Open Educational Resources (OER)

ESU is making a commitment to making college education more affordable. OER is something that you as faculty directly and solely control, and utilizing it in your courses will not only demonstrate your participation in ESU’s goal of making college more affordable, but it will also allow you to assist in ESU’s enrollment and retention goals. By adopting OER textbooks, you can help ESU prove that it puts students first while still providing exceptional instruction.

Why? Quick facts:

U.S. PIRG released a new study titled Fixing the Broken Textbook Market, SecondEdition, a follow-up to their 2014 survey, which found that 65% of students skip buying textbooks because of their high cost. The new study, which is based on a survey of over 4,000 students across 83 college campuses, shows that despite the supposedly lower cost of access codes versus hard copy textbooks, students still report skipping buying textbooks at the same rate as 2014. In addition, nearly 1 in 5 students reports having skipped buying an access code. These numbers continue to rise. Ensuring students have their course materials from the beginning of class helps increase student retention, course completion, grades, and student satisfaction. 

What is OER?

The Hewlett Foundation defines open educational resources (OER) as "teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge."

The 5R Permissions of OER

The term "open educational resources" describes a copyrightable work that is licensed in a manner that provides users with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities:

• Retain - the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
• Reuse - the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
• Revise - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
• Remix - the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
• Redistribute - the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend

The 5R Permissions of OER was created by David Wiley and published freely under a CC BY 4.0 license at http://opencontent.org/definition/.
Image OER is Sharing by Giulia Forsythe

Kemp Library works tirelessly to make course materials, technology and spaces more available and accessible to students. In pursuit of this we ask professors to donate a copy of their textbook if at all possible for use in the building for 2 hours at a time. If that is not possible please contact us at klibrary@esu.edu and let us know your textbook titles and ISBNs so we can purchase textbooks for our OER/Accessibility collection which are used for 2 hour checkouts in the building as well.

Any books or materials professors donate to the library can be returned to the professor at any time. Any items purchased by the library are library property.

Both collections are available at the Circulation Desk during our operating hours.