We threw the switch this morning, launching the OER pilot program. It's a small-scale initiative, intended to support the integration of open textbooks into 10 courses within the 2017/2018 academic year. There are two branches - faculty advocacy, and project implementation. The implementation is being let by my team at the Taylor Institute, working with the University of Calgary's OER Faculty Advocate and his team.
We'll be hiring a graduate student to act as a research assistant for the program, who will help coordinate the various projects - hopefully 10 concurrent projects with instructors working with up to 20 undergraduate students to identify good candidate resources for use in a course, which will be reviewed by a graduate student (and the instructor) before being integrated into the course.
The pilot has been designed to give full autonomy to the instructors - they have to opt into the program, and they will be working directly with the students as much as they'd like to discover and review potential OER and open textbook candidates.
More info about how the program will run is available on the website, as well as the application form for instructors to sign up to participate.
This first pilot program is entirely focused on adopting existing open textbooks - ideally, as a "simple" replacement of commercial resources within a course. We may be exploring adopting and authoring in subsequent stages of the program, but to start we need to keep things simple.
I'll post info to the open.ucalgary.ca website once we've got the 10 projects selected, with updates as the open textbooks are integrated into the courses.