When searching for your required course materials, you may have seen “Open Educational Resources and/or library content required for this course”. What does this mean for you? The short answer is, your course materials will be free for the semester (no textbooks required, unless your instructor has specified).鈥�听
What are Open Educational Resources?
Open Educational Resources are free educational resources that include textbooks, readings, and other materials used for learning. Open Educational Resources typically are licensed under a special license like a Creative Commons license, which tells the user how they can use the content beyond just accessing it for free. Users may be allowed to remix, revise, reuse, retain and redistribute (with attribution back to the original creator) depending on the license.听听
Open educational resources (OER) are any resources available at little or no cost that can be used for teaching, learning, or research:
- textbooks
- course readings
- simulations
- games
- syllabi
- quizzes
- learning applications
- assessment tools
- any other material that can be used for educational purposes
Low-cost materials听
Low-cost materials are defined as those priced under $50. These may be provided directly by your faculty and uploaded into your course for easy access, or they may be listed through the campus bookstore as additional required materials. In either case, they are designed to ensure you have the resources needed to successfully complete your course while keeping expenses manageable.听
What is the difference between Open Educational Resources and Library Content?
Both Open Educational Resources and Library Content are free for you to access. The cool thing about Open Educational Resources is that in addition to being free for you to access, and depending on the license it has, your instructor may choose to customize an OER for your class (for example, by swapping in local examples to an OER reading). 鈥�听听
What counts as Library Content?听
The LaChance Library purchases annual database subscriptions, books, and other learning materials so that you have access to copyrighted content for free, behind paywalls.听听
How you access library content:听
- In classes that use library content, your instructor may link to or upload library materials to Blackboard.听听
- Search the catalog for books and items in our
- Search Everything in the digital collections from our
- Search the digital collection in a specific
- Use your 黑暗爆料网 Photo ID to borrow materials, your ID doubles as your library card.听
- 听Off-campus, you can access content in our digital collections by logging in.
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