Introduction
What is the problem?
- Textbooks are too expensive for students! Many are over $200 for one book!
- Textbook price increases are 3 times that of inflation
- If we can reduce this burden, it will help students succeed
What is OER?
- Open Educational Resources could be textbooks, learning modules, experiments, simulations, videos, tests, group activities, etc.
- Free use (could be public domain or an open license)
Advantages
- OER can be revised or adapted
- More opportunity for collaboration and innovation
| Possible Objections | Reassurance |
|---|---|
| OER won’t be as good as books from traditional publishers | Many OER are high quality now and go through peer review (and many resources from traditional publishers have been decreasing in quality) |
| Students want print | There is a print on demand service so that students can have a printed OER textbook for about $30! |
What to Do
1 – You could be a reviewer for open textbooks. Minnesota State offers a program where you participate in a webinar offered four times/year and then review an open textbook from the Open Textbook Library. Read more on that here (log in with your starid).
2 – You could ditch your expensive textbook and use open resources in your course (or at least use library resources).
Start Looking for Open Educational Resources Here:
Library Resources such as items in our databases:
- Are not OER, but are licensed to us
- Are free to students (the library pays for access)
- Can be more current than textbooks
- You can put the link in D2L
3 – You could author your own textbook using Pressbooks. Book layout used to be difficult and expensive, but not any more. Updates are easy too and you can export to various online and print formats. We can use Pressbooks for free through the Minnesota Libraries Publishing Project and if you have used WordPress, it will be easy for you.
Steps:
- Register account
- Add book information such as title and author
- Organize sections and add text
- Choose theme (how you want it to look)
- Export the formats you want
Tips:
- Be sure to set a Creative Commons license
- There are choices for how public or private you want it to be
- There is a cover generator
- Beware of copyright for any included content (next video will cover this)
Copyright and Open Educational Resources
There are two things here:
- The copyright for your creations. Learn about setting a Creative Commons license here.
- The copyright for material created by others that you might want to use in your creations. There are different types of licenses, not everything is in the public domain. Many people want attribution, some allow modification and some don’t, etc. Note that sharing a link to an item is much safer than reprinting or redistributing the item. Also note that the user is responsible for clearing the copyright. Learn more here: Minnesota State IP/Copyright Tools and Forms.