The expansion of open educational resources (OER) adoption by faculty requires mentorship, guidance, and comradery to create a community of adopters. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. Here we outline the Open Textbook Initiative (OTI) facilitated by the Open Education Working Group at Millersville University, specifically focusing on the value of mentoring adopters. The working group is a community of early OER adopters and passionate enthusiasts consisting of teaching faculty, librarians, and instructional designers. With support from the university administration, our working group developed the OTI as a grassroots effort to create an environment in which OER adopters support, learn, and grow with one another.
Beyond the Credential Factory: Why Higher Education Must Shift from Management to Flourishing
For decades, higher education leadership has obsessed over “student success” as a purely operational metric. We track retention and graduation rates and postgraduation outcomes with the same linear precision that
Yoshitaka Iwasaki
August 3, 2026
