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Get Involved in OER at SCU
According to SCU's 2018 Campus Climate Study final report, 61.8% of student respondents said that books and course materials were a financial hardship--second only to tuition (65.6%). A direct response to issues of textbook affordability is the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement. The University Library is interested in holding faculty focus groups, or perhaps even a Faculty Learning Community, to discuss issues of textbook and course material affordability. If you are interested in participating, please email Anna Yang, Science Librarian at ayang3@scu.edu.
What are OER?
Textbook costs have soared more than 800% since 1978, at more than four times the inflation rate. Student loan debt surpassed credit card debt for the first time in 2010. One study showed that 65% of students don’t buy textbooks due to the cost; other studies have recorded even higher percentages.
A growing solution to this problem of spiraling textbook costs is Open Educational Resources (OER): textbooks written and peer-reviewed by experts / academics and made available freely online. Often OER collections are the result of a foundation-sponsored initiative. Below are a few well-regarded OER collections:
- OpenStax College Textbooks, a part of Rice UniversityOpenStax, a part of Rice University, provides access to numerous open textbooks on a variety of subjects, including in math, science, business, and the humanities. Textbooks undergo peer review, and users can view a full list of contributor's on each books information page. Textbooks are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, which means users can share and adopt content, as long as they credit the original creator, indicate the changes that were made, and link to the CC license page. Books also include Instructor Resources like answer guides and powerpoint presentations for lectures.
- Open Textbook LibraryOpen Textbook Library, supported by members of the Open Education Network and the Center for Open Education at the University of Minnesota, provides complete textbooks licensed under open licenses--most commonly Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Textbooks exist for a variety of subjects, including accounting, business, computer science, education, the humanities, math, and the sciences. As per their website, all textbooks submitted must "be in use at multiple higher education institutions, or affiliated with a higher education institution, scholarly society, or professional organization." The author and institutional information are provided for each textbook, and some textbooks have reviews.
- MERLOTMERLOT, a program of the California State University, hosts a variety of teaching materials geared toward university faculty and students. MERLOT members can add materials to the collection, and materials are reviewed by MERLOT editorial boards. As per their site, "All MERLOT editorial board members are faculty with expertise in the scholarship of their field; excellence in teaching, experience in using technology in teaching and learning, and connections to professional organizations in their discipline." MERLOT also allows and displays user ratings of materials. MERLOT features not only open access textbooks, but also animations, online courses or modules, quizzes and tests, and other educational tools. Please note that MERLOT materials may be subject to a variety of licenses, which may affect editing of materials.
The 5 Rs of Open Education Resources
In order for a resource to be considered open, users should be able to:
Retain - Make and own copies
Reuse - Use in a wide range of ways
Revise - Adapt or modify
Remix - Combine two or more OERs
Redistribute - Share with anyone
This is adapted from The 5 Rs of designing an OER course from eCampus News.
Why Open Education Matters
This video by David Blake is licensed under Creative Commons.