Innovation opportunities for academic libraries to support teaching through open education

Abstract

Opportunities for academic libraries to enrich their products and services through facilitating open education (OE) in higher education are presented in an overview of good practices. A case study of open textbook publishing was performed at TU Delft to study how these products and services could stimulate educators to adopt OE. A simplified user acceptance model of innovation was developed and applied to the case study, to study the educator’s mind-set before and after they published an open textbook with the support of the TU Delft Library. Using the insights that were gained from the case study and from good practices of other university libraries, recommendations are presented for professionalizing products and services by academic libraries to facilitate the adoption of OE into educational practice and to develop institutional policies and regulations that support educators with these practices.