With 2026 celebrating key 25 year Open Education milestones (e.g. the founding of MIT Open CourseWare, Creative Commons, and Wikipedia) we add a rich collection of stories of the people behind the open education movement in the state of California published as Sowing the Seeds of a Global Movement: Stories from California Trailblazers of Open Education.
The voices in this episode are lead author and interviewer Barbara Illowsky plus editor Judith Sebesta sharing the “story behind the stories.” It is most fitting that Barbara herself is one of the featured trailblazers for her long career effort at De Anza College where her early Collaborative Statistics OER become one of the first titles published on the plarform known widely as OpenStax.
The idea for Sowing the Seeds was “planted” by James Glapa-Grossklag (in the book) Dean at College of the Canyons and previous board member of OEGlobal. Sowing the Seeds includes interviews with Cathy Casserly, Una Daly, Gerry Hanley, Barbara Illowsky, Martha Kanter, Gary K. Michelson, Lisa Petrides, and Hal Plotkin (describing all of these leaders would take too much of this post, so follow the links to read their stories). Each chapter includes the trailblazer’s “aha” moment in open education with their perspectives on both the early years of open education in California and where it has gone since. It’s worth noting how so much of the trailblazing started in the California community college system, all leading to the initial creation of the Community College Consortium for OER at Foothill-DeAnza Community College district that has evolved into the even larger reaching CCCOER organization within OEGlobal.
And Judith also shared that the followup volume From Grassroots to Ecosystem: The Growth of OER and ZTC in California will be published before the end of the year. We hope you listen to and appreciate all the stories in this episode, and ignore Barbara’s overly humble statements!
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In This Episode
FYI: For the sake of experimentation and the spirit of transparency, this set of show notes alone was generated by the AI “Underlord” in the Descript editor we use to produce OEGlobal Voices.
Sowing the Seeds of a Global Movement: Capturing California’s OER and ZTC Trailblazers
In episode 102 of OE Global Voices, host Alan Levine talks with Barbara Illowsky in Cupertino, California, and Judith Sebesta in Austin, Texas, about Sowing the Seeds of a Global Movement, an openly licensed OER documenting the origins of OER and Zero Textbook Cost efforts in California. Illowsky recounts her “aha” moment teaching community college students facing financial barriers, leading to co-authoring an early low-cost statistics text that became the first ADA-accessible open textbook via Rice University’s Connexions (later OpenStax), saving De Anza College students over $3 million. Sebesta, project manager for the California Community Colleges ZTC Grant Program technical assistance provider, explains how James Glapa-Grossklag initiated the project to preserve pioneers’ stories as early leaders retire. Illowsky interviewed California-centered trailblazers including Cathy Casserly, Una Daly, Gerry Hanley, Martha Kanter, Gary Michelson, Lisa Petrides, Hal Plotkin, and James Glapa-Grossklag, and Sebesta previews a forthcoming expanded history, From Grassroots to Ecosystem: The Growth of OER and ZTC in California.
- 00:00 Intro Music and Highlighted Quotes
- 01:02 Episode Introduction
- 02:16 Meet Barbara
- 03:26 Meet Judith
- 04:31 Workspaces and Touchstones
- 07:20 Barbara Growing Up
- 11:39 Judith Growing Up
- 14:13 Barbara OER Aha
- 17:26 From Notes to OpenStax
- 22:39 Impact and Responsibility
- 24:50 Seeds of the Book
- 27:53 Choosing Trailblazers
- 30:35 Chasing Final Interview
- 31:44 Discovering Hidden Histories
- 33:20 Why Barbara Was Perfect for this Project
- 35:18 Building Interview Questions
- 39:04 Nerves and Surprises
- 40:32 Why Document Now
- 45:07 Open Blueprint and Sequel
- 46:41 Giving Back Ethos
- 50:09 Seeds and Favorite Quotes
- 53:46 Life Beyond OER
- 57:29 Podcast Wrap Up
(end of AI generated show notes)
Additional Links and Quotes for Episode 102
But my life was so enriched, really so enriched by knowing that I contributed to this movement, to find out how much money at my own college we had saved. At one point before I retired, we had saved over $3 million just in elementary statistics books.
And that’s the aha moment. It was like, okay, this is what I can do besides being hopefully a fabulous instructor, and making students not hate statistics, at least tolerate it. This is the little piece I can do to help people achieve their educational goals.
Barbara Illowsky
- Sowing the Seeds of a Global Movement: Stories from California Trailblazers of Open Education
- Zero Textbook Cost Program (California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office)
- Collaborative Statistics by Barbara Illowsky and Susan Dean, De Anza College (2012 version, Open Textbook Library)
- Collaborative Statistics (First Connexions version, Internet Archive)
- Introductory Statistics 2e (2023, OpenStax)
- Barbara Illowsky 2013 Open Education Award for Excellence as an Educator (OEGlobal)
- Robert Maxfield (Wikipedia)
- ROLM Corporation (Wikipedia)
- Connexions, Rice Univresity founded 1999 (Wikipedia)
- OpenStax history
- Charles Sidney Burrus (Rice Unicersity)
- Open Textbook Proof-of-Concept via Connexions by Judy Baker, Joel Thierstein, Kathi Fletcher, Manpreet Kaur, and Jonathan Emmons (International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2009)
- Community College Open Textbook Project
- Community in ning (Internet Archive)
- Marshall S. Smith, former dean at Stanford GSE, dies at 85 (Stanford Report)
- Michelson 20 Million Minds
Barbara was a perfect person to do this because she was doing similar work. You’re being very modest, Barbara, as a trailblazer of open education. So I think had an inside understanding of the types of things that work required, as well as the rewards. Repeatedly in these interviews, the interviewees highlight the joys and the rewards of this very grassroots work that they were doing.
They make it clear that it’s hard work, but it also kind of highlights that anyone– that, a faculty member, a staff member, or just about anyone with the right passion and then surrounding themselves, I think, with the right people and resources can engage in this very, very impactful work.
Judith Sebesta
When you listen to Barbara in this episode describe herself as an “old lady” keep these photos in mind that she shared with us!
The open licensed music for this episode is a track called Plant A Seed by Brentin Davis licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Like most of our podcast music, it was found at the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).
Photo of field in Central California coast used in background of the featured image for this episode is Field of Greens flickr photo by kla4067 shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license.
