Open Educational Resources as Learning Materials: Prospects and Strategies for University Libraries

University students and faculty have positive perceptions of open/alternative resources and their utilization in a textbook replacement initiative

“…The Alternative Textbook Project at Temple University provides grants up to $1,000 (Bell 2012), and The Open Education Initiative at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst provides grants of $1,000Á2,500 for faculty members to replace textbooks with OAERs (Billings et al 2012). While these initiatives have been successful in attracting faculty to adopt, adapt, or create OAERs, they have been less successful in reaching high-enrollment, lower level courses that would benefit the most students.…”

“…While these initiatives have been successful in attracting faculty to adopt, adapt, or create OAERs, they have been less successful in reaching high-enrollment, lower level courses that would benefit the most students. Faculty members at the University of Massachusetts indicated that this may be because faculty in high-enrollment, lower level courses want larger grants to make a change (Billings et al 2012).…”

“…To combat this, there are multiple initiatives aimed at replacing textbooks with open/alternative educational resources (OAERs) at the institutional (Bell 2012;Billings et al 2012;Oberlander 2015;Sutton and Chadwell 2014) and system levels (Caswell 2012). There are also a number of more focused initiatives/projects that have replaced textbooks in a course or similar courses (Bliss et al 2013a(Bliss et al , 2013bFeldstein et al 2012;Hilton et al 2013;Morris-Babb and Henderson 2011;Petrides 2011;Watson, Clouser, and Domizi 2014).…”

Navigating OER: The Library’s Role in Bringing OER to Campus

“…They come at this issue from two angles: looking for resources for instruction and seeking a place to publish their own work. 11 Of course, instructors want high-quality material for use in teaching. Low cost and flexibility are nice, but they are not worth sacrificing the authority professors are used to getting from traditional resources.…”

<i>The Open Library at AU</i> (Athabasca University): supporting open access and open educational resources

“…These rising costs, coupled with the issues outlined in the CARL position statement point to the need for increased library support and involvement in open access. A related issue is the high cost of textbooks, and the sometimes negative effect this has on student's decisions to take certain courses (Billings, Hutton, Schafer, Schweik & Sheridan, 2012), or even enroll in post-secondary studies. This issue has contributed greatly to the growth of the open textbook movement.…”