In October, the U.S. Department of Education awarded nearly $7 million in grants to four projects in the 2026 Open Textbook Pilot program. This brings the total amount awarded since the program began in 2018 to $61 million. The funding has received bipartisan support from Congress to expand the development of open textbooks to benefit students across the country.
Here’s an overview of the new 2026 grant recipients:
Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC)
The Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) received $1.99 million to develop six openly licensed textbooks and supporting materials for professional-technical (ProfTech) programs. This marks SBCTC’s third federal Open Textbook Pilot grant, bringing its total funding to nearly $6 million since 2021.
SBCTC’s first $1.8 million grant in 2021 supported six open textbooks and ancillary materials in criminal justice, machining, hospitality, early childhood education, healthcare, and welding. (See SPARC’s 2021 recipient profile.) A second $2.1 million grant in 2023 funded seven additional textbooks in fields including forensic science, information technology, cloud computing, clinical informatics, culinary mathematics, computer-aided design, and medical law and ethics. (See SPARC’s 2023 recipient profile.)
Together, the grants have helped SBCTC establish a statewide, faculty-driven model for developing open textbooks in career and technical education, an area historically underserved by OER, said Boyoung Chae, open education policy associate at SBCTC, who has served as principal investigator and project director for all three grants.
The initiative has also seen growing interest in developing OER for professional-technical programs. While the first grant relied on advisory groups to recruit authors, the second issued a statewide call for proposals, receiving 115 submissions and selecting seven. For Chae, the response demonstrated faculty enthusiasm for creating open textbooks tailored to the needs of professional-technical programs and their students.
To support the authors, SBCTC developed a collaborative production process that brings together faculty, instructional designers, librarians, accessibility specialists, editors, and external subject matter experts. Faculty receive training and ongoing support throughout the writing process, while external reviewers provide feedback to strengthen the accuracy, quality, and relevance of the textbooks.
“There’s real excitement and curiosity for open textbooks for the professional technical programs,” Chae said. “I’m so proud of the momentum that this project has created.”
With the third grant, SBCTC will build on five years of experience while exploring how AI can make OER development more efficient. A key deliverable will be an AI-assisted OER production toolkit to help faculty use AI responsibly and effectively in textbook creation.
The grant will support six new Open ProfTech textbooks: Pharmacology for the Pharmacy Technician; Foundations of Mechatronics; Criminal Investigation and Policing; Introduction to Dental Assisting; Health, Safety, and Nutrition; and Blueprint Reading for Manufacturing. All textbooks and supporting materials will be freely available and openly licensed for educators and students to use, adapt, and share.
Chippewa Valley Technical College (WisTech Open)
A new $1.67 million federal grant to develop open early childhood education textbooks is the latest in a series of federal and state investments supporting WisTech Open, a statewide consortium of Wisconsin’s 16 technical colleges. Led by Chippewa Valley Technical College (CVTC), the initiative develops free, openly licensed educational resources that save students millions of dollars annually while expanding access to high-quality instructional materials.
In 2019, CVTC received a $2.5 million federal Open Textbook Pilot grant to develop five nursing textbooks and 25 virtual reality scenarios through Open RN. The project later expanded to include additional textbooks and updated editions, establishing the foundation for WisTech Open. Additional state investments supported expansion into early childhood education, general education, health sciences, and technical programs. Today, Open RN alone saves more than 40,000 Wisconsin students nearly $7 million annually in textbook costs.
(See SPARC’s Open RN impact story.)
The latest federal award will support Bright Beginnings, an early childhood education initiative launched in 2023. The project will develop six new, no-cost digital textbooks, accompanying instructional resources, and AI-supported learning tools. These resources will complement three existing textbooks, creating a comprehensive collection aligned with Wisconsin’s early childhood education curriculum and workforce needs.
Building on established publishing processes, WisTech Open will collaborate with faculty and educational partners throughout Wisconsin to develop and review the resources. The consortium surveyed educators to better understand the need for affordable textbooks and interest in participating.
“The feedback in the field was that they were hungry for this,” said Vince Mussehl, director of WisTech Open. “It’s a low-income discipline where graduates don’t make a ton of money. We want to help them and improve the path to make education easier.”
The project will emphasize accessibility and student engagement through custom instructional videos, interactive activities, and AI-supported tutoring tools. Materials will be designed to meet applicable accessibility standards and support a variety of learning needs.
Once all nine textbooks are completed, Bright Beginnings is projected to support more than 13,000 annual course enrollments and generate approximately $1.70 million in annual textbook savings across Wisconsin’s technical colleges and high schools. The openly licensed resources will also be available for educators nationwide to adopt and adapt.
Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Commission
With this round of grant funding prioritizing workplace readiness, Oregon decided to make communications courses the center of its application. The Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Commission received $1.71 million in federal money to develop OER between October 2026 and September 2029. This news was also shared via FIPSE Awards Second OER Grant to Oregon.
“Communications courses are really relevant to workforce development,” said Amy Hofer, statewide open education program director of Open Oregon Educational Resources. “That’s always at the top of the list of skills that employers want.”
The project will be run out of Linn-Benton Community College, the administrative home of Open Oregon Educational Resources. The new grant will build on the groundwork laid by the 2021 federal grant funding the program received to create open textbooks and course packs in criminal justice, sociology, and human development and family sciences. More information on the first Oregon grant is available via Open Curriculum Projects Launch in Oregon and Beyond.
“I’m really excited. We have all the documentation of what we need to do,” Hofer said. “We’re going to repeat the model – based on what we learned in the pilot – and make four new textbooks and course packs.”
The new textbooks will be: 1) Introduction to Communication; 2) Public Speaking; 3) Interpersonal Communication and 4) Small Group Communication. These courses are part of Oregon’s initiative to have common course numbers, shared descriptions and learning outcomes for the highest transferred courses. This creates a big opportunity to design OER that is tailored to the new statewide course outcomes.
Bringing textbook costs to zero in these high-enrollment courses is expected to save an average of $59 per student. Total savings are projected to be $219,000 during the grant period and $2 million per year after 2029.
The textbook savings from the last grant far exceeded the team’s expectations. The target was to save 2,700 students $370,000, but 7,151 students actually saved $730,265. [See More Bang for No Bucks]
Hofer said she worked closely with Veronica Vold, an instructional designer from the first grant, to create materials and professional development for authors that are aligned with the project’s criteria for success. Hiring for the project is underway and virtual professional development for authors will kick off in January.
“I’m hoping that we can demonstrate this model is really effective to make open textbooks and course packs,” Hofer said. “And then capture funding to be able to do this with more common course numbered courses in Oregon.”
University of New Mexico
The first Open Textbook Pilot grant from the federal government got OER going in New Mexico, creating a consortium and developing publication processes. The $2.1 million given to the state in 2023 was targeted at building awareness and coordinating materials primarily at large institutions in urban areas, such as Albuquerque and Santa Fe.
The new $1.55 million grant for 2026-2028 is intended to expand the program outside the north-central part of the state to serve more rural schools, according to Jennifer Jordan, OER librarian at the University of New Mexico and the principal investigator on the project.
“We can hit the ground running,” said Jordan, who will use the same OER editor and multimedia specialist to assist with the development of open textbooks with this second round of funding. “The focus is to spread [OER] to smaller schools that can have potentially greater impact and support faculty.”
Jordan applauds faculty from the first grant for their ability to develop OER quickly from chemistry to New Mexico history to poetry books. [See The New Mexico OER catalog.] The state surpassed its goal, saving 15,000 students nearly $2 million since 2024.
In addition to financial benefits, Jordan said instructors were able to adapt textbooks by adding activities and images to make the material more engaging. “Faculty added experiences that would resonate with a student from this particular part of the country – customizing the content,” Jordan said.
The federal grant money has helped the state establish a community of practice for OER developers.
The aim with this new grant is to save 40,000 students $3 million in textbook costs in general education courses. Jordan is doing outreach now to identify the high-enrollment courses best suited for OER and share existing OER with schools that have not yet adopted what’s available.
“There’s a lot of amazing, creative people here with really distinct voices working on OER,” Jordan said. “And we want students to feel like their course materials are relevant, so I’m super excited to help enable that through the funding.”