Welcome! In this Guide, you'll find:
Open Educational Resources, or OERs, are
teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.
~ from UNESCO
SPARC, a global open education coalition, states:
Textbook costs should not be a barrier to education. The price of textbooks has skyrocketed more than three times the rate of inflation for decades. College students face steep price tags that can top $200. ... Using OER solves this problem because the material is free online, affordable in print, and can be saved forever.
The Open Education Conference happens each year typically in October. The website contains information about the upcoming conference and session recordings from several years of previous conferences (as of January 2024, there are recordings for the keynotes from 2023 and the full conference for 2020-2022).
The North Dakota University System has compiled information about OERs from its member institutions. See the link below for access to other ND universities' OER guides and repositories, and information on conferences and other support from NDUS.
We are aware of a few faculty at UJ using open resources in their teaching! We're happy to put you in touch with those individuals if you'd like to hear about their experiences.
While technically an affordable course materials initiative and not OER, Raugust Library does partner with faculty to make textbooks available on course reserve, both as short-term and full semester loans. Course reserves are a library service that follow some of the same principles of OERs, namely, freely-available access to course materials.
The library purchased copies of textbooks for several courses as a pilot program in Fall 2020. These courses fulfill general education requirements and faculty agreed to use the same textbook for at least the next 5 years. As of Spring 2024 there are a dozen courses with textbooks on full-semester reserve in the library. We have not purchased textbooks in bulk in several years due to limited funding, but this program has continued to grow due to textbook donations from faculty.