WASHINGTON, D.C. – Earlier this year, the Saylor Foundation (http://www.saylor.org) released four openly licensed, college-level textbooks as part of its ongoing Open Textbook Challenge (OTC), an initiative that offers $20,000 to college textbook authors to license his or her work under a CC BY 3.0 license. Now in its second wave of funding, the Challenge has received a boost of support, thanks to a grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Under its mission to make education freely available for all, the Saylor Foundation provides an option for education-seeking individuals facing financial or geographical barriers by employing university professors to compile high-quality, college-level courseware.

“In the US alone, millions of students are being turned back by community colleges, and four year institutions as prices continue to sky rocket and seats are being eliminated due to dramatic budget cuts,” said Victor Vuchic, Program Officer of Open Educational Resources for The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. “It is in this context that Saylor.org is using the power of Open Educational Resources to build a comprehensive, high quality open course system to provide access to the millions of learners in the US and around the world that desperately need it.”

The OTC is one of the Saylor Foundation’s initiatives to diminish this accessibility gap by addressing the challenge of rising textbook costs. Submitted texts that pass the Foundation’s peer review process and align with one of the eligible courses are entitled to the $20,000 prize, and will be made freely available via Saylor.org. By opening up these textbooks to the world, textbook authors and college professors can positively impact worldwide student learning.

“We believe that the textbooks we relicensed during Wave I will positively impact students and educators across the globe, ” said Alana Harrington, Director of the Saylor Foundation. “Thanks to this grant from the Hewlett Foundation, we’re excited to expand the reach of our Challenge to include even more educators – resulting in more openly licensed texts.”

Submissions in the second wave of the OTC will be accepted until May 31, 2012. More information about this challenge can be found at www.saylor.org/otc.