Faculty interested in adopting OER or eliminating textbook costs to students for an upcoming semester may apply for an OER Pilot award.
Figure updated as of October 2019.
SC4 is working to track the use and adoption of OER in the classroom. This spreadsheets denotes any situations in which traditional textbooks have been replaced with low or no cost materials, and calculates the potential financial savings impact on SC4's student body.
If you, or one of your colleagues utilizes low or no costs textbooks as a replacement for a traditional text, please complete the survey on this page.
"In Biology, we’re proud that we’ve selected an Anatomy and Physiology textbook that our students can download for free. Affordability was our (we = full time Anatomy and Physiology instructors) reason for making the switch. We all agree that the commercial texts are better (especially the figures), but not enough better to justify the cost to our students when there is so much information and so many high quality figures available online. " - Dr. Janice Fritz, on the Biology faculty's decision to use OpenStax Anatomy and Physiology open textbook.
Starting in the Fall 2016 semester, Dr. O'brien chose to curate her own collection of readings for her Introduction to Short Story class. Working with librarians, Dr. O'brien used electronic course reserves, library resources, and other freely available web resources to customize her class. She shared her syllabus and reading list to SC4's OER commons hub so that others could benefit from her work. Dr. O'brien has also adopted OER in her ENG 101 and SPC 101 classes as of Fall 2017.
Liz Jacoby has been using Wikispaces and Twitter to communicate with her classes, share readings, assignements, and videos and build a sense of community with her students since 2013.
Ryan has been working textbook free for a number of semesters, relying heavily on primary source materials to tell their story. He has compiled a list of go to sources, including some from the Fordham University Internet History Sourcebooks, He has also worked with the library team to discover, evaluate and adopt additional openly licensed resources in place of restricted copyrighted sources in his classes.
By using a website that offers content for free to students in place of a traditional textbook, Mr. Hunckler has reduced his students' cost of attendance by $150.
Starting Fall 2017, Dr. Kimberly Frey has adopted OpenStax College Physics and University Physics textbooks in her Physics courses.
Becky Lubbers has adopted Criminal Law from the Open Textbook Library for her Fall 2017 CJ 202 course.
New to SC4 in Fall 2017, Brandis Hubbard jumped right into adopting OER in the classroom, using OpenStax Microbiology in her BIO 206 class. She is exploring additional OER options for upcoming Biology courses.
Sue Plachta has been using open resources in her ENG 101 class for a few years, and has recently adopted OER in her ENG 102 course as well.
A number of SC4 instructors use textbooks or other supplemental required books that are available in the library's collection as ebooks. In utilizing library collections, these instructors are able to offset student textbook costs by sharing a link to the ebook with their students in their syllabus.
