Open Educational Resources | Subject and Course Guides

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What are Open Educational Resources (OER)?

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.

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OER

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Open Educational Resources, available at auw.cl/oer is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Open Textbooks

Did You Know...

The high cost of some course materials can impede students’ academic success.
The College Board estimates that the average undergraduate can budget $1,220 - $1,420 for textbooks and supplies in 2017–18.
The cost of textbooks is rising at a rate of 4 times inflation.
Seven out of 10 students don’t purchase a required textbook during their academic career because of cost.

Open Textbooks

Open textbooks can help alleviate the burden of textbook costs for students and provide faculty with content that can be customized for their course. Open textbooks are full, real textbooks, used by many faculty across the country, and licensed to be freely used, edited, and distributed.

Open Textbook Library

The Open Textbook Library provides access to open textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization.

The Open Textbook Library provides a growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks. It is supported by the Center for Open Education and the Open Textbook Network.

Other Open Educational Resources

Mason OER Metafinder - Simultaneously search several OER repositories

More Open Textbook Resources

BCcampus Open Textbooks

Using OpenStax Textbooks in Canvas

Transcript

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

OER Opportunity at UNCW's Randall Library

Open Education Mini-grants ($1,000) 2021-2022

Randall Library will be awarding another round of $1000 mini-grants this spring to support faculty adoption of open educational resources (OER). All UNCW faculty members teaching undergraduate or graduate classes during the 2021-2022 academic year are eligible to apply.

Mark your calendars for an informational workshop about OER and the mini-grant program on March 3rd, 1:00-2:00 pm, via Zoom. Register here by February 26th.

Apply for the grant here. Applications are due March 31.

Interested in exploring OER? Plan to apply for this year's mini-grants? View the slides from our information session.

Randall Library has awarded 11 mini-grants with a cumulative savings to students of $115,100.

Open Education Awarded Grants

Instructor	Course	Textbook	Semester(s) Taught
			2020-2021
Vance Durrington, Dennis Kubasko, Angelia Reid-Griffin	EDN 301	Foundations of Learning and Instructional Design Technology	Fall, Spring 2020
Joanne Halls	GGY 215	TBD	Spring 2021
Michaela Howells	ANT 346	Multiple open access resources to include articles, podcasts, videos, databases (Newsbank) and open source software technologies	Fall 2020
Yeoun Soo Kim-Godwin	NSG 582	Teaching the Practitioners of Care: New Pedagogies for the Health Professions, Expert Clinician to Novice Nurse Educator: Learning from First-Hand Narratives, Educating Nurses: A Call for Radical Transformation	Summer, Fall 2020, Spring 2021
Richard Pond	PSY 225, PSY 264	Introductory Statistics from OpenStax Social Psychology	Summer, Fall 2020
			2019-2020
Lance Cummings	ENG 312	Business Communication for Success	Spring 2020
Kathy R. Fox	EDN 340, LIC 540	Steps to Success: Crossing the Bridge Between Literacy Research and Practice	Summer 2019, Fall 2019
Huili Hao	EVS 518	Research Methods for Environmental Studies: A Social Science Approach, Social Science Research: Principles, Methods and Practices	Fall 2019
Tracy Y. Hargrove	EDN 322	Mathematics for elementary teachers, Teaching Children Mathematics, North Carolina Standard Course of Study	Fall 2019, Spring 2020
Colleen Reilly	ENG 393	A concise guide to communication in science and engineering, Explaining research: How to reach key audiences to advance your work, An introduction to social media for scientists, The Forgotten Tribe: Scientists as Writers. Perspectives on Writing	Fall 2019, Spring 2020
Ann Rotchford	CRM/SOC 300, CRM/SOC 301	Online Statistics Education: An Interactive Media Course of Study	Fall 2019

Scholarly Research Services

For more information, visit our Scholarly Research Services webpage.

UNC System Course Collection Libraries

The UNC System Course Collection Libraries is a set of OER collections that have been curated by faculty teams from across the UNC System during Summer 2020 to support and enhance both face-to-face and online instruction. Each collection complements a high-demand course commonly offered across most UNC System institutions, including anatomy and physiology, introductory statistics, and much more. Extensive implementation guides and how-to videos make implementing these resources into an LMS like Canvas easy and straightforward.

Also view the OER Collections Webinar Series which features expert presentations on topics including:

Customizing OER Materials and Integrating into Your LMS
Copyright, Fair Use, and Building/Remixing OER
Open-Enabled Pedagogy
Using OER to Build More Inclusive Materials

NC LIVE Open Education Initiative

Open Education North Carolina is an initiative that aims to reduce the cost of higher education for North Carolina students by providing free, open e-textbooks for 30 of the most frequently-taught courses across North Carolina’s 2 and 4-year colleges and universities.

View curated collections, join groups, and view tutorials through Open Education North Carolina's hub at the OER Commons.