Through partnerships with hundreds of partner universities and programs, the simple nonprofit website fuelled what (over the next 15 years) became a revolution of open education, saving students billions, and eventually retooling the entire for-profit textbook industry. The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (the precursor to the current 501(c)(3) nonprofit, COT Education, received $1.5 million in funding from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in August 2009, to support a campaign to raise awareness about open textbooks among community college instructors and students and increase the number of free, high-quality digital textbooks available online for community college courses with the highest enrollments.
