OER and Textbook Affordability

What are OER?

Open Educational Resources (OER) are free and openly licensed course materials, such as free textbooks, that can help ensure that all of your students, regardless of their financial situation have free access to your course materials on the first day of class. OER fit into a larger umbrella of textbook affordability, with the goal of providing a variety of solutions for faculty to minimize the cost of course materials for students, while also maintaining the quality of educational materials and respecting academic freedom. 

OER include traditional textbooks, lesson plans, videos, quizzes and more. There are many ways to use OER including: adopting an existing OER, adapting an OER to meet the needs of your specific class, or creating a new OER. 

Already using OER, low cost, or no cost materials? Let us know.

Right now the only way to let students and librarians know you are using low/no cost materials is by reporting them through the "Adopt Your Textbooks" form on the Duck Store website. This Textbook and Course Material Affordability page will walk you through reporting course materials.

Consultations and Support

You can meet with the OER librarian or OER specialist and get support finding OER, adopting OER or adapting/creating OER. If you have any questions about how you can use OER or find resources that meet your needs you can request a consultation. You will be directed to a short form where you can tell us a little about the kind of support you need and sign up for a meeting slot.

This guide is adapted from Open Educational Resources (OER), by Abbey Elder and Iowa State University Library, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0)