People Who Built Open Educational Resources

Baraniuk founded Connexions at Rice as a way to assemble and share teaching material online. That work grew into OpenStax’s publication of free, openly licensed textbooks. Start with him to see how a project for sharing pieces of a course can lead to full books that instructors can assign and adapt.

Abelson served on the faculty committee that proposed OpenCourseWare at MIT. The proposal put syllabuses, assignments, and other course materials within reach of readers outside the university. MIT's reuse terms let instructors adapt much of that material for noncommercial teaching under the same license.

Wiley helped instructors use and adapt open materials through Lumen Learning. His course design framework makes a practical distinction between a resource you can read for free and one you can revise and share. A teacher who needs to rearrange lessons for a different class can use that distinction when choosing materials.

Horner helped build Siyavula, whose open math and science textbooks were developed with teachers, academics, and other contributors. The books are aligned to school curricula and offered in formats that include web and print. Siyavula offers some unbranded editions under Creative Commons Attribution, while its branded open editions can be shared without changes. That combination matters when a class needs an assigned text that can be read on a phone or used on paper.

Wieman founded PhET at the University of Colorado Boulder. Its simulations give a class something to test by changing a variable and observing what follows. Try a PhET lesson for an example of open educational work built around an interactive model. The regular web simulations have a Creative Commons license for noncommercial use.

McCallum was the lead author of the Illustrative Mathematics middle-school curriculum published by Open Up Resources under Creative Commons Attribution. Lessons give teachers tasks and routines for a classroom organized around solving problems. The materials let a teacher see how that approach could work across a unit, with room to adapt it for a class.

Jhangiani adapted Paul C. Price’s Research Methods in Psychology for Canadian students, then coauthored the second Canadian edition with I-Chant Chiang. The edition revised examples and materials to reflect the Canadian context, including the ethics of research involving people. It shows how an open textbook can be edited for the place where it will actually be taught.

McGuire founded Pressbooks, a publishing platform used by colleges and other groups to make open textbooks. Its books can be read online, and instructors can use it to adapt eligible materials. Pressbooks made the editing and publishing process part of the work of getting an open textbook into a classroom.