OpenStax College is a nonprofit organization committed to improving student access to quality learning materials. Our free textbooks are developed and peer-reviewed by educators to ensure they are readable, accurate, and meet the scope and sequence requirements of your course. Through our partnerships with companies and foundations committed to reducing costs for students, OpenStax College is working to improve access to higher education for all. OpenStax College is an initiative of Rice University and Connexions and is made possible through the generous support of several philanthropic foundations.

Foundation Support

OpenStax College is grateful for the tremendous support from our foundational sponsors. Without their strong engagement of our mission, the goal of free access to high-quality textbooks would remain elusive.

	The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has been making grants since 1967 to help solve social and environmental problems at home and around the world. The Foundation concentrates its resources on activities in education, the environment, global development and population, performing arts, and philanthropy, and makes grants to support disadvantaged communities in the San Francisco Bay Area.
	Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to help all people lead healthy, productive lives. In developing countries, it focuses on improving people’s health with vaccines and other life-saving tools and giving them the chance to lift themselves out of hunger and extreme poverty. In the United States, it seeks to significantly improve education so that all young people have the opportunity to reach their full potential. Based in Seattle, Washington, the foundation is led by CEO Jeff Raikes and Co-chair William H. Gates Sr., under the direction of Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett.
	Our mission at the Twenty Million Minds Foundation is to grow access and success by eliminating unnecessary hurdles to affordability. We support the creation, sharing, and proliferation of more effective, more affordable educational content by leveraging disruptive technologies, open educational resources, and new models for collaboration between for-profit, nonprofit, and public entities.
	The Maxfield Foundation supports projects with potential for high impact in science, education, sustainability, and other areas of social importance.
	As a leading research university with a distinctive commitment to undergraduate education, Rice University aspires to pathbreaking research, unsurpassed teaching, and contributions to the betterment of our world. It seeks to fulfill this mission by cultivating a diverse community of learning and discovery that produces leaders across the spectrum of human endeavor.

Strategic Advisors

Robert Maxfield

Robert R. Maxfield was a co-founder in 1969 of ROLM Corporation, a computer and telecommunications company, where he served as Executive Vice President and director until ROLM was acquired by IBM in 1984. From 1988-2007 he was a consulting professor in the Management Science and Engineering department at Stanford University, and was a venture partner with Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield & Byers, a venture capital firm, from 1989 to 1992. He served as a trustee of Rice University from 1995 to 2011. He is President of the Maxfield Foundation, which he founded in 1986 to support scientific research and education. He serves as a director of Echelon Corporation, and as a trustee of the Santa Fe Institute. He earned his B.A. and B.S.E.E degrees from Rice University in 1963 and 1964, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University in 1966 and 1969.

William N. (Bill) Sick

Bill Sick is chairman and CEO of BRI, a private firm in Winnetka, Illinois, specializing in early-stage growth companies. Since 1989, he has been chairman, founder or active director of 11 early-stage companies including MetaSolv (telecom service provider software, IPO 1999) and VIRxSYS (genetically-engineered treatment for HIV/AIDS).

In the 1980’s, Bill was CEO of American National Can where he successfully combined two companies through an LBO to create world’s largest packaging company. Prior to that time, he was Executive VP and a director of Texas Instruments, where he was president of the Semiconductor Business, the company’s primary business.

He is a trustee of the Santa Fe Institute and was a trustee of Rice University, where he received his engineering education. Bill also was chairman of the Fairhill School for learning-different children. In Chicago, he is a trustee and former chairman of the Shedd Aquarium and a founder and a director of Millennium Park.

Stephan M. Schwanauer

Stephan M. Schwanauer attended Yale University (‘81, ‘86 Ph.D.), after which he entered the banking profession. As a banker, he held positions of increasing responsibility at Salomon Brothers, Inc. and The Sumitomo Bank, Limited. He is a Senior Managing Director and an Independent Partner of Finacity Corporation, a company founded in 2001 through the collective efforts and investment capital of Bank of America, Euler Hermes and Amroc Investments.

In addition to making the highest-quality educational materials available to all learners, his research interests include machine learning and digital media tools and environments. Known for his book "Machine Models of Music" (MIT Press, 1993), he has taught the HCI course "Digital Multimedia Tools & Environments" intermittently in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University since 1994. He is currently an Adjunct Professor in ECE at Rice.

The OpenStax College Team

OpenStax College is brought to you by a team of open education professionals dedicated to increasing global access to high-quality learning materials for students and teachers.

Richard Baraniuk
Director

Richard G. Baraniuk is the Victor E. Cameron Professor of Electrical Engineering at Rice University. Dr. Baraniuk founded Connexions in 1999 to make high-quality educational content available to anyone, anywhere, anytime for free on the web and at very low cost in print by inviting authors, educators, and learners worldwide to "create, rip, mix, and burn" textbooks, courses, and learning materials from its global open-access repository. Each month, Connexions’ free educational materials are used by millions of people from nearly 200 countries. With OpenStax College, Rich challenges the team to take OER to the next level and provide resources that will easily fit into standard curricula.

David Harris
Editor in Chief

David is a graduate of the University of Connecticut and has worked extensively in higher education publishing. During his career David has held a range of leadership positions allowing him to collaborate with the best authors, editorial groups, and media development teams in the industry. Most recently David was the president of WebAssign, the largest independent online homework provider. At OpenStax College David hopes to contribute to the teams effort of improving access to high quality materials by working with authors, developers, and partners to substantially lower costs for students.

C. Sidney Burrus
Senior Strategist, Connexions

C. Sidney Burrus received his PhD degree from Stanford University in 1965 after which he joined the faculty at Rice University where he is now Research Professor in ECE, Senior Strategist for Connexions, the Maxfield and Oshman Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Dean Emeritus of the George R. Brown School of Engineering. Prof. Burrus has been interested in the use of technology to teach and facilitate learning. He and five colleagues at other universities have published a book of exercises using Matlab to teach DSP. He has been part of the Connexions Project since its founding in 1999 and is now its Senior Strategist.

JP Slavinsky
Web Architect

JP Slavinsky is a staff engineer in the Electrical Engineering department at Rice University. After graduating from Rice and Berkeley (‘01 and ‘03), JP worked in Silicon Valley for six years on defense-related projects. With a career that has combined signal processing research and development with software architecture and design, JP enjoys bringing a creative approach to interesting engineering problems. In addition to developing and architecting the OpenStax College web infrastructure, JP designed and built Quadbase, an open online homework question bank, and The Personalized Learning System, a tool aiming to improve student learning by automating and individualizing the interactions between students and open educational resources.

Daniel Williamson
Project Manager

A Rice University graduate and longtime Connexions team member, Daniel now manages the day-to-day operations of OpenStax College using his extensive experience in academic e-publishing to guide content development, technology integration, and overall project coordination. He has overseen the creation, editing, and maintenance of a database of nearly 2000 open educational resources accounting for a total online viewership of over 3 million.

Ed Woodward
Connexions Lead

Ed Woodward is the Technical Director for Connexions. He has Bachelor and Master degrees in Music and a Master in Computer Science Technology. Before joining Connexions, he was a Vice President and Application Architect at JPMorganChase. He has worked as a Java Developer and Development Team Lead for several firms in the Houston area. Prior to his software development career, he worked as a high school and junior high music teacher.

Kathi Fletcher
Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow

Kathi Fletcher is a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow focusing on how to foster an ecosystem of innovative tools and services around an education highway (metaphorically) made of open education resources (OER). Currently OER is available in incompatible formats in many individual projects. Kathi’s goal is to accelerate both the production of high-quality, reusable OER, and the development of innovative learning environments that build upon OER.

Prior to accepting this fellowship, Kathi spent four years directing the technical development and managing the development team at Connexions. She views Connexions as one of the premier examples of a repository that supports remixable OER and a key player in fostering low-cost, high quality textbooks and learning materials. She is continuing to work closely with the Connexions team, Connexions consortium, and Connexions partners like Open Stax College to strengthen the OER ecosystem utilizing Connexions.

Before joining Connexions, she helped run a small business focused on middleware software, taught computer engineering courses at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and conducted grant-supported research in K12 science education. She has a Master’s Degree in Computer Science.