by Prof. Cailean Cooney
High textbook prices present a massive financial burden. Many City Tech students choose to forego a purchase, while others must wait several weeks into a course in order to buy the book with financial aid funds and thus risk falling behind. This lack of access to essential course materials can deeply jeopardize student academic achievement.
In response to the surmounting cost of textbooks, City Tech Library has launched an Open Educational Resources (OER) initiative this spring. Three faculty have been selected to participate. The initiative provides funding to support faculty in the development of alternative course materials to replace a traditionally required textbook. The course materials will be free to students and publicly available on an OpenLab site this fall.
OER may not be a familiar term to all, but most faculty will already be familiar with and have used open resources in some capacity. Perhaps it has been by linking out to a speech or short story in the public domain, or creating a course assignment that is shared with and adopted by other colleagues. Others may be familiar with the terrific work of Prof. Thomas Tradler and Prof. Holly Carley on their precalculus textbook, and Prof. Johannah Rodgers’ English 1101 digital reader.
“OER are free and openly licensed educational materials that can be used for teaching, learning, research, and other purposes.” –Creative Commons
What really sets OER apart from other learning materials is the ability for students to access them throughout and beyond their academic careers.
For the pilot, faculty are selecting high quality, curriculum specific content from a number of open educational resource collections such as the Open Textbook Library (University of Minnesota), the OER Commons, and MERLOT II. Open resources are not restricted to textual materials and often may incorporate interactivity through a variety of media formats, and can offer more diverse learning approaches than a textbook might. Faculty are also encouraged to incorporate online library resources that could include journal articles, discipline specific handbooks, and multimedia.
For more on this first cycle of the OER initiative, visit the OER Project Overview and Application and if you’re interested in doing some OER work yourself, this checklist of criteria may be worth looking at.
We are preparing to launch our second funding cycle and will send a call for applicants this Fall. Stay tuned!
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