Right now, the Duck Store is the main information source for students to find out if a course is using low or no cost materials. Because of this, it's important to use the "Adopt Your Textbooks" feature on the University of Oregon Duck Store website to report any OER or library materials you plan to use. Please see the following resources for more information on how to adopt your course materials through the Duck Store.
If you have any questions, please contact facultyadoptions@uoduckstore.com and the Duck Store staff can assist you!
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:
(See OpenContent.org, UNESCO and OER Commons for the above definitions).
This page modified from Anderson, T. & O'English, L. (2018). Open educational resources: Tools for affordable learning. Washington State University Libraries under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).