about that, some of the benefits of open textbooks include that students can have free access from day one, forever. There's not an expiration date. They don't have to wait until the course starts. You can customize an open textbook for your course, so you can really help it align with your syllabus, with your quizzes, with your lectures, and it can feel very integrated. It's possible to include more voices and perspectives in an open textbook. You can indigenize and localize content. For example, how a tribe in the United States might discuss the environment is very different than how a biologist may discuss the environment. And so you can create a textbook that will explore some of the differences and similarities in the way that different communities approach a topic or a subject.
You can easily update an open textbook. You have those files, you have permission to get in there and change what you want. So maybe you want to add a case study or a story, interviews, multimedia, and maybe you want to engage your students in creating that content and publishing that work together. And finally, another possible benefit is you can make an impact in your field as an author of an open textbook. When you share one in the open textbook library, it means it's discoverable. It means other faculty in your field can find it, they can choose to adopt it, and they can tell others about it in addition to posting a review. So it's really a way to get your work out there as well.
One example that you're going to hear about next week of an open textbook is botany in Hawaii. You're going to be joined by Daniela Dutra Elliot, a co-author of this book. And Daniela chose to write an open textbook because she teaches botany in Hawaii, and she found that the botany textbooks did not speak to the tropical plants that were in their surrounds. She wanted something that her students were familiar with, that many of her students had many generational history with. And so she created a book that would resonate with the students in Hawaii. And it's a really cool example. I'm very excited for her to share the story of how she created this book and share it with you. If you would like to take a look at that before next week, you can find her book at z.umn.edu/botany. I think Amanda is sharing those links in the chat, so you can go ahead and check it out. Bring any questions you might have for Daniela next week.
Another benefit of open textbooks is that students assigned them are almost twice as likely to report using them, which of course is a pretty great benefit. Students use them more frequently and for more time per week overall in this particular study, and so that is an encouraging information. Students assigned open textbooks also perceived a greater degree of overlap between the textbook, the lecture, and the quiz material. This is what I was just talking about a moment ago. You can customize your book to coordinate with the rest of your course.
Maybe you choose to have one chapter aligned with one week of instruction. There's all sorts of potential, but to have that integrated feeling can help students relate all of these different pieces of their learning experience, what's happening in the classroom, what they're being tested on, what they're reading in the book, and so on.
Perhaps you've been inspired. Something inspired you to come to this meeting and set aside an hour of your time before now. Hopefully this additional research and information is continuing to boost your inspiration. And so if students have been asking for help and you're thinking this might be a way to offer that assistance, welcome.
Perhaps you are on a campus where you've heard about OER, there might be an initiative or grant support. That's great. Maybe administrators are starting to move towards OER. They often do so because the return on investment can be very clearly shown. When you show how much money you're saving students by using open textbooks, it's a really great illustration of how institutions care for their students and are taking into account affordability issues. And finally, you might be starting to think about how writing an open textbook can contribute to your professional goals and get out there the ways that you teach your subject, you share your expertise with others.
Let's pause. I'll take a breath and a sip of water. And in the chat, if you could please share why you're here, why you're interested in writing an open textbook. Just a brief blip. If any of the ideas on the previous slide resonate with you, or if you have another idea, please share.
Amanda: Deanne says that, "Unhappy with current OER textbooks in my field, US history." Tiara said, "I want to write a text that speaks directly to my students in my class that come from a variety of backgrounds and interests. I want to gear examples of media around their interests." That's a great idea. Marco, "Sent the open education librarian at the University of Idaho where I support faculty. I'm here for inspiration." Justin said, "Each time I teach my class, I add more and more out of text materials to the point where I'm starting to wonder if I need the text at all." I've been there myself. Kelly says, "I want to have a text that more closely aligns with my students' backgrounds and professional goals in a format that works for my department's makeup." So we're seeing a lot of this theme of customizability.
Gary says, "I'm tired of my students having to pay over $200 for a textbook and I, sorry to brag, think that I could do a better job. Our school is pushing it and does have grants and I need to learn more about." That's what you're here for, learn stuff. Christopher says, "We're starting an initiative to encourage more instructors to use OERs. That's exciting. I want to be better able to help students and instructors the best way I can." Eric says, "I'm interested in creating and providing a resource that they would actually use in our English classes that we could also change and update based on student needs." Erica says, "I'm in the library and supporting tutor with the adoption and creation of OER. They're currently writing a tutorial, an OER tutorial for creating virtual escape rooms." Oh, that sounds really cool.
Karen: There are so many cool things in the chat.
Amanda: So many. Thank you for everybody participating. I'm going to stop there so we can get back, but thank you for participating. This is all really cool stuff.
Karen: It is. And it's great to see that there's a combination of librarians and faculty. It's really nice to have that web of support, people coming from different perspectives, but it sounds like we're all in this shared space and that a lot of these reasons we've been exploring are resonating, and it's really exciting to learn about the details of your projects, so thank you. Okay.
I got a little playful with my grammar here. We talked about why open textbooks, and now we're going to talk about how open textbooks, if you will allow me that playfulness. How is it that open textbooks come to exist? What are these different systems? Some of you mentioned that, "Oh, I think this is a thing at my institution and then there is a grant program." We're going to talk a little bit about that now.
First and foremost, I just want to lay the foundation that publishing can mean many things, and we're here for all of those things. There's a lot of synonyms for publishing that I see in this space. You might identify as a creator, an author, a writer, a maker. Great. You might want to start from scratch because you have all those lecture notes from over the years, or maybe you want to browse the library and take something that's already been written and just move some things around and make some small editions, in which case, you would be adapting, editing, or modifying, which is perfectly allowed and encouraged with the Creative Commons license. There's also the simple act of sharing. So posting a file, working with your library to share that PDF, that is also an important part of publishing.
And again, I'm just going to keep mentioning open pedagogy because I think it's a really fun potential way to bring open educational practices into the classroom and work with students. If you are interested in learning more about it, the Open Education Network has open pedagogy learning circles. I'd be happy to share more information about those. Amanda, who is here with us, is also an expert in that area, so let us know. And then finally, you might be working by yourself, you might be working with a lot of people. However you're going to slice your open textbook pie, we welcome you and it is publishing. You are publishing. Sometimes there's some reticence or shyness about that, but that is absolutely what you're doing.
Now we're just going to take a brief look at publishing models. So on the left, we have a publisher. The publisher publishes the textbook. The textbook is then offered to the students for a price, which then goes back to the publisher. This is our familiar commercial traditional textbook publishing model. Now, some of that, sales money, will go back to the author in terms of royalties. It's usually a single digit percentage. It's usually quite modest. It is usually not what people dream of in terms of, "Oh, perhaps I can fund my own child's education with my textbook money." Unless you're like a super, super, superstar and you really hit gold, it's probably going to be something quite modest.
Okay. Now let's look at the slight variation of that model or the open textbook publishing model that is frequently how many of the books in the Open Textbook Library came into being. So instead of the publisher funding the textbook, a college or university decides to fund the textbook, and then that textbook gets into students' hands without cost. It is still possible that the author will receive, instead of royalties, some compensation. Maybe that's course release time, maybe it's a grant, maybe it is some other fee upon deliverable, but it doesn't mean that the author is writing the work for free, although sometimes that happens too. But in this particular model, the college and university is engaged and funding this progress.
Now, where does the college and university get their funding? Sometimes it comes from foundations, from state government or from consortia. There are different initiatives that support it. Now, what is true between both of these models is that there is copyright. So whether you're on the publisher traditional side or whether you're on the open textbook college university side, your work is still your work. It is still copyrighted and it is still attributed to you. And again, we will talk more in detail about that in about two weeks.
Now, in addition to the infrastructure that Creative Commons licenses provide, there is also, of course, infrastructure that you need to publish. And while we're not going to get into different publishing tools in Pub101, I am going to talk about the infrastructure that's available to you as someone who's at an institution that is affiliated with the OEN. First, Pressbooks, which is a popular and common open textbook publishing platform, Pressbooks offers a discount to OEN institutional members. It's 20%. So if you're an institutional member of the OEN and you see that you and your colleagues are starting to want to publish, Pressbooks can offer a discount in order to access their tools.
That may still not be financially feasible for you, or maybe Pressbooks doesn't quite offer what it is you want. The OEN also has a Manifold community. Manifold is the name of another publishing platform that does things a little bit differently. There are some trade-offs between Manifold and Pressbooks, but we offer access to anyone in the OEN community who would like to publish to Manifold, and that comes at no additional cost.
We also are experimenting with different community-based publishing infrastructure that includes a tool called Ketty, which is in a very preliminary experimental stage. And then we also have a relationship with something called publishing back office provider that's scribe services. So they do things like proofreading, copy editing, design. So if you are in a well-resourced program or you do have some money that you would like to spend on another pair of eyes to proofread your manuscript before you share it, we have resources that can help with that as well.
Okay. We've talked about what open textbooks are, why you might want to use them, and how they come to be in many different colleges and universities. Now we're going to turn to you personally and thinking about your capacity to write an open textbook. So many of you are thinking about this. Where do you start?
First, we suggest that you start by assessing your environment. Do find out if there's a librarian there who wants to help, who can help. Do find out if your administrators are offering funds. Do some research. Maybe your Center for Teaching and Learning has publishing tools and other things that can help and they have training that they could offer you. Maybe there are people in your department who are also interested in doing this and you want to write together as a team. Definitely take some time to assess your environment, explore, and know what your options are before you sit down... I was going to say, before you sit down with a piece of paper and start writing, but however you decide to sit down and start writing, do some assessment first.
We've already talked about some of the partners that may be available to you. They include students, librarians, instructional designers, your colleagues, even the bookstore. You might be at an institution where there's a university press and they have publishing support or guidance they can offer, or within your academic units. There are lots of people out there and a lot of them want to help. I think especially once they hear the details of your project and why it is you want to do this, it can really get other people excited and want to help you.
Okay. Our next break, brief break, our question for you, in a word or two or three, how would you describe your capacity for publishing an open textbook today? This could be both within a personal professional context like, "I'm learning about this now, but I know I'm two years out because I have a newborn," or, "I'm ready to go and I'm going to start next week," or, "I'm waiting for my institution to catch up with me. I'm going to have a persuasive conversation with a couple people and go there." How are you feeling? How would you describe your readiness to dig into this work? Please take a moment to respond in the chat.
Amanda: Okay. Somebody is... We have, "Resource hunting, writing a chapter for one for the department this summer. Going to get my feet wet before I launch into my own." Nascent, that seems fair. "There's support from the university and plan to start writing after the semester's over." Alan has started and has 2,000 words. That's a celebration.
Karen: Woo.
Amanda: Yes, there's probably still a long way to go, but you started. That's exciting. "Plan to finish in the summer." Somebody has written an OER already. That's lovely.
Karen: Jonathan, it'll be great as we go along these weeks. Feel free to share what you've learned through the process of writing.
Amanda: What went wrong? What went right in your process? There's always something else going on. Yeah, the idea that we're super busy. "Just need to commit some time to do it. Plan to start for about six months from now." So we have people in a lot of different stages of this process, which is really exciting.
Karen: A math graphic novel also sounds exciting. Very cool.
Amanda: Does sound very exciting. Also, I'm going to link we have, and I put a little bit of context for this. We also have a capacity scanned worksheet that you can take a look at if you want to work through what your capacity might be. It has some questions to help guide you through the process.
Karen: Yeah, thank you, Amanda. And Gary, I don't know if you need inspiration or if you already have it, but I've been reading some fun legal graphic novels about history of music and the public domain. They're in a comic book style and they make some legal education really exciting and fun. So if you're interested in that, I'm happy to share some of that inspiration.
Okay. Well, no matter what stage you're at, Pub101 for Authors can help you. That is a bold claim and I'm here to make it. Let's talk now about what to expect over the next several weeks. As I mentioned, today's session is a broad orientation. It's a little bit different than what you're going to get in the following sessions, all of which will be co-hosted by Pub101 committee members and featuring presenters who have been down this road before and they want to help smooth the path for you.
Next week, we're going to talk about audience scope and structure. I mentioned Daniela's book, Botany in Hawaii. You'll hear about how she thought about her students, how she scoped her book, how she decided to structure it based on her course. And then the following week, we'll talk about accessibility. You'll notice how early on accessibility is in our program. And that's because we really encourage you to think about it first and foremost, not think about it as something to remediate at the end. It'll be so much easier for you and so much better structured for your students if you build accessibility in from the start.
After that, we're going to talk about copyright, creative comments, fair use, how to navigate all of these things when you're including resources from different places, how they work together, how we wish they worked together, but they don't yet work together. And then we're also going to spend some time on project management. You'll hear from a Penn State team who worked together in a fairly large group, how they accomplished that, how they had contributors from around the world. And then you'll hear from a librarian faculty author team on April 29th, how they worked together, how they built on their strengths. And both of those sessions will talk about some of the more uncomfortable things that came up and how they navigated that. Then Amanda will be hosting the May 6th session, pedagogical and AI considerations. And then we'll finish with, you're published, you did it. Now what? How do you share it? How do you get it out there? How do you maintain your publication? So that's a snapshot of what is going to be covered over the next several Wednesdays.
If you haven't noticed already, Pub101 is pretty low-key. There are no assignments, so come when you can. This is really a place for you to begin. And so all of your questions are welcome. We won't be recording the Q&A so that you feel more comfortable speaking up or asking something you feel like you think maybe you should know. This is just really a place for you to come if you can make every session or drop in and out and get what you can.
Our vibes, of course, are friendly. We are here to learn, share, and connect together. We're going to participate in authentic and constructive ways. We've already done that. Thank you so much for what you've shared in the chat. And I have no doubt that we will share consideration and respect for others. So thank you again for joining us and creating this community together.
Now I'm going to talk about Pub101 curriculum. I mentioned it at the beginning. It's something that the committee has spent time revising for you and author audience. And I just want to highlight how these sessions connect to the curriculum and how that curriculum is there for you as a resource.
The curriculum is comprised of four units. Unit one, what is an open textbook? I touched on some of those things today, but go much deeper in the curriculum. Unit two, planning your open textbook, assessing your capacity, mapping things out, thinking about those pedagogical elements in terms of how you want to structure each chapter. Unit three, developing your open textbook, how you're going to work with others, what are the project management skills involved, really thinking about how you're going to do the hard work when so many other things keep coming up and taking priority. And then finally, no surprise, AI is a huge part of our conversation in higher ed and across our whole lives. And so we would be remiss if we did not also explore how GenAI is impacting the creation of open textbooks and how you may or may not want to use it in the creation of yours.
I would also like to mention that there are many resources in the curriculum. For example, when that Penn State team is here talking about project management, they're going to discuss memorandums of understanding, or MOUs. You do not have to create an MOU from scratch. We have several examples for you in the curriculum, and we highly recommend them. Even if you're just working with one other person, you might want to think about using it. It's really a communication or a clarification tool so that everyone knows what's expected of them, who's going to do what, what the timeline is. They're just really great tools for working on complex projects. We also have things like style guides, which are helpful. If you're working with multiple authors, you can all kind of use the same style. We have toolkits, which are basically collections of different forms that you can adapt for your needs. So whenever you think to yourself, "Oh, what I really need is," fill in the blank, the curriculum probably has it for you.
Now, in terms of what we hope and want for you to get out of this, it is the following: the ability to identify key elements of an open textbook, which we talked about today, reflect on your capacity to write one, which we've just started to do, identify support that may be available at your institution, apply project management methods and strategies, and always, I feel like this is actually the most important thing or the closest to my heart, which is consider the human elements of writing and publishing and reading a book. This is an intimate human act. And so think about yourself as a human. You're not a writing machine. Hopefully you don't have to put too much pressure on yourself or others. There are ways to really celebrate our humanness in creating this resource for other humans. And then finally, we want to help you identify vetted resources that can support your project, like those templates I was just talking about.
Now I would like to share with you what I call One-Stop Google Doc, which looks suspiciously like a syllabus, but since this is an informal low-key experience, syllabus doesn't seem like quite the right word. This is an overview of each week, who's going to be talking, what the takeaways will be. It is there for you at z.umn.edu/pub-authors. Amanda's also dropping it in the chat. It's just a great thing to bookmark if ever in between meetings, you're wondering, where do I go for this? What's happening? I can't remember what she said. It's probably covered in this document.
For example, we are going to record most, but not all of the sessions. Those will be posted to our 2026 YouTube playlist. We are aiming to do that prior to the next week's meeting, so pretty quick turnaround. If you want to be notified when that video is available, simply subscribe to that playlist. If you're wondering, where is that YouTube playlist? It's in the One-Stop doc. It's linked from there. That's where you can find it. Same thing with links to our blog, which is where transcripts and chat will be posted. And as I mentioned earlier, we will not record or transcribe Q&A just so that you feel like you can really chat informally, let your hair down, ask your questions. So there are some Pub101 housekeeping for you. Please keep the One-Stop Doc in an easily accessible place.
And finally, I've already gone on a bit about how excited I am that we're all human beings, which is also why I think it's important to take care. As we progress through this, it's really easy for us to be hard on ourselves. I saw a little bit of that even in the chat. Other things keep getting in the way, or there are so many demands on us, especially in higher ed right now. It can be a dispiriting time. And so we don't want you to feel isolated. You have people you can turn to, but creating a resource like this, a textbook, can be really heavy lift sometimes, especially if you're working with collaborators. There could be misunderstandings and tough conversations. Maybe someone wants to use technology you haven't used before. All of this can shake things up a little bit. So we always encourage you to take care of yourselves and one another and let us know how we can help.
As I mentioned, next week you'll be hearing from Daniela. That will be hosted by Micah, who is a Pub101 committee member and also at the University of Minnesota where I am based. Then I also mentioned earlier that this is the first time we've offered Pub101. We did a lot of work gathering input, asking people, librarians, and faculty authors what they thought was important to include in the curriculum and in this experience. And we've done our best to incorporate that feedback into what you're about to experience, but we also want to hear from you when it's fresh. So if you could please go to z.umn.edu/pub3, that will take you to what I promise is a super short Google form where you can just let us know at the end of every session. You're going to see this slide at the end of every session. "This is what I thought or you know what? I really hoped that you would cover this other thing." Please tell us. There's no other way for us to know, and so we really appreciate your input and the colleagues who will come after you really appreciate your input.
As you do that, I want to say thank you. You're here because you are committed to your student's success and you want to make things better, and that's a big deal. You're here because you're willing and eager to learn more, another big deal. And so I'm thankful for your interest in joining us. If you have any questions in the interim, please feel free to email open@umn.edu. I will receive that email along with a few of my other colleagues and get back to you as soon as possible.
I'm just going to go back to this link so that you can fill out this form and then we can transition to Q&A. So I'm going to stop recording and see you on the other side of the screen share.
END OF VIDEO
Introduced in 2026, Pub101 for Authors is a free, online orientation to open textbook publishing that complements our openly available curriculum. Colleagues share what they’ve learned so that faculty authors can get started with writing an open textbook. The synchronous experience is open to the extended Open Education Network community. In this inaugural session, Karen Lauritsen, OEN Senior Director, Publishing, introduces the Open Education Network, defines what to expect at Pub101 for Authors, and helps participants begin to consider their capacity for publishing.
Watch the video recording of this March 25, 2026 session or keep reading for a full transcript.
Audio Transcript
Speaker:
- Karen Lauritsen (Senior Director, Publishing, Open Education Network)
- Amanda Larson (The Ohio State University)
Karen: Welcome, everyone, to Pub101 for Authors, brought to you by the Open Education Network. This is an orientation to publishing open textbooks, and we're really glad you're here. We're so excited to get started. This program has been in the making for a few years, and so it's very exciting to kick off with all of you today. My name is Karen Lauritsen. I am Senior Director Publishing with the Open Education Network. When I am not coming to you via Zoom, I love to be in my garden. This is a photo from a spring a couple of years ago. These are Native California wildflowers that had a very happy year that year.
I would also like to welcome you on behalf of the Pub101 Committee. This is a group of librarians who have been working on bringing this event to you for some time. They have been editing a curriculum and inviting guest presenters. They will also be facilitating the sessions over the next several weeks, and so you will get to know each of them. I would also like to point out Amanda Larson. She is the chair of our committee, and she will be managing chat today. So you'll have the chance to get to know Amanda a little bit better as we move through the hour, and then meet all of our committee members as we move forward.
Our agenda for today is a little bit different than the following seven sessions. I'm going to be doing a lot of talking, but we will take some breaks and take some time to check in with each other. I'm going to introduce you to the Open Education Network. This may be the first OEN event that you've ever been to. So I'm just going to talk a little bit about who we are and what we do and why. I'm also going to give you an overview about what to expect with Pub101 for authors, what we're hoping to accomplish, the feedback that we want from you. Since this is our first time out with this program, we're really looking to engage with you to understand what it is that you need, what will be helpful, and how we can continue to improve this experience for your colleagues in the future.
And in addition, we're also going to begin to consider your capacity for publishing. This is something that we're going to talk about over all of our meetings, and we'll just get started today looking around at where you are in your context at your institution, because of course you're coming from all different places, all different types of institutions. Some of you may have a lot of support that you can turn to. Some of you may decide to move forward without any support and go it alone. It can be done. There are so many different ways to write and publish an open textbook, and we're always going to try and keep in mind how we can adapt different resources and suggestions that we give you for your context.
If you feel like we don't quite get it right and you're wondering how you can take a suggestion and apply it to your situation, please let us know in the chat. We're always going to leave time for Q&A, and we want to hear from you if you're like, "Okay, this sounds great if I were at a well-resourced institution with all the things that I need, but I don't, how could I do something like this?" We want to help you think about that.
A little bit more about the Open Education Network. We are based at the University of Minnesota, and we are a community of people, primarily university librarians, but also instructional designers and other administrators who work together to make higher ed more accessible, more affordable. We do that through open educational practices, creating resources, and supporting one another in different techniques to move towards open. For example, one of the things that we do is encourage people to adopt an open textbook, consider using one instead of a commercial textbook.
We have a whole suite of programs to support that particular step. We also talk about open pedagogy, and of course, we're here today talking about open publishing. And a lot of these things overlap with each other, they compliment each other, but that's a snapshot of what it is we're about. All of those librarians, all of those people together represent more than 1,800 institutions. Most of them are in the United States, but we also have people who are working in Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia, and it's really fun to talk together and think together about how these programs can be adapted to different contexts.
You may be familiar with the Open Textbook Library. This is a referatory where you can find almost 2,000 open textbooks. We also oversee something called the Open Pedagogy Portal, examples of open pedagogical exercises and products that students have made. So these are examples of the work that the OEN does at the University of Minnesota. Of course, what we're really doing is creating a collective and a community, a network across all of these institutions. And what we're able to accomplish together is much greater than what those of us based at the University of Minnesota could do alone.
What is Pub101 for Authors? Well, although this is the first time we've offered Pub101 for Authors, it's built on a very successful foundation, and that's Pub101. Pub101 was created for that librarian audience that I've mentioned, and it's been offered for several years now, both in person and online. And as we offered that to librarians, we realized that one of the things that may support their work and take something off their plate is adapting it and offering it directly to you as a potential author or an author of an open textbook. And so we want to support librarians and we also want to support you. You might be at an institution where you don't have a librarian you can turn to but you're still interested in creating an OER. And so we want to support you in that effort as well. If somebody wants to write an open textbook, we want to find ways to be there for them.
What we're here to do is introduce what's involved with writing and publishing an open textbook over the next several weeks. We're going to share lots of resources that you can adapt and use and also connect you with one another so that you don't feel as alone as you might if you are going it by yourself. We're going to provide a broad publishing foundation that's platform-agnostic. What I mean by that is there are 32 participants in this call right now, and potentially there could almost be 32 different ways that you decide to publish in terms of what tool you use, how you share. And so we're not going to get into the nitty-gritty of how you use a particular publishing tool. We're just going to lay a foundation that can be applied regardless of that. As I mentioned, we're also going to think about your institutional context, your connection, and how to look after yourself when you engage in this work, because it can be taxing.
It's sometimes also helpful to clarify what something is not, and Pub101 for Authors will not be how-to lessons on how to write a book. We're not going to go step-by-step and talk about how to do an introduction or how to create your chapters, but there is content related to that within the curriculum, and I'll talk more about the curriculum later. We also won't demo how to use different publishing tools, how to create a file, how to create a header, but we will have a session on creating an accessible book, which will discuss some of those things. So again, we're looking for big picture stuff that you can apply however you choose to write your book.
And finally, Pub101 for Authors is meant to be flexible and informal and meet you where you're at. So feel free to drop into the sessions when it works with your schedule. You don't have to let us know if you can't make it. There are suggested assignments or readings that we offer to you, but no one's going to be checking up on you and there's not a certificate involved. So it really is just meant to be something that works for your schedule and fits into your busy schedules.
Okay. So taking a further step back, let's start with the definition. What is an open textbook anyway? Well, it's free to the reader. The student does not have to pay to access that content. Now, that may mean, just to get into the weeds for a moment, you may choose to offer your open textbook in a variety of file formats, and sometimes people will choose to charge a nominal fee for a print, copy, for example. But that is not the only way to access the material. Somebody could read it online, somebody could down the PDF, and all of that would be for free.
In addition to being no cost for the reader, for the user, there are permissions on an open textbook, and typically those permissions are given through a Creative Commons license. And in a couple weeks, we will talk more about Creative Commons licenses and copyright and how they work together, but that is an important definition to open textbook, free to the reader with permission to edit through the Creative Commons license. And all of you are familiar with textbooks more broadly. You know that they're different from monographs. They have structure. The content is organized in a hierarchical way. There are pedagogical elements that are consistent in every chapter. For example, a chapter opens with a bulleted list of key points that will be covered, and perhaps every chapter ends with reflective questions that the students can ask themselves. Those are the kind of things that we're accustomed to seeing in a textbook, and these are the assumptions or the definition that we'll be operating with as we talk about open textbooks throughout the next few weeks.
I've already mentioned the Open Textbook Library. If you would like to browse and look at more examples of open textbooks and see examples of creative commons licenses and different structures, there are almost 2,000 examples in the OTL freely available for you to check out, adopt, and edit if you wish.
Okay. Now we've talked about what open textbooks are. Now we're going to spend some time talking about why we think open textbooks can be useful and why we spend all of this energy and effort in the OEN, supporting their development. Well, you know, and I know that everything continues to get more expensive, and that's true of education, and that's also true of the students' share of tuition. In Minnesota in 2024, students paid almost half, about 48% of their tuition cost compared to 1980 when they spent about 18%. So the financial responsibility that students feel for their education is increasing, and it can be a barrier to people continuing with their education, getting a degree, and moving through the system.
We can see here that when asking students, in your academic career, has the cost of textbooks caused you to not purchase the required textbook, slightly more than half said that was the case, 44% said, "I've taken fewer courses." Around 39% have decided not to register for a specific course. 32% have earned a poor grade. They think because they probably didn't buy the book or haven't used it, or about 24% have dropped a course because the cost of a required textbook. Now, all of these slides will be shared with you and the details in terms of the research, and where you can find it is in the notes of these slides as well, but this is a snapshot of some of the impact that high textbook costs have on students. And one reason why we've decided to focus on it as a means to make higher education more accessible to more people.
So thinking about that, some of the benefits of open textbooks include that students can have free access from day one, forever. There's not an expiration date. They don't have to wait until the course starts. You can customize an open textbook for your course, so you can really help it align with your syllabus, with your quizzes, with your lectures, and it can feel very integrated. It's possible to include more voices and perspectives in an open textbook. You can indigenize and localize content. For example, how a tribe in the United States might discuss the environment is very different than how a biologist may discuss the environment. And so you can create a textbook that will explore some of the differences and similarities in the way that different communities approach a topic or a subject.
You can easily update an open textbook. You have those files, you have permission to get in there and change what you want. So maybe you want to add a case study or a story, interviews, multimedia, and maybe you want to engage your students in creating that content and publishing that work together. And finally, another possible benefit is you can make an impact in your field as an author of an open textbook. When you share one in the open textbook library, it means it's discoverable. It means other faculty in your field can find it, they can choose to adopt it, and they can tell others about it in addition to posting a review. So it's really a way to get your work out there as well.
One example that you're going to hear about next week of an open textbook is botany in Hawaii. You're going to be joined by Daniela Dutra Elliot, a co-author of this book. And Daniela chose to write an open textbook because she teaches botany in Hawaii, and she found that the botany textbooks did not speak to the tropical plants that were in their surrounds. She wanted something that her students were familiar with, that many of her students had many generational history with. And so she created a book that would resonate with the students in Hawaii. And it's a really cool example. I'm very excited for her to share the story of how she created this book and share it with you. If you would like to take a look at that before next week, you can find her book at z.umn.edu/botany. I think Amanda is sharing those links in the chat, so you can go ahead and check it out. Bring any questions you might have for Daniela next week.
Another benefit of open textbooks is that students assigned them are almost twice as likely to report using them, which of course is a pretty great benefit. Students use them more frequently and for more time per week overall in this particular study, and so that is an encouraging information. Students assigned open textbooks also perceived a greater degree of overlap between the textbook, the lecture, and the quiz material. This is what I was just talking about a moment ago. You can customize your book to coordinate with the rest of your course.
Maybe you choose to have one chapter aligned with one week of instruction. There's all sorts of potential, but to have that integrated feeling can help students relate all of these different pieces of their learning experience, what's happening in the classroom, what they're being tested on, what they're reading in the book, and so on.
Perhaps you've been inspired. Something inspired you to come to this meeting and set aside an hour of your time before now. Hopefully this additional research and information is continuing to boost your inspiration. And so if students have been asking for help and you're thinking this might be a way to offer that assistance, welcome.
Perhaps you are on a campus where you've heard about OER, there might be an initiative or grant support. That's great. Maybe administrators are starting to move towards OER. They often do so because the return on investment can be very clearly shown. When you show how much money you're saving students by using open textbooks, it's a really great illustration of how institutions care for their students and are taking into account affordability issues. And finally, you might be starting to think about how writing an open textbook can contribute to your professional goals and get out there the ways that you teach your subject, you share your expertise with others.
Let's pause. I'll take a breath and a sip of water. And in the chat, if you could please share why you're here, why you're interested in writing an open textbook. Just a brief blip. If any of the ideas on the previous slide resonate with you, or if you have another idea, please share.
Amanda: Deanne says that, "Unhappy with current OER textbooks in my field, US history." Tiara said, "I want to write a text that speaks directly to my students in my class that come from a variety of backgrounds and interests. I want to gear examples of media around their interests." That's a great idea. Marco, "Sent the open education librarian at the University of Idaho where I support faculty. I'm here for inspiration." Justin said, "Each time I teach my class, I add more and more out of text materials to the point where I'm starting to wonder if I need the text at all." I've been there myself. Kelly says, "I want to have a text that more closely aligns with my students' backgrounds and professional goals in a format that works for my department's makeup." So we're seeing a lot of this theme of customizability.
Gary says, "I'm tired of my students having to pay over $200 for a textbook and I, sorry to brag, think that I could do a better job. Our school is pushing it and does have grants and I need to learn more about." That's what you're here for, learn stuff. Christopher says, "We're starting an initiative to encourage more instructors to use OERs. That's exciting. I want to be better able to help students and instructors the best way I can." Eric says, "I'm interested in creating and providing a resource that they would actually use in our English classes that we could also change and update based on student needs." Erica says, "I'm in the library and supporting tutor with the adoption and creation of OER. They're currently writing a tutorial, an OER tutorial for creating virtual escape rooms." Oh, that sounds really cool.
Karen: There are so many cool things in the chat.
Amanda: So many. Thank you for everybody participating. I'm going to stop there so we can get back, but thank you for participating. This is all really cool stuff.
Karen: It is. And it's great to see that there's a combination of librarians and faculty. It's really nice to have that web of support, people coming from different perspectives, but it sounds like we're all in this shared space and that a lot of these reasons we've been exploring are resonating, and it's really exciting to learn about the details of your projects, so thank you. Okay.
I got a little playful with my grammar here. We talked about why open textbooks, and now we're going to talk about how open textbooks, if you will allow me that playfulness. How is it that open textbooks come to exist? What are these different systems? Some of you mentioned that, "Oh, I think this is a thing at my institution and then there is a grant program." We're going to talk a little bit about that now.
First and foremost, I just want to lay the foundation that publishing can mean many things, and we're here for all of those things. There's a lot of synonyms for publishing that I see in this space. You might identify as a creator, an author, a writer, a maker. Great. You might want to start from scratch because you have all those lecture notes from over the years, or maybe you want to browse the library and take something that's already been written and just move some things around and make some small editions, in which case, you would be adapting, editing, or modifying, which is perfectly allowed and encouraged with the Creative Commons license. There's also the simple act of sharing. So posting a file, working with your library to share that PDF, that is also an important part of publishing.
And again, I'm just going to keep mentioning open pedagogy because I think it's a really fun potential way to bring open educational practices into the classroom and work with students. If you are interested in learning more about it, the Open Education Network has open pedagogy learning circles. I'd be happy to share more information about those. Amanda, who is here with us, is also an expert in that area, so let us know. And then finally, you might be working by yourself, you might be working with a lot of people. However you're going to slice your open textbook pie, we welcome you and it is publishing. You are publishing. Sometimes there's some reticence or shyness about that, but that is absolutely what you're doing.
Now we're just going to take a brief look at publishing models. So on the left, we have a publisher. The publisher publishes the textbook. The textbook is then offered to the students for a price, which then goes back to the publisher. This is our familiar commercial traditional textbook publishing model. Now, some of that, sales money, will go back to the author in terms of royalties. It's usually a single digit percentage. It's usually quite modest. It is usually not what people dream of in terms of, "Oh, perhaps I can fund my own child's education with my textbook money." Unless you're like a super, super, superstar and you really hit gold, it's probably going to be something quite modest.
Okay. Now let's look at the slight variation of that model or the open textbook publishing model that is frequently how many of the books in the Open Textbook Library came into being. So instead of the publisher funding the textbook, a college or university decides to fund the textbook, and then that textbook gets into students' hands without cost. It is still possible that the author will receive, instead of royalties, some compensation. Maybe that's course release time, maybe it's a grant, maybe it is some other fee upon deliverable, but it doesn't mean that the author is writing the work for free, although sometimes that happens too. But in this particular model, the college and university is engaged and funding this progress.
Now, where does the college and university get their funding? Sometimes it comes from foundations, from state government or from consortia. There are different initiatives that support it. Now, what is true between both of these models is that there is copyright. So whether you're on the publisher traditional side or whether you're on the open textbook college university side, your work is still your work. It is still copyrighted and it is still attributed to you. And again, we will talk more in detail about that in about two weeks.
Now, in addition to the infrastructure that Creative Commons licenses provide, there is also, of course, infrastructure that you need to publish. And while we're not going to get into different publishing tools in Pub101, I am going to talk about the infrastructure that's available to you as someone who's at an institution that is affiliated with the OEN. First, Pressbooks, which is a popular and common open textbook publishing platform, Pressbooks offers a discount to OEN institutional members. It's 20%. So if you're an institutional member of the OEN and you see that you and your colleagues are starting to want to publish, Pressbooks can offer a discount in order to access their tools.
That may still not be financially feasible for you, or maybe Pressbooks doesn't quite offer what it is you want. The OEN also has a Manifold community. Manifold is the name of another publishing platform that does things a little bit differently. There are some trade-offs between Manifold and Pressbooks, but we offer access to anyone in the OEN community who would like to publish to Manifold, and that comes at no additional cost.
We also are experimenting with different community-based publishing infrastructure that includes a tool called Ketty, which is in a very preliminary experimental stage. And then we also have a relationship with something called publishing back office provider that's scribe services. So they do things like proofreading, copy editing, design. So if you are in a well-resourced program or you do have some money that you would like to spend on another pair of eyes to proofread your manuscript before you share it, we have resources that can help with that as well.
Okay. We've talked about what open textbooks are, why you might want to use them, and how they come to be in many different colleges and universities. Now we're going to turn to you personally and thinking about your capacity to write an open textbook. So many of you are thinking about this. Where do you start?
First, we suggest that you start by assessing your environment. Do find out if there's a librarian there who wants to help, who can help. Do find out if your administrators are offering funds. Do some research. Maybe your Center for Teaching and Learning has publishing tools and other things that can help and they have training that they could offer you. Maybe there are people in your department who are also interested in doing this and you want to write together as a team. Definitely take some time to assess your environment, explore, and know what your options are before you sit down... I was going to say, before you sit down with a piece of paper and start writing, but however you decide to sit down and start writing, do some assessment first.
We've already talked about some of the partners that may be available to you. They include students, librarians, instructional designers, your colleagues, even the bookstore. You might be at an institution where there's a university press and they have publishing support or guidance they can offer, or within your academic units. There are lots of people out there and a lot of them want to help. I think especially once they hear the details of your project and why it is you want to do this, it can really get other people excited and want to help you.
Okay. Our next break, brief break, our question for you, in a word or two or three, how would you describe your capacity for publishing an open textbook today? This could be both within a personal professional context like, "I'm learning about this now, but I know I'm two years out because I have a newborn," or, "I'm ready to go and I'm going to start next week," or, "I'm waiting for my institution to catch up with me. I'm going to have a persuasive conversation with a couple people and go there." How are you feeling? How would you describe your readiness to dig into this work? Please take a moment to respond in the chat.
Amanda: Okay. Somebody is... We have, "Resource hunting, writing a chapter for one for the department this summer. Going to get my feet wet before I launch into my own." Nascent, that seems fair. "There's support from the university and plan to start writing after the semester's over." Alan has started and has 2,000 words. That's a celebration.
Karen: Woo.
Amanda: Yes, there's probably still a long way to go, but you started. That's exciting. "Plan to finish in the summer." Somebody has written an OER already. That's lovely.
Karen: Jonathan, it'll be great as we go along these weeks. Feel free to share what you've learned through the process of writing.
Amanda: What went wrong? What went right in your process? There's always something else going on. Yeah, the idea that we're super busy. "Just need to commit some time to do it. Plan to start for about six months from now." So we have people in a lot of different stages of this process, which is really exciting.
Karen: A math graphic novel also sounds exciting. Very cool.
Amanda: Does sound very exciting. Also, I'm going to link we have, and I put a little bit of context for this. We also have a capacity scanned worksheet that you can take a look at if you want to work through what your capacity might be. It has some questions to help guide you through the process.
Karen: Yeah, thank you, Amanda. And Gary, I don't know if you need inspiration or if you already have it, but I've been reading some fun legal graphic novels about history of music and the public domain. They're in a comic book style and they make some legal education really exciting and fun. So if you're interested in that, I'm happy to share some of that inspiration.
Okay. Well, no matter what stage you're at, Pub101 for Authors can help you. That is a bold claim and I'm here to make it. Let's talk now about what to expect over the next several weeks. As I mentioned, today's session is a broad orientation. It's a little bit different than what you're going to get in the following sessions, all of which will be co-hosted by Pub101 committee members and featuring presenters who have been down this road before and they want to help smooth the path for you.
Next week, we're going to talk about audience scope and structure. I mentioned Daniela's book, Botany in Hawaii. You'll hear about how she thought about her students, how she scoped her book, how she decided to structure it based on her course. And then the following week, we'll talk about accessibility. You'll notice how early on accessibility is in our program. And that's because we really encourage you to think about it first and foremost, not think about it as something to remediate at the end. It'll be so much easier for you and so much better structured for your students if you build accessibility in from the start.
After that, we're going to talk about copyright, creative comments, fair use, how to navigate all of these things when you're including resources from different places, how they work together, how we wish they worked together, but they don't yet work together. And then we're also going to spend some time on project management. You'll hear from a Penn State team who worked together in a fairly large group, how they accomplished that, how they had contributors from around the world. And then you'll hear from a librarian faculty author team on April 29th, how they worked together, how they built on their strengths. And both of those sessions will talk about some of the more uncomfortable things that came up and how they navigated that. Then Amanda will be hosting the May 6th session, pedagogical and AI considerations. And then we'll finish with, you're published, you did it. Now what? How do you share it? How do you get it out there? How do you maintain your publication? So that's a snapshot of what is going to be covered over the next several Wednesdays.
If you haven't noticed already, Pub101 is pretty low-key. There are no assignments, so come when you can. This is really a place for you to begin. And so all of your questions are welcome. We won't be recording the Q&A so that you feel more comfortable speaking up or asking something you feel like you think maybe you should know. This is just really a place for you to come if you can make every session or drop in and out and get what you can.
Our vibes, of course, are friendly. We are here to learn, share, and connect together. We're going to participate in authentic and constructive ways. We've already done that. Thank you so much for what you've shared in the chat. And I have no doubt that we will share consideration and respect for others. So thank you again for joining us and creating this community together.
Now I'm going to talk about Pub101 curriculum. I mentioned it at the beginning. It's something that the committee has spent time revising for you and author audience. And I just want to highlight how these sessions connect to the curriculum and how that curriculum is there for you as a resource.
The curriculum is comprised of four units. Unit one, what is an open textbook? I touched on some of those things today, but go much deeper in the curriculum. Unit two, planning your open textbook, assessing your capacity, mapping things out, thinking about those pedagogical elements in terms of how you want to structure each chapter. Unit three, developing your open textbook, how you're going to work with others, what are the project management skills involved, really thinking about how you're going to do the hard work when so many other things keep coming up and taking priority. And then finally, no surprise, AI is a huge part of our conversation in higher ed and across our whole lives. And so we would be remiss if we did not also explore how GenAI is impacting the creation of open textbooks and how you may or may not want to use it in the creation of yours.
I would also like to mention that there are many resources in the curriculum. For example, when that Penn State team is here talking about project management, they're going to discuss memorandums of understanding, or MOUs. You do not have to create an MOU from scratch. We have several examples for you in the curriculum, and we highly recommend them. Even if you're just working with one other person, you might want to think about using it. It's really a communication or a clarification tool so that everyone knows what's expected of them, who's going to do what, what the timeline is. They're just really great tools for working on complex projects. We also have things like style guides, which are helpful. If you're working with multiple authors, you can all kind of use the same style. We have toolkits, which are basically collections of different forms that you can adapt for your needs. So whenever you think to yourself, "Oh, what I really need is," fill in the blank, the curriculum probably has it for you.
Now, in terms of what we hope and want for you to get out of this, it is the following: the ability to identify key elements of an open textbook, which we talked about today, reflect on your capacity to write one, which we've just started to do, identify support that may be available at your institution, apply project management methods and strategies, and always, I feel like this is actually the most important thing or the closest to my heart, which is consider the human elements of writing and publishing and reading a book. This is an intimate human act. And so think about yourself as a human. You're not a writing machine. Hopefully you don't have to put too much pressure on yourself or others. There are ways to really celebrate our humanness in creating this resource for other humans. And then finally, we want to help you identify vetted resources that can support your project, like those templates I was just talking about.
Now I would like to share with you what I call One-Stop Google Doc, which looks suspiciously like a syllabus, but since this is an informal low-key experience, syllabus doesn't seem like quite the right word. This is an overview of each week, who's going to be talking, what the takeaways will be. It is there for you at z.umn.edu/pub-authors. Amanda's also dropping it in the chat. It's just a great thing to bookmark if ever in between meetings, you're wondering, where do I go for this? What's happening? I can't remember what she said. It's probably covered in this document.
For example, we are going to record most, but not all of the sessions. Those will be posted to our 2026 YouTube playlist. We are aiming to do that prior to the next week's meeting, so pretty quick turnaround. If you want to be notified when that video is available, simply subscribe to that playlist. If you're wondering, where is that YouTube playlist? It's in the One-Stop doc. It's linked from there. That's where you can find it. Same thing with links to our blog, which is where transcripts and chat will be posted. And as I mentioned earlier, we will not record or transcribe Q&A just so that you feel like you can really chat informally, let your hair down, ask your questions. So there are some Pub101 housekeeping for you. Please keep the One-Stop Doc in an easily accessible place.
And finally, I've already gone on a bit about how excited I am that we're all human beings, which is also why I think it's important to take care. As we progress through this, it's really easy for us to be hard on ourselves. I saw a little bit of that even in the chat. Other things keep getting in the way, or there are so many demands on us, especially in higher ed right now. It can be a dispiriting time. And so we don't want you to feel isolated. You have people you can turn to, but creating a resource like this, a textbook, can be really heavy lift sometimes, especially if you're working with collaborators. There could be misunderstandings and tough conversations. Maybe someone wants to use technology you haven't used before. All of this can shake things up a little bit. So we always encourage you to take care of yourselves and one another and let us know how we can help.
As I mentioned, next week you'll be hearing from Daniela. That will be hosted by Micah, who is a Pub101 committee member and also at the University of Minnesota where I am based. Then I also mentioned earlier that this is the first time we've offered Pub101. We did a lot of work gathering input, asking people, librarians, and faculty authors what they thought was important to include in the curriculum and in this experience. And we've done our best to incorporate that feedback into what you're about to experience, but we also want to hear from you when it's fresh. So if you could please go to z.umn.edu/pub3, that will take you to what I promise is a super short Google form where you can just let us know at the end of every session. You're going to see this slide at the end of every session. "This is what I thought or you know what? I really hoped that you would cover this other thing." Please tell us. There's no other way for us to know, and so we really appreciate your input and the colleagues who will come after you really appreciate your input.
As you do that, I want to say thank you. You're here because you are committed to your student's success and you want to make things better, and that's a big deal. You're here because you're willing and eager to learn more, another big deal. And so I'm thankful for your interest in joining us. If you have any questions in the interim, please feel free to email open@umn.edu. I will receive that email along with a few of my other colleagues and get back to you as soon as possible.
I'm just going to go back to this link so that you can fill out this form and then we can transition to Q&A. So I'm going to stop recording and see you on the other side of the screen share.
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