State Sen. Larry Taylor visits OpenStax

Texas state Sen. Larry Taylor, R-Friendswood, who chairs the Senate Committee on Education, recently received an in-depth tour of Rice’s OpenStax offices in Houston. Daniel Williamson, managing director of OpenStax, led the tour. He and Taylor discussed the recent announcement that over 2.2 million students this year are saving an estimated $177 million by using free textbooks from OpenStax. In addition to being a vocal advocate for greater adoption of open education resource (OER) materials at the K-12 and college levels, Taylor introduced legislation in the last session to help streamline the licensing processes for the state of Texas to contract with more OER publishers for K-12 textbooks. Pictured (from left) are Adam Jones of Capitol Jones, Taylor and Williamson.