PALNI’s PALSave Textbook Creation Grants Program has awarded funding to faculty members from PALNI supported institutions to create six open textbooks. These open textbooks will be freely available on the web, reducing costs to students enrolled in courses in the future. Financed with support from Lilly Endowment Inc., each author will receive up to a maximum of $5,000 with a cap of $6,500 per proposal.
After starting a successful pilot with Butler University Professor James McGrath, the PALNI Open Educational Resource (OER) Publishing Task Force put out a call for proposals in October 2020. They received twenty proposals from institutions varying in size and scope. A review committee recommended this diverse set of projects based on proposal quality, need, and adoption potential within PALNI schools and beyond.
PALNI will coordinate peer review, copyediting, layout, and hosting services to assist the faculty in their textbook creation. Each project will also be supported by a local project manager to monitor progress and answer questions. The open textbooks will be published on the PALNI Press supported Pressbooks platform alongside other faculty-contributed works like Brass Techniques and Pedagogy, by Butler University faculty member Brian Weidner, and will ultimately be submitted to the Open Textbook Library and OER repositories.
The textbooks will be tentatively available by Fall 2023.
Congratulations to the awardees:
| Author(s) | Institution | Department | Textbook Working Title |
| Nathan Willowby | Anderson University | School of Theology and Christian Ministry | Morality for Professionals: Developing a Moral Conscience through Christian Virtue Ethics |
| Scott Kaschner & Amber Russell | Butler University | Mathematics, Statistics, and Actuarial Science | Linear Transformations on Vector Spaces |
| James McGrath | Butler University | Philosophy, Religion, and Classics | The Bible and Music |
| Gabriel Vanover | Hanover College | Theatre | Center Stage |
| Paul Bible & Lucas Moser | Marian University | Mathematics | An Open Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms |
| Yuriko Ikeda & Julia Baumgardt | Marian University | Languages and Cultures | Comunidades |
About PALSave: PALNI Affordable Learning
Supported by a Lilly Endowment Inc. grant, PALSave supports student success and retention by fostering the use of Open Educational Resources (OER). It provides collaborative resources and a framework for OER awareness, education, and engagement. In addition, it funds and supports faculty adoptions of affordable learning materials to enhance the teaching and learning missions of private higher education in Indiana. PALNI campuses are affiliate members of the Open Education Network through this initiative. The PALSave Admin Team team started in 2018, after PALNI’s Affordable Education Initiatives Task Force completed an environmental scan of peer programs, resulting in a preliminary project plan identifying components for future work.
About the PALNI Press
The PALNI Press openly publishes the scholarly and creative content of PALNI-supported institutions. This service provides the capacity to create and host open access publications such as journals, textbooks, monographs, and digital exhibits, without the costs associated with program design or platform maintenance and hosting. In May 2018, the Library Publishing Task Force was formed to explore how to create a more robust publishing service by addressing structure, needs, and plans for the future. Now, in 2021, the Publishing Services Admin Team administers the PALNI Press by creating documentation and developing services. The Team is also engaged in the larger library publishing community as part of the Library Publishing Coalition.