Benefits and Impact

With the rising costs of living, students may have to choose between buying groceries or buying a textbook; a choice no one should be forced to make. Whether it is using an OER or finding resources with Leddy Library we can do our part to help our students save money, and in many cases access more relevant resources for their classes. Bill 166 mandates transparency for students about course resource costs, and reporting requirements signal the government’s interest in examining the cost burden placed on students in higher education. Proactively moving to open resources may help insulate against changes in legislation and educational policy from the Province.

Some students will choose to not purchase a textbook for a variety of reasons. These students will be at a disadvantage compared to students who can access all the course support resources. In addition, some current textbooks are offered in digital formats only and students in essence “rent” the book for a term or two. Thus, they will not have continued access to the information for future courses or reference. OERs allow them continued access and Library resources can be used for the entire time they are a student. Many of the affordable options we have explored can even be posted directly to your course site for students to browse or download.

By combining various resources or using an OER, you can truly customize the learning materials to fit your specific course learning outcomes. OERs can come in a variety of licences and some of them will let you edit the resource to fit your needs, whether that be removing or adding content, editing it to fit your specific geographic region, or making it more inclusive of diverse voices, perspectives, and examples.

Some people worry that “you get what you pay for” might apply to the resources we have discussed, but in most cases that is not true. We have already referenced the sort of resources the library can supply that are often created by scholars and experts, but OERs often are made by those same sorts of colleagues. Some OERs are created from funded projects and could involve peer review and multiple authors/editors. Many OERs are the passion project of dedicated scholars who wish to share their work to a large audience. It is also worth noting that many of the affordable options we are discussing are multimodal to help support student engagement.

Think you might be interested in exploring these options? Contact CTL and/or Leddy Library to chat about how we can help you meet your needs. We can help find existing resources, help edit resources to fit your needs, or even guide you in creating your own resources with technologies such as Pressbooks and H5P.

Creating your own OER can help you to share your knowledge with a much wider audience than just our own classes. If you allow it, other instructors can adopt or even edit your book for their own teaching, while acknowledging who the original author is. Similarly, some researchers are publishing in open journals so that their research can be viewed by everyone and not hidden behind a paywall.

Of course, adopting accessible resources also can impact your courses, enabling you to create customized and engaging course content for your students that align with the specific aims of your course, all while saving your students money.