TAGS"OER"
LibreTexts News & Updates | January 2026
Greetings, LibreTexts Community!
Keep reading for the latest updates from the LibreTexts team.
New Year, Same Mission
Happy new year to everyone in our LibreTexts community. We thought we would ring in 2026 with a brief recap of the progress we made in year one of our three year strategic plan, which we released last year.
Building a Sustainable and Interconnected LibreVerse
In 2025, the LibreTexts technology team made significant progress in each of our key focus areas. We released The Forge word processor into general availability and deployed JupyterHub onto modernized cloud infrastructure, complete with LibreOne single sign-on support. The new LibreTexts Store introduced new product formats and improved internal order management, helping us to deliver an unprecedented number of print copies to our readers around the globe. Our self-hosted traffic analytics solution entered beta testing, offering authors new insights into how and where their books are used. Finally, Conductor entered the AI era with the general release of our AI Co-Author tool. Our progress this year has given us great forward momentum to continue delivering on our vision of a coherent and interconnected LibreVerse.
Development and Launch of The LibreTexts Academy
The LibreTexts Academy has officially transitioned from foundational infrastructure development to a phase of active institutional scaling and community building. By launching the Academy website and its inaugural Academy Online courses, the project has started to deliver on providing many Academy Services. These efforts are illustrated in working with new authors as part of a cohort authoring team, helping to develop multi-year Zero Textbook Cost plans for several partner institutions, which utilize tiered training and cohorts to ensure long-term sustainability and widespread adoption of OER. Current initiatives include intensive virtual training sessions at Southwestern College and an exciting in-person kick-off at Fullerton College to prepare for the comprehensive launch of OER programs in 2026. Looking ahead, we look forward to the evolution of LibreFest into a more formal conference format including an upcoming solicitation for speakers and presentations! Also, look forward to the launch of the LibreTexts Connections forum to build stronger support networks within the LibreVerse, but also be a place for Communities of Practice to discuss pedagogy, design, and use of LibreTexts tools! All of this will further cement the project's role as the Open Instructional Innovation and Professional Development.
Strengthening Community Partnerships
- The number of registered instructors in the LibreVerse grew by over 7,000 people from January 2025 to January 2026.
- Our Basics for Beginners webinar series kicked off one year ago this month and covered all things LibreTexts from creating an account, editing and remixing, getting started with our ADAPT open homework and assessment platform, and all things in between. We are hosting this monthly webinar series again throughout 2026. You can catch up on our YouTube channel, and register for new sessions on our website.
- For the first time since 2019, the majority of our team gathered in-person at the Open Education Conference in Denver last October. We also hosted our annual OctoberFest workshop in partnership with MSU Denver before OpenEd officially kicked off.
We hosted, or participated in workshops across the State of California in partnership with colleagues from the Academic Senate of the California Community College Open Education Resources Initiative (ASCCC OERI) where hundreds of new and seasoned LibreTexts users collaborated on ways to adapt or adopt OER for their courses.
Building a Sustainable and Transparent Model
Finding the means by which we can continue to build on our long term sustainability plans is at the forefront of everything we do. To this end, we were fortunate to receive two significant grants in 2025:
Our proposal, Collaborative Research: Transforming STEM Education Nationwide Through Scalable Open Educational Infrastructure, Social Annotation, and Collaborative Content Improvement, was funded through the NSF for $2 million over five years. This project aims to serve the national interest by expanding access to high-quality, adaptable STEM learning materials through the development and large-scale deployment of Open Educational Resources (OER) and integrated social annotation technologies. To learn more about this project's goals, head over to our blog: https://libretexts.org/blog/new-nsf-proposal-funded.
LibreTexts was awarded the California Community College Zero Textbook Cost Program OER Platform RFP Vendor Agreement, for $5 million over five years. Building on the $115 million dollar allocated for the creation of more OER content and ZTC courses from Governor Newsom in 2021, all OER created by California Community College faculty over the course of the next five years will be hosted on our platform and made widely available across the state. We will have more to come on this exciting partnership as details become available.
Noteworthy
Since our start in 2008, the LibreTexts team has facilitated faculty collaborations across the country, helping instructors work together on building new course content while making powerful connections across institutions and disciplines. Making it easier for our community to work together and build their own communities starts here! Currently we have faculty looking to work on the following projects over the next year:
- Introduction to Special Education for K-12 Classrooms - especially on describing how to implement best-practices in the classroom (textbook)
- Organic Chemistry Structure-based Question Writing (using ADAPT Sketcher)
- Voice and Video thread-based question writing for language courses (ADAPT Discuss-It); Especially in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, and Italian
- Collaboration opportunities for Education Research
- Materials Chemistry, Inorganic Chemistry, and Nanomaterials
- Mathematics in Context, Intro to Physics, Sport Studies,
- Emerging technologies, UDL in ID, Learning theories in action, instructional strategies for e-learning, ID models through experiential learning
If you are interested in finding collaborators, asking questions about how LibreTexts are used in other people’s classes, or other communities of practice, please head over to the new LibreTexts Connections Forum and join the conversations!
Is your institution part of our LibreNet consortium? If not, consider joining and become part of a growing community of OER practitioners and advocates unlike any other. More information about the numerous benefits of LibreNet membership can be found on our website.
Have you heard about our new professional development opportunities through LibreTexts Academy? From year long cohorts to asynchronous webinars, Academy has something for all of the OER advocates and practitioners in your life. Head over to our website and fill out an interest form to get started.
Don't forget about our First Friday Features held virtually the first Friday of each month. Join a member of our team at 11:30 am PST to hear all about what's new in the LibreVerse and what's coming soon. You can catch us on our regular Zoom channel: https://zoom.libretexts.org.
Be sure to follow us on social media to stay up-to-date on the latest LibreTexts news and events and share how you're using our resources to further your own open efforts. You can find us as @LibreTexts on Facebook, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Blue Sky.