Why Open Educational Resources?
City Tech Library supports faculty to replace textbooks with no-cost open/alternative course materials through a faculty development program called the OER Fellowship.
The cost savings are perhaps the most obvious benefit to students–data accumulated through New York State’s OER initiative show how immense the textbook cost savings are. Lowering or eliminating the cost of required books can lower or eliminate one barrier that decreases access and therefore decreases student success.
In addition to the cost savings, many OER materials created are created locally, meaning they are in step with the particular curriculum in place.
Open resources are available to students before they enroll and well after they enroll, not only while they own the book before sellback deadlines, rent it, or share it with a classmate. The ability to provide resources across and beyond a student’s college career is profound.
Zero Textbook Cost materials are not necessarily Open Educational Resources. Materials shared from the library databases via a permalink, for example, are free to students (technically already paid for by tuition and fees), as are newspaper articles, but they are likely under copyright. Instructors can share links to these materials, but should not share full-text on a course site. Materials with a Creative Commons license, and those in the public domain, are openly available, meaning that instructors can not only share the links but the full text as well.
Why should it matter if materials are ZTC or OER? Although it’s true that both achieve that first goal of eliminating text book costs for students, those that are available as ZTC materials might not remain that way, particularly materials in the databases that students lose access to when they are no longer enrolled.
What you’ll find here on the First Year Writing OER site: curricular materials for college writing courses at City Tech, specifically ENG1101: Introduction to College Writing and ENG1121: Advanced College Writing. This site is a living repository of OER and ZTC materials, some developed by English Department faculty, others from other colleges and universities, some in a text-book format and others as an annotated bibliography with links to available materials. You can also contribute your own resources to help grow the OER.
