A few of you have said that you were unable to download/read the attachment, so I am including the ³Vision Document² below:

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Utah OpenTextbooks Project

Overview: The Utah OpenTextbooks Project will cultivate a grassroots community of K-12 teachers, students, university professors, educational administrators, and concerned citizens within the state of Utah, with the intent of creating open, free textbooks, along with supplemental digital learning materials, for educational use.

The Vision: Within 5-10 years (2010-2015), we see the following as within reach: * Utah Saving Millions of $$$ in Textbook Costs: The state of Utah could save literally millions of dollars a year in textbook costs by replacing expensive textbooks with free, open textbooks (currently the annual K-12 budget for textbooks in Utah alone is $20M) * UTAH State Standards: Utah OpenTextbooks will be directly \aligned with both Utah state curriculum and local priorities/preferences‹and will not be oriented towards the curriculum, preferences, or social norms of other states (e.g. New York, California, Florida, and Texas). * Helping Teachers Teach Better, with Less Time Commitment: A major goal of ours is to SIMPLIFY teacher¹s lives, by providing them with time-saving course materials, while still helping them improve their overall instruction. A few ideas include:

• Teacher subject matter knowledge and passion will increase through

participation in the ³online teacher communities², as well as through increased direct involvement in both content development and selection.

• By allowing teachers to share with each other quality digital supplemental

course material designed around a specific textbook (multimedia clips for lectures, digital self-paced learning objects for student homework, test banks, classroom exercises, etc), we hope to dramatically simplify teacher¹s overall jobs, while still helping them improve their level of instruction

* Helping Students Learn More via Social Networks and Digital Content‹Today, our competition for student time includes alternatives like Xbox, MTV, Internet Forums, etc. By intermingling student learning with social groups via a digital medium, we hope to create a Œspecial sauce¹ that will lead to increased student interest, involvement and enjoyment in learning like never before (making it ³cool² to learn, from a social perspective, and allowing students to develop/foster social relationships within a learning context).

• Subject-specific online learning communities for students will be

cultivated, such that students can ³socialize² with other students from around the state in a learning environment (killing 3 birds with one stone by facilitating learning, socialization, and fun simultaneously).

• Classroom lectures/activities become better for students, by providing

professors with better materials for lectures and activities (see above)

• By providing students with well-designed digital learning objects (digital

text, self-paced learning modules, multimedia clips, etc), students can learn at their own pace, in a digital environment that is more familiar, and potentially more compelling.

• As the communities begin to mature, city-wide and even state-wide

competitions could be held (think of online or state-wide history or math tournaments), where students gain notoriety/respect/success (ratings? Rankings?) for excelling within specific subject areas.

How We Will Do This: 1. Online Community: For starters, we will create an online community of educators, and actively recruit participants. Currently, this forum is located at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/utahopentextbooks. We will seek to recruit members from: a) contacts in Logan/Cache Valley and at Utah State University, b) the Utah Educators Association, c) the Utah Educators Network, and d) any other area/forum where Utah educators congregate. 2. The ³Kernel² (our 1st Textbook)‹To borrow on a software-related metaphor, the ³kernel² of our efforts will be the creation of a single community and textbook (we are thinking U.S. History to start with). We will try to find an author of an existing text (or other opentextbook initiative) who is willing to ³donate² their textbook to our cause as a foundation. If we can¹t find this, we will seek grant money to pay 4 or 5 university professors and/or teachers $20K each ($100K total) to help design the 1st textbook over a year¹s time. This book will be developed:

1. DIRECTLY based on Utah State curriculum requirements
2. With EXTENSIVE input from real, live, active teachers in the given field
3. With a ³Wiki² approach (see www.wikipedia.org http://www.wikipedia.org ).

While we are intent on approaching the design of this text w/ a spirit of openness and community, we will optimize around creating a quality text in a reasonable amount of time (1 year?)‹and will sacrifice openness (in terms of authoring, not input) to ensure a quality/timely release. 2 potential models for development include:

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1. 5 paid authors‹thousands of volunteer reviewers
2. Thousands of volunteer authors‹5 paid editors/reviewers (gate-keepers)

4. Digital Content: We will seek to obtain digital content for the textbook

from any/all available sources, including the Library of Congress, National Archives, National Science Foundation, other learning object repositories, etc.

3. Printing and Evangelizing the Textbook: While this textbook will be fully digital/online, it will also be available via print. We will locate a printer who is able to print a quality version of this text (hard copy?) for under $5/copy. Once the 1st textbook is completed, it will be evangelized to charter schools, school districts, and even the state of Utah for pilot usage. 4. Supplemental Digital Content Libraries: Once the text is completed (or perhaps in parallel), the community will be invited to submit digital ³learning objects² to supplement the text. Possible items for submission will include:

1. Lesson plans, including supplemental digital multimedia
2. Group exercises
3. Student homework /assignments
4. Test questions
5. Other supplemental instruction or learning materials

What will differentiate our content repository from the plethora of other ³failed² content repositories is: 1. It will be directly associated with a specific course/textbook, instead of generic subjects‹thus teachers will have much more of a direct interest in participating. 2. By fostering usage within a unified state/system‹we will be able to create a critical mass of community members, with enough in common, and with enough mutual familiarity, to add real value to the individual members. The content will be created and evangelized via a local community of teachers (³viral marketing²) 3. The content (text and digital learning objects) will be rated by teachers AND learners, such that a ³virtual feedback loop² will be digitally enabled (leading to dramatic content improvement). As far as learning objects go, only a few of the VERY BEST content objects will be recommended for each section of instruction. In other words‹SIMPLIFIED CHOICES, SUPER HIGH QUALITY.

And of course, this initiative will likely solve world peace, world hunger, and general moral decayŠbut I wanted to keep predictions relatively conservative at this point. J