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We update our tracking of Open Educational Resources (OER) adoption when we release a new year of data. Because Open Syllabus data collection is always backwards looking, the new update runs through 2025. This year's update continues the pattern of previous years, showing rapidly growing adoption but from a very low baseline. For the first time, the percentage of US college and university courses assigning an open textbook has crossed 2%.

Open Syllabus adoption tracking addresses a reporting problem in the OER ecosystem. Because titles are freely available from many different sources, the usual methods of tracking adoption through bookstore sales or publisher downloads don't work well. By looking at the demand side of adoption -- on the syllabus -- we have a wider view that doesn't depend on specific distribution channels.

Working with syllabi does have limitations, and rather than repeat them I'll link to previous year discussions. Broadly there are two takeaways: 1) we have the best overall account of OER adoption in the anglophone world; 2) our data probably undercounts adoption -- though probably not significantly.

This year's data shows the continued strength of OER textbook adoption in the US, which is growing at a rate of around 15% per year. In contrast, the adoption of research monographs has not budged much over the past decade despite the steady growth in the number of open titles. In the US, OER adoption is organized around the replacement of commercial textbooks in an effort to lower student costs.

As in previous years, growth is fastest at 2-year colleges, where textbooks represent a higher share of student costs. Predictably, research monograph use is almost absent.

Math and Computer Science -- the first fields to develop widely-used OER titles, continue to lead the way, with OER titles at 2-year schools used in just under 8% of classes.

In other fields, we can see the recent and, in some cases, rapid impact of targeting general education classes with OER alternatives.

Most of this growth is attributable to Kurtz & Waskiewicz's American Government, which accounts for over 90% of OER title use in Political Science at 2-year schools.

State-level adoption continues to vary. We've highlighted the well-funded California two-year college initiative in the past. But other states have ramped up efforts and are not far behind -- Texas, for example.

International adoption continues to show wide variation and often country-specific patterns that diverge from the US experience. The UK, for example, has a high rate adoption of OER titles into classes overall, but shaped by course support tools that encourage the creation of lengthy recommended reading lists. OER research monographs appear frequently on these. OER textbook adoption remains minimal.

Australia splits the difference between the US and UK by having some movement toward open textbooks and a culture of lengthy optional reading lists, which contributes to OER monograph adoption.

Most European countries resemble Australia in their overall lower rates of adoption and heavy use of monographs -- but we are less confident in our tracking outside of anglophone-country curricula. There are other sources of possible error. Probably the most consequential is the undercount of OpenStax titles, which are routinely attributed on syllabi to the publisher rather than to what is often a group of authors. Better accounting for bad OpenStax citations might add half a percentage point to US counts -- significant, but not interpretation changing. We're generally reluctant to create bespoke rules for publishers, but may make an exception in this case.

We've just released Version 2.14 of the syllabus dataset, which adds 5.2 million syllabi to the collection and brings the topline numbers to:

• 32.9 million syllabi
• 8620 colleges and universities represented.
• 156 schools with over 50,000 syllabi.
• 94 million citations of
• 4.4 million unique titles

For comparison, our 2.10 dataset, release 2 1/2 years ago, topped out at:

• 18.9 million syllabi
• 7900 schools
• 75 with over 50,000 syllabi
• 56 million citations of
• 3.4 million titles

New versions of the dataset usually include more syllabi collected, more discoverable titles, better deduplication, and better overall quality of the extracted sections. This is a big part of the work of building and curating the largest archive of teaching materials in the world. Syllabus numbers grow as new terms become available, but also as we intermittently revisit the roughly 10,000 schools we track over time. We also invest in collecting from older sources, which slowly expands the historical dimension of the collection. In practice, this means that the collection peak is always several years behind the current year. Currently, that peak is 2021. Taken together, these factors produce a 'crawl frontier' that traces the the growth of the collection over time.

There are two other developments that might be worth sharing since they affect how we provide access to data. One is the growth of third-party scraping of OS Analytics -- both the free version and attempts to scrape via spam trial accounts. As a scraping-based archival project, we have a lot sympathy for scraping as a baseline feature of the open web. But we are seeing very significant growth in scraping that, in the past year, has come close on several instances to bringing down OS Analytics. This is not a problem specific to Open Syllabus. A recent Charleston conference panel of open data service providers put the percentage of traffic from bots to their sites at 86%. Waves of AI bot scrapers produce a drain on engineering resources and, of course, our sustainability model around the dataset. And it's why, since March, if you visit Analytcs, you'll experience one or more Cloudflare prompts that try to separate the humans from the bots. I see no reason to think that this will stop, and some reason to fear that it will force open services further behind authentication walls.

Yes, that red line at the bottom is our normal traffic compared to recent (China sourced) scraping efforts.

The other development is the growth in the number of data requests, mostly from researchers, that come into Open Syllabus. What in past years was a more-or-less once a month pace has increased to several per week and sometimes more. Since each of these leads to a conversation, written agreement review by counsel, involvement of engineers, usually a payment, and often follow up, the higher numbers have been hard to manage for our small team. If you've experienced this personally in the form of slow follow ups or deferred answers, I apologize. Now you know why. The answer -- at least a partial answer -- will be coming shortly in the form of a large open "CC-NC" data release. More on that to come.

In the meantime, we're launching our Spring 2026 Account Jubilee, which will give all existing (expired) trial accounts renewed access through June 8. If you've been missing your full account access, enjoy.

With the release of the 2.13 dataset, we can update our analysis of OER adoption for 2024. You can see the ealier 2023 update here and here for 2022. And as always you can explore all of this in Analytics with a trial account or subscription.

To revisit some of the earlier context:

A few years ago we reported on the rates of growth in the adoption of ‘Open Educational Resource’ (OER) textbooks and ‘Open Access’ (OA) monographs. These are books published under Creative Commons licenses, which means that they can be used and circulated freely. In a world of $200 commercial textbooks, OER textbooks, in particular, have become an important part of school and state efforts to reduce student costs. But free has a few drawbacks. In markets for commercial textbooks (and most other goods), supply and demand are connected by the sale. Producers and consumers communicate through this information loop, and this relationship makes the market more or less efficient and — on the supply side — capable of adjusting. The information loop for free digital books, on the other hand, isn’t closed. There is no sale or single point of access and titles are copied and circulate freely. It’s hard, accordingly, to know what the demand side of the OER and OA ecosystems looks like. And this lack of information becomes a problem for authors and publishers (the producers) and faculty and students (the consumers). Decisions to invest time and money by faculty, funders, libraries and others in creating new titles are made without strong insight into the demand for existing ones. Adoption decisions by faculty and staff are made without much visibility into the experience of other programs, which could provide models. Both sides of the equation involve risks, that those risks are hard to mitigate. Open Syllabus can construct this demand side information from syllabi, and so partially close the information loop.

So what's new?

US data shows continuing growth of over 20% annually, with open titles now assigned in over 2% of all classes. The overall story is still one of fast growth but from a near-zero baseline in the mid 2010s -- and with a lot of variation by field and school type.

US adoption is primarily about textbook adoption — especially into the general education curriculum and especially at two-year colleges, which have been the focus of a number of state-level adoption efforts. Rates of OA monograph adoption, in contrast, have remained nearly unchanged over the period. We would attribute this to the much greater opportunities to scale up adoption of introductory textbooks compared to specialized scholarly work — though this pattern does not hold up consistently in other countries.

The fastest growth that we can measure is still in the California 2-year system, which benefits from the largest state-supported adoption program in the country. Nearly 6% of Calfornia 2-Year college classes use OER textbooks.

There are still major differences by field, reflecting the still-very-uneven availability of open titles in the gen ed curriculum. Math and Computer Science remain at the top of the list. At California two-year schools, over 20% of math courses use open titles.

Take off can be rapid when a title successfully breaks into a major gen ed category, such as American Government survey classes. Glenn Krutz’ American Government textbook (2021) is responsible for almost all of the growth below — and in fact is higher than the chart indicates because syllabi routinely misspell his name as Kurtz, which leads to a citation undercount.

Much the same is true in Psychology, where Spielman’s Psychology (2020) has broken into the Intro to Psychology text pool.

Other fields are comparatively underserved, with no breakthrough titles. History, Sociology, Business, and Engineering are examples.

International data continues to show interesting variation. Canadian adoption patterns look a lot like the US, with a focus on introductory textbooks.

The UK, in contrast, has high levels of OA monograph adoption, but very low levels for textbooks. The ease of construction of secondary bibliographies in widely-used reading list tools like Talis and Leganto probably boosts the monograph numbers, but textbook adoption has clearly not been a focus.

Other non-reading-list-using European countries show a similar pattern: heavy on monographs but light on textbooks. In earlier updates, we attributed this to the ease with which English-language research monographs circulate as optional reading through international research communities compared to the work of producing language-localized versions of open textbooks. This still seems plausible to us. Italy is typical in this regard..

Australia falls between the two models.

As we put it last year:

The data outside the US and Canada point to differences between OER textbook publishing and 'OA' or open access scholarly monograph publishing, which remains the province of university presses. For OER textbook authors and publishers, the goal is to provide substitutes for commercial titles used in popular classes. An OER textbook can have a steep adoption curve because it has a large potential pool of classes to convert. This conversion process, in turn, has been formalized into policy and advocacy approaches, and has become an official responsibility of the library at many schools.

OA monographs, in contrast, come out of a more-or-less parallel but distinct movement to ensure that published research is free -- beginning with journal articles but extending to books and other research outputs. As research, OA monographs are usually specialized titles and almost by definition not intended to be direct substitutes for existing (commercial) titles.

The incentives and growth potential are accordingly different. Publishers are publishing more OA titles (measured by growth of the Directory of Open Access Books ), but they tend to fill small course niches and show up in classes that already assign a lot of other (commercial) books. The US and Canadian advocacy model doesn't apply as easily in this context, 'free' has less of an impact, and the textbook-based curriculum of two-year schools is largely irrelevant. This is, we think, the context for what we see in the US and Canadian data, which shows modest growth at best in the adoption of OA titles over the past ten years.

But elsewhere, the monograph vs textbook data is different and I don't think we have a complete explanation of it. One important factor is that the market-size dynamic is reversed: it's entry-level textbooks that are fragmented by country and language -- and dominated by translated commercial textbook titles -- while the research culture is international and built around English. English-language research monographs 'travel' better in this context and cost/benefit decisions shift accordingly.

We’ll refer back to last year’s update for a discussion of some of the caveats around the data — including the likelihood that OS undercounts OER adoptions, but probably not by a lot. You can learn more about OS's methods there too.

We have a lot!

First, we’re very pleased to announce a strategic partnership with VitalSource, the world’s leading learning delivery network. This represents is a big vote of confidence in our work and provides a path to improving OS services in a variety of ways in the years to come. It’s also a significant step for VitalSource into the world of open data and open educational resources, which have been at the core of Open Syllabus’s work.

What does strategic partnership mean? In short, it means that VitalSource will provide financial and technical support to Open Syllabus and become the primary commercial path for accessing premium versions of OS services like Analytics. Open Syllabus remains an independent nonprofit organization and will continue to pursue its mission of supporting curricular research, archiving curricular data, and building teaching and learning services.

What changes for regular users? Nothing. Analytics, the Galaxy, and the Course Matcher will continue to provide access to most data and services for free.

What changes for subscribing institutions? Open Syllabus services become better – drawing on resources that go beyond those of what has been, over the past five years, a four-person team.

With VitalSource’s support, Open Syllabus can continue to grow into what we’ve wanted it to be: the global archive for curricular information and core infrastructure for higher education.

Second, we’ve released a new version of the Analytics dataset.

The new dataset (Version 2.13 for those counting) adds six million new syllabi, bringing the total to 27.6 million and representing the single largest increase in OS history. It updates and expands the range of discoverable titles and incorporates a range of improvements to data quality.

Third, we will be releasing a research dataset with seven and a half million syllabi representing eight years of the OS syllabus collection (2010-2017). This dataset will be available to academic researchers and nonprofit organizations -- with more information to come.

And there is more in the pipeline for the next months. It's an exciting time for Open Syllabus and we hope you'll stay tuned.

The New York Times recently published a list of the '100 Best' books of the 21st Century, drawing on recommendations from authors and critics -- and it is generally excellent. And also completely subjective in the way all best-of lists are, and that's part of the fun.

It got me wondering what the analogous '100 Most Frequently Taught' books of the 21st century would look like if one removed the primarily 'instructional' genres that crowd the top ranks in Open Syllabus Analytics -- the textbooks, reference guides, readers, introductions to X, and similar titles. So that's what I've tried to do here.

Let's start by noting that 'Most Frequently Taught' does not mean 'Best,' nor is it a stamp of approval of the author or the ideas. A title can serve multiple pedagogical purposes, including exposure to work that is, for better or for worse, 'influential.' But I think it's fairly easy to see when the selection of a contemporary title, especially, does appear to reflect a judgement about what's best to illustrate an argument, introduce a perspective, or illuminate a topic.

You have to go pretty far down the title ranks in Analytics to identify 100 titles that (1) aren't in those pedagogical categories above; and (2) were published after 1999. 2600 titles specifically. And you learn a few things when you do.

First, the corpus of teaching titles is old. There are very few widely-used titles published in this century. The approach for most instructional materials is to continuously update titles published -- often -- decades ago. And the most successful textbooks are no longer books so much as brands or product lines. Pedagogically, higher ed is very conservative.

Second, the results cluster around a few topics: globalization and economic development, leadership and management, cognitive science, new media, and science writing are the largest categories. I think that reflects three conditions for appearing in the top ranks: large fields do better than small fields -- e.g., business, economics, psychology, and political science over religion or anthropology or classics; fields that assign books (rather than textbooks) to undergrads do better than fields that don't, so very little STEM presence; and fields that track and develop new ideas around contemporary events have a stronger appetite for new titles. It would be possible to continue down the ranks and identify, for example, the top 100 assigned contemporary novels but in practice the literature side of English is a fairly small and mostly historical field and contemporary fiction is a niche within it. Only a few literary titles appear near the top.

So this is not a literary best list, but arguably best for learning something important about the topics that have clustered at the top of the ranks, and best for understanding books that have become influential in thinking about those topics. The overlap with the NYT list is small, but does feature a few rapidly canonized literary titles. I've indicated the overlapping titles with a smiley. And since I was enjoying this excercise I extended the ranking a bit to 116. So you get more best books from Open Syllabus than from the NYT.

The links go to title and author profile pages in Open Syllabus Analytics. You can sign up for free to explore the full data.

1. Leading Change, John P. Kotter
2. Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
3. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert D. Putnam
4. Development as Freedom, Amartya Sen
5. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins
6. 😀 The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander
7. The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich
8. Globalization and Its Discontents, Joseph E. Stiglitz
9. The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, Richard G. Wilkinson
10. Good to Great, Jim Collins
11. 😀 Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
12. A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey
13. Courageous Faith: Life Lessons From Old Testament Heroes, Edward E. Hindson
14. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant, W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne
15. The Lean Startup, Eric Ries
16. 😀 Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, Barbara Ehrenreich
17. The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, Thomas L. Friedman
18. Influence, Robert B. Cialdini
19. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Malcolm Gladwell
20. Eats, Shoots and Leaves, Lynne Truss
21. 😀 Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel
22. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King
23. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, John J. Mearsheimer
24. The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, Jeffrey D. Sachs
25. Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell
26. The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard L. Florida
27. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Arjun Appadurai
28. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond
29. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable, Patrick Lencioni
30. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot
31. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty
32. Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo
33. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty, Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson
34. Globalization, Manfred B. Steger
35. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, Eric Schlosser
36. 😀 Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
37. 😀 Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, Tony Judt
38. Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work, Timothy J. Keller
39. Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, Sherry Turkle
40. Empire, Michael Hardt, Toni Negri
41. Justice, Michael J. Sandel
42. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Robert Young
43. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation, Tim Brown
44. The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, Jesse Schell
45. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Anne Lamott
46. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, Dan Ariely
47. The Culture of Control, David Garland
48. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, Steven D. Levitt
49. A History of the Modern Middle East, William L. Cleveland
50. Strategy: An International Perspective, Bob De Wit
51. The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Michael Pollan
52. Planet of Slums, Mike Davis
53. Reassembling the Social, Bruno Latour
54. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Dipesh Chakrabarty
55. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yochai Benkler
56. 😀 Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine
57. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon
58. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, Naomi Klein
59. Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things, Donald A. Norman
60. 😀 Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
61. Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig
62. 😀 The Road, Cormac McCarthy
63. The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
64. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie
65. 😀 White Teeth: A Novel, Zadie Smith
66. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein
67. Cities of Tomorrow, Peter Hall
68. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
69. Undoing Gender, Judith Butler
70. 😀 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz
71. The Globalization Paradox, Dani Rodrik
72. 😀The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee
73. Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, Chris Anderson
74. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, Odd Arne Westad
75. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Jane Bennett
76. The Education Debate, Stephen J. Ball
77. Cold War: A New History, John Lewis Gaddis
78. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Kenneth Pomeranz
79. Making Globalization Work, Joseph E. Stiglitz
80. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Judith Butler
81. Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks, Ben Goldacre
82. Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, Owen Peter Jones
83. Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby's Brain, Sue Gerhardt
84. Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America, John Charles Chasteen
85. In Defense of Globalization, Jagdish N. Bhagwati
86. Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet, Tim Jackson
87. Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective, Ha‐Joon Chang
88. Pathologies of Power, Paul Farmer
89. The Gene: An Intimate History, Siddhartha Mukherjee
90. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Saba Mahmood
91. Impossible Subjects, Mae M. Ngai
92. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Marc Auge
93. A Theory of the Firm: Governance, Residual Claims, and Organizational Forms, Michael C. Jensen
94. Created Equal, Jacqueline Jones
95. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, Guy Standing
96. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
97. What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, Michael J. Sandel
98. The Art of Looking Sideways, Alan Fletcher
99. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons, C. A. Bayly
100. Global Political Economy: Understanding the International Economic Order, Robert Gilpin
101. This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, Carmen Reinhart, Kenneth Rogoff
102. A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, Andrew Gordon
103. Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security, Mark Duffield
104. The Economics of Climate Change, N. H. Stern
105. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel H. Pink
106. Craftsman, Richard Sennett
107. Postdramatic Theatre, Hans-Thies Lehmann
108. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, C.1400-C.1580, Eamon Duffy
109. Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, Paul Hawken, Amory B. Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins
110. Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School, C. J. Pascoe
111. Digital Art, Christiane Paul
112. Into the Woods, John Yorke
113. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, Manuel Castells
114. The Politics of the Environment: Ideas, Activism, Policy, Neil Carter
115. Place, Tim Cresswell
116. A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Samantha Power

*** Updated to remove a couple mistakenly included older books and articles