The effort spent peer reviewing and rendering Open Textbooks accessible will not
The effort spent peer reviewing and rendering Open Textbooks accessible will not be well expended unless these texts find their way into the university classroom. It is therefore important to discuss strategies and challenges for disseminating Open Textbooks, so they can help to create a more equitable education system. Similar to the work on curation and testing, Rebus’ marketing efforts are in their early stages and present a diverse set of issues. Consequently, this section focuses on the range of issues Rebus is experiencing in marketing, promoting, and updating community-supported Open Textbooks.
4.1 How Do We Get Them into the Classroom?
Marketing is the primary problem in introducing Open Textbooks into university classrooms. At present, there is not enough awareness of open educational resources. According to a 2014 survey conducted in the United States, only one-third of the 2,144 faculty polled (15.2%) were aware of Open Textbooks and 33.1% found OERs more difficult to find than traditional resources (Allen and Seaman 2014). Open Textbooks, particularly Rebus’ iteration, have numerous benefits for professors. Usually, professors have to plan their courses based on information already contained in a traditional textbook, which can restrict the scope of material they cover, or alternatively, must assign students more than one book per course. With Open Textbooks, however, professors have more flexibility in designing courses without burdening students further financially.
Given the status quo, Rebus is currently prioritizing making instructors aware of the resources it offers. In so doing, Rebus relies upon principles of the AIDA funnel: Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action (Barry 1987). Guided by these principles, it aims to make instructors aware of its products, with the final goal being that they desire it enough to act and adopt Rebus books (Barry 1987).
Rebus is beginning to develop its model for marketing: they currently have published only one textbook while others are at in classroom beta testing. Marketing these books is thus still unknown territory. Moreover, Rebus has a very small marketing budget, which inhibits the kind of advertising it can commit to. However, Rebus has done significant work despite this lack of funding by leveraging networks of contributors including authors, editors, and reviewers to adopt the book or to reach out to others to do the same. Since the proven efficacy and trusted quality of a resource are the highest criteria for faculty to adopt Open Textbooks, this type of word-of-mouth approach has worked well for Rebus thus far (Allen and Seaman 2014).
Having books peer reviewed significantly encourages adoption, as this indicates the reliability of the textbook as a resource. Karen Lauritsen from the Open Textbook Network noted that approximately 40% of reviewers end up adopting the text post the review, likely because they have been convinced of the quality of the resource (Rebus 2017). As Rebus bri