Open Educational Resources and Textbook Affordability for Faculty

OER Defined: 

"'Open Educational Resources' are high-quality teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license, such as a Creative Commons license, that permits their free use and repurposing by others, and may include other resources that are legally available and free of cost to students. 'Open educational resources' include, but are not limited to, full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, faculty-created content, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge."

The Academic Senate for California Community College (ASCCC)'s OER Initiaive has an open Canvas class which includes links to tutorials, workshops and courses on what OER are and how to use them!

"An Introduction to Open Educational Resources" by Abbey Elder is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 International license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... This video is intended to serve as an introduction to OER for college professors.

"Textbook Affordability Umbrella" by Katherine Luce and all original content in this guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

OER can be part of an integrated approach to course material affordability that also includes approaches such as:

• Materials licensed to the college that are free to students, such as articles, ebooks and streaming videos available through library subscriptions.

• Course reserves, which are printed textbooks available for a limited time, usually during library hours.

• Semester-long or other long-term textbook checkouts

• Less-expensive copyrighted materials, such as older editions.

• Openly (and hopefully legally) available internet resources, such as KhanAcademy, YouTube videos, and websites.

• Public domain materials.