Students should have equitable access from course materials from the first day of class onward. This leads to stronger learning outcomes and student success.
The Student PIRG group has done a great deal of advocacy on Textbook Affordability.
What is Open Access?
According to the SPARC site "Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access ensures that anyone can access and use these results—to turn ideas into industries and breakthroughs into better lives."
A range of media types are published as Open Access online, including:
Google is a source for Open Access materials, guided by information literacy about the origin and sources of materials. To ensure that you are using Open Access, always look for rights descriptions, proper attributions, and source content to cultural heritage, scholarly or trade organizations.
Google Scholar pulls together scholarly and academic content, providing links to content available in an open capacity, through institutional repositories and sites. Make sure to select UNCSA as a "Library link" under settings to search for licensed and open materials simultaneously.
Open Educational Resources are often known as OER. According to SPARC, "Open Education encompasses resources, tools and practices that are free of legal, financial and technical barriers and can be fully used, shared and adapted in the digital environment. Open Education maximizes the power of the Internet to make education more affordable, accessible and effective."
OER is authored based on the principles of 5 R's:
OER can typically be used in part or whole, with content revised to match course needs. Authors place a Creative Commons license on content that helps to guide future users about any rights restrictions. Most authors want simple attribution of authorship, and OER is freely available to students and faculty.
OER can appear as full length textbooks, or as short form information such as essays and videos. In the arts, it is more common to engage with shorter form information for arts-based and studio approaches to learning. OER can be found on aggregator sites such as OER Commons (to which the UNC System belongs) and Project Merlot among others.
OER can appear as full length textbooks, or as short form information such as essays and videos. In the arts, it is more common to engage with shorter form information for arts-based and studio approaches to learning. OER can be found on aggregator sites such as OER Commons (to which the UNC System belongs) and Project Merlot among others.
OpenStax is a well-founded collaborative textbook project from Rice University which provides general level (101 course) content freely on its site, or that students can order in print for low-cost.
LibreTexts is an excellent platform with thorough educational content for a variety of subjects.
The Arts are often taught through a studio approach, and one textbook is not enough material to teach with. Instructors like to flexibly refer to many texts across a range of media. OER is a great way both to gain the content you need, mix a full range into your course, and to hopefully give back by publishing subsequent OER.
UNCSA Library holds over 450,000 eBooks from a variety of publishers and platforms. These can be found by searching in our catalog, and identified by scoping the search by "book" under "resource type" and selecting books that appears with "available online."
Ebooks come with a variety of licenses. These can be 1-user, 3-user or unlimited use. For the purpose of class texts, we want to use eBooks that are unlimited, and that come with DRM-free (less restrictive copyright for download and use). Academic eBooks can be different for students who may be used to consumer eBooks, but typically come with sets of tools for study, examination, download and citations.
UNCSA Library has large collections of eBooks available from such publishers as Oxford University Press, Routledge, Wiley and many university presses.