Open Educational Resources & Textbook Affordability

Over the past several years, students and educators have watched with concern as the cost of educational materials has risen dramatically. According to an NBC News study, textbook costs have increased more than 1,000% since 1977, outpacing the cost of medical care, new homes, and the consumer price index.

Expensive course materials can be detrimental to students as they may struggle to keep up in classes and may be more likely to drop out when they cannot readily access textbook material. Seeking to address these concerns, colleges and universities have begun to seek educational materials that are both high-quality and affordable for students.

Open Educational resources (OER) are free and openly licensed educational materials that can be used for teaching, learning, research, and other purposes. OER are emerging as a strategy for lowering barriers to student academic success, specifically by ensuring that all students have access to course materials regardless of their financial situation.

To be more specific, when we say that OER are openly licensed, we mean that they can be retained, reused, revised, remixed, and redistributed. In practice this means:

• Retain - the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
• Reuse - the right to use the content in settings like classes, study groups, on websites, in videos, etc.
• Revise - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
• Remix - the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
• Redistribute - the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

(See OpenContent.org, UNESCO and OER Commons for the above definitions).