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Open Educational Resources

Textbook Affordability

Many faculty members across DU have converted traditional textbooks for their courses to zero-cost course materials. How can you do the same?

  • There's no one answer for everyone, but you can use a mix of Open Educational Resources, library-licensed resources, and items freely available or in the public domain on the web. 
  • Talk to your library liaison to help you locate alternative course materials. 

Using OER

Using Open Educational Resources (OER) is an easy way to make your class affordable.

  • Most OER is funded by governments, foundation grants, or universities and is created, edited, and peer-reviewed by academics, ensuring that their quality is comparable to traditional textbooks.
  • While many OERs are created for lower-level, high-enrollment courses, more are being developed for higher-level specialized courses.

Using Library-Licensed Resources

While library-licensed resources are not OER and may come with copyright and licensing restrictions, using materials available through your library can save your students money.

  • The library offers e-books, articles, and journals that can be easily linked to and freely accessed through Blackboard or your syllabus.

CATS Initiative

Course Adopted Texts (CATS) E-Book Initiative: In an effort to help reduce student spending on textbooks, the library has launched an initiative to cross-reference the faculty course-adopted textbook lists with multi-user e-books that we either already have in our collections, or that we can purchase.

  • When we find a match, we will notify the faculty via email so that they can have the option to share the link to the e-book with their students through Blackboard.
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