panOpen

Institutions are under enormous pressure to reduce costs to students. Not least of these costs are textbooks. At community colleges, which account for half of college student enrollment in the US, textbooks often cost more than the course itself, and more than 60% of students aren’t buying them. When students forgo textbooks, their academic performance suffers and fewer graduate. The institutions also suffer, losing credibility and their biggest source of revenue, tuition. In this $18b industry, faculty and administrators are scrambling for viable alternative content options. panOpen uses faculty curated open source content and combines it with the best learning technology available in one seamless, easy to use platform. Instead of students spending hundreds of dollars on textbooks, they pay a small platform fee for access to high quality and technologically-rich open source courseware and tools, providing a foundation for lower cost materials and improved learning outcomes.