This two-year award of $263,000 from the US Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE) was to develop a sustainable publishing model for foreign language instructional materials to combat the rising costs of textbooks.
For this project, TLTC (now COERLL) joined open source technology with print-on-demand publishing to radically lower textbook prices. Besides price reductions, print on demand publishing holds many benefits, such as inventory tracking and little or no waste from unsold products. The goal was to create an online French textbook that will be free of charge and free of copyright and licensing restrictions. A print-on-demand version is available for a fraction of the cost compared to most commercially published textbooks. In addition, the collaboratively published textbook allows students and instructors to customize materials by editing existing content or by adding their own content.