Maryland Open Source Textbook Initiative  
textbooks on shelf

M.O.S.T. Services

Supporting Maryland faculty, staff and institutions in adopting, scaling and sustaining OER

Is textbook affordability a problem for your students? Have you thought about adopting open educational resources (OER) in your course? The Maryland Open Source Textbook (M.O.S.T.) initiative is here to make using OER simple and effective for you and your students.

What is the M.O.S.T. Initiative?

Started in 2013 as a collaboration between the University System of Maryland’s Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation and the system-wide student council, M.O.S.T. was charged in 2017 by the state legislature with supporting and scaling the adoption of “openly licensed, fully accessible” instructional materials across Maryland public higher education institutions.

As part of a first wave of new services, the M.O.S.T. initiative has launched the M.O.S.T. Course Hub to support Maryland faculty in finding easy-to-adopt, high-quality OER.

Explore MOST Course Hub

Discover OER Course Materials in M.O.S.T. Course Hub

Explore the M.O.S.T. Course Hub to find curated course materials to replace expensive textbooks in many college courses. These learning resources:

  • Are openly licensed and fully accessible.
  • Include comprehensive learning content such as text, video, slide decks, test banks, assignments, auto-graded homework for quantitative subjects, and so forth.
  • Easily integrate into your learning management system (LMS).
  • Are simple to customize, to support your students’ learning.
  • Provide students with day one access to learning content.
  • Allow students to retain copies of course materials forever.

Supporting teaching and learning innovation with OER, a number of M.O.S.T. Hub courses also include user-friendly personalized learning tools* and analytics to help you easily identify and help struggling students. These courses also generate data to guide targeted improvements to course materials that strengthen learning and student success.

Are you interested in adopting OER courses for the Fall or beyond?

To get started:

  1. Explore the resources on the M.O.S.T. Course Hub and review the course content currently available.
  2. Join an informational webinar to learn more about the M.O.S.T. initiative and the M.O.S.T. Course Hub.
  3. Click the “Learn More” button on any of the course pages to get assistance.
  4. Once you are ready, click the “Adopt this Course” button and fill out the form, and one of our OER experts will follow up to get you set up.

*M.O.S.T. courses utilizing the Waymaker analytics platform or Online Homework Manager (OHM) system for mathematics courses are $30 per student, part of which will also go toward helping sustain the services provided by M.O.S.T. Learn more in our FAQ.