It’s no secret that college is expensive. Tuition, room and board, fees: these costs add up. So, too, do the costs of textbooks. For example, one popular chemistry textbook sells between $185 and $350 brand new. All told, the average cost of books and supplies for undergraduate students in 2023 was $1,250, according to the College Board. While used textbooks or rentals offer students a lower-priced choice, there also exists a zero-cost option: open textbooks and other Open Educational Resources (OER).
Open Alternatives
In addition to being free to use, open textbooks and other materials are frequently published under licenses that allow you to make edits to them. The Open Textbook Library, a popular directory of such titles based at the University of Minnesota, frequently lists works published with GNU and certain Creative Commons licenses. These licenses allow you broad flexibility to adapt and share texts based on your own instructional aims and contexts. For instance, you may wish to replace the text’s examples with your own, or adjust the problem sets to better suit your assessments. Depending on what kind of resource it is, making edits can be as simple as editing a Word document.
You may be wary of adopting a textbook or resource that is freely distributed, perhaps concerned about its quality compared to pricier options. Of course you’ll want to review whichever text you choose closely–open or not–to see if it meets you and your students’ needs. But in general, researchers such as John Hilton have found that students “achieve the same or better learning outcomes when using OER while saving significant amounts of money.”
Not Just Textbooks
In addition to open textbooks, there is a range of other resources with few restrictions on use available to instructors. OER Commons is a popular library of such resources, where you can search and filter items according to type (modules, readings, assignments) and education level, among other options. One of the most established providers of OER content, MIT OpenCourseWare, contains a vast repository of materials, including lecture notes, exams, and videos, from MIT faculty.
Stay Up-To-Date in a Rapidly Changing Field
Because they are digital-first, open textbooks and other materials can be edited and published more quickly and efficiently than print publications. This is particularly important in rapidly changing fields, such as natural language processing. Jeff Tharsen, Associate Director of the Forum for Digital Culture, notes how one authoritative text in that field, Speech and Language Processing, has been open and accessible for the last 10 years. “Anything in this field that’s in print, it’s already out of date, “ Tharsen reports.
Get Started with OER at UChicago
Did you know you can search for OER directly in Canvas? Simply head over to Canvas Commons from the global navigation menu. There, you can search for a variety of materials, such as readings, modules, or even entire courses, all of which you can import into your own Canvas course.
Popular materials in Canvas Commons include course homepage templates, guides to using Canvas, and courses on programming in Swift, the development language for Apple. Do note that some content in Canvas Commons is available free to use but subject to copyright, unlike the other repositories discussed here.
Alternatively, let’s say you’ve found materials that you’d like to adopt from a popular repository like OpenStax. There are a few ways you might integrate content found there into your own Canvas course:
- The simplest way to share the resource with your students is add a link to the online book in your syllabus, page, or module.
- Alternatively, you could download the resource as a PDF and upload it to your Canvas course.
- Some open books include instructor resources, such as PowerPoint slides. You can import these materials into your Canvas course using the Canvas Cartridge available for download and then select the resources you want copied over.
To get started viewing what kind of OER is available in your discipline, explore the Further Resources below. If you’d like help integrating OER into your Canvas course, contact Academic Technology Solutions.
Further Resources
- Canvas Commons is located right inside Canvas, accessible via the global navigation menu.
- Open Textbook Library and OpenStax are popular repositories for open textbooks.
- OER Commons and MIT OpenCourseWare are libraries that contain a broader range of OER resources.
- Subject matter specialists from the UChicago Library can help you explore library resources, including OER.
