Affordable and Open Educational Resources

The Libraries are pleased to support instructors and instructional designers in adopting OER for their courses. In addition to this guide, please visit our Open Educational Resources Faculty Toolkit (Manifold), which is intended to help instructors think through the benefits of OER for their teaching and steps for adopting them in the classroom.

Open Educational Resources, or OER, are course materials that are openly licensed, often with a Creative Commons license, allowing for their legal display, use, modification, download, printing, etc., without fee, permission, or conducting a fair use analysis. Materials in the public domain can also be used as OER.

They differ from our licensed electronic resources in that they are not purchased and licensed specifically for NYU students and faculty to use, but openly-licensed and free (or low-cost) for everyone.

Many types of materials can be or become OER when openly licensed or in the public domain, including:

• Videos
• Presentation slides
• Syllabi
• Textbooks
• Online courses
• Quizzes
• Assignments and homework platforms
• Online games
• Infographics

For additional assistance in locating quality open course materials, contact your subject specialist.

Teaching with OERs can have many benefits for instructors and students:

• Intentional sharing for engagement: Neither students nor instructors need to pay fees to use OERs in the classroom. Instructors do not need to get permission or make a fair use assessment for classroom use, or to revise and share OERs with other instructors to improve upon them over time.
• Flexibility & Modularity: No textbook is ever perfect. OERs help you tailor course materials; they can be used alongside traditionally-published materials, remixed with other OERs, and modified to meet specific needs. Instead of teaching to a textbook, your course materials help you teach to your classroom goals.
• Enabling innovative instruction: OERs enable and lend themselves to many innovative teaching practices, including renewable assignments and other forms of open pedagogy.
• Affordability and academic success: Teaching with materials that are freely available can mitigate the decades-long issue of textbook and course material affordability for students. Lowering these cost barriers is demonstrated to improve student outcomes.
• Access from Day 1: Using course materials that are freely available and do not require permissions, fees, or fair use assessment ensures that students have access to their materials from the first day of class, instead of needing to take time to consider how they will obtain the materials.
• Inclusion, Diversity, Belonging, Equity: Many commonly-used traditional textbooks are informed by dominant-culture perspectives and contain (or are permeated by) racism, ableism, gender discrimination, and queerphobia. Creating and adapting OER presents an opportunity to build more inclusive texts, rather than hoping and waiting for new editions to be released. What is culturally considered “inclusive” also shifts quickly, and OER can be adapted more readily to keep up with those shifts.

There are many common concerns about open educational resources; the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)’s OER Mythbusting efforts address many of these.

The following list of sources to find OER is by no means exhaustive. Please contact your subject librarian for help finding OER in your discipline.

General OER Search Platforms

Open Textbook Collections

Each of the open textbook collections listed below have been peer-reviewed by faculty in that particular discipline to ensure quality in keeping with current academic standards:

Open Courses

Other Sources of OER

NYU Libraries and NYU IT offer multiple web publishing platforms for those who are seeking to build new OERs or adapt existing ones for NYU courses, including the following:

Manifold

An open-source publishing platform with media support, and iterative and customizable publishing templates. Powerful annotation tools in the reader interface enable teaching and learning through conversation.

Web Publishing

A fast and easy way for faculty, staff, and students to create a WordPress website or blog in NYU’s custom environment.

The OER Starter Kit Workbook, by Abbey Elder and Stacy Katz

A broad introduction with worksheets to walk readers through multiple topics in OER, including copyright, finding and evaluating OER, and tools and techniques for creating new OER.

Authoring Open Textbooks, by Melissa Falldin and Karen Lauritsen

A guide published by the Open Education Network for creating open textbooks, including guidelines on textbook organization and elements, a checklist for getting started, writing resources, project management considerations, and authoring tool suggestions.

Modifying an Open Textbook, by Cheryl Cuillier, Amy Hofer, Annie Johnson, Kathleen Labadorf, Karen Lauritsen, Peter Potter, Richard Saunders, and Anita Walz

A step-by-step guide for modifying open textbooks, including importing and editing across multiple common open textbook file types (PDF, HTML, EPUB, MOBI, Pressbooks, OpenStax)

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Open Educational Resources, coordinated by American University Washington College of Law and North Carolina State University Libraries

A document that supports OER creators in evaluating when and how to incorporate third party copyrighted materials into their OERs to meet pedagogical goals.

Student voices are essential in our campus conversations about affordability, and about teaching and learning. For students interested in talking with professors about options and alternatives for class readings, and for student organizations interested in creating a platform for the discussion of textbook affordability on campus, there are many resources available. Here are a few:

• The Library Course Content page of this guide includes details about the Libraries’ vast resources, all of which are available to students and faculty without additional cost.
• BC Campus Open Ed’s OER Student Toolkit lays out important points for student advocates on OER specifically
• Student PIRGs provide useful research and information on making textbooks more affordable.