As the conversation around higher education enrollments and the value of higher education more generally continues to escalate as we approach the so-called “demographic cliff,” demonstrating to current and future students the value of a college degree is more important than ever. As the debate surrounding the value-for-money of higher education becomes more central to a family or individual’s process in choosing to go to college at all, access to Open Educational Resources (OER) are only going to become an increasingly important consideration for students and their instructors when choosing and designing a course.

It is within this environment where, in late 2020, the leadership at non-profit OpenStax commissioned an editorial team to develop a new OER history textbook for introductory World History courses at both the college and advanced high school levels. While Rice University-backed OpenStax has been publishing freely available and open textbooks since 2012 and currently includes a library of more than 60 books, the traditional humanities disciplines have only recently become a new focus for the initiative. The two-volume World History represents only the third humanities textbook that they have so far published.

For this roundtable, the lead editors of the new OpenStax World History will discuss the process of designing and writing a new open access textbook for World History classes in the current environment. The session is especially relevant for university-level professors and advanced high school instructors with responsibility for teaching any portion (whether subdivided or not) of the survey-level World History course. The participants will discuss the important goals that were central to the design of the text beyond its free availability, which include an increased focus on diversity of historical voices and geographic regions covered as well as a firm emphasis on connecting the past with the present. They will also discuss how these foci helped shape the overall outcome of the book, as well as challenges that they experienced throughout the writing and editorial processes. Finally, the participants will also discuss opportunities and strategies for integrating the textbook either piecemeal or wholesale into World History classrooms.