Affordable & Open Educational Resources: Home
The costs associated with higher education have risen exponentially in recent years. The University Libraries are committed to exploring new and experimental models of mitigating these costs, and to providing solutions that align with the University's Mission and its standards for high quality education for all students. The purpose of this guide is to provide relevant sources and services for mitigating costs and for improving teaching and learning.
Affordable and Open Learning Testimonial
Textbooks
The costs associated with course textbooks has become untenable. The UB Libraries are committed to working with faculty and instructors to mitigate these costs in a variety of ways: use of licensed library content, creation of course packets, and the adoption or development of open educational resources (OER). The Libraries can also assist faculty and instructors with the development of course content beyond traditional texts: for example, multimedia, virtual reality, integrated homework modules, and student response systems. Visit our Textbook site for more information.
Open Educational Resources (OER)
Open educational resources (OER) are any teaching, learning, or research materials, in any format, that reside in the public domain, or are made available under an intellectual property license permitting free use or re-purposing for educational purposes. The most commonly used OER is an open textbook, but they can also be complete courses, parts of course, course sites, modules, syllabi, video-recordings, or podcasts. The UB Libraries are here to assist faculty and instructors who are interested in learning more about OER or who wish to adopt, adapt, or create their own open course materials. Visit our OER page for more information.
Affordable Resources
Affordable resources are materials that are free for students to use. It includes materials owned or licensed by the University Libraries as well as materials that are freely available online, such as YouTube videos and other website content.
Affordable content differs from OER in that affordable content is not necessarily openly licensed. That means that, while it can be linked to, it can't be revised, remixed, ore retained as OER can. Because it cannot be retained by anyone other than the copyright owner, that means that you cannot make a copy of the material and make that copy available to students, and you are dependent on the copyright owner leaving the content in place for your students to access.
Copyright
This web guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
In the spirit of the open education community, this guide serves as a model for other institutions to replicate or to adopt and modify for their own purposes.
