OER (Open Educational Resource)

The high cost of textbooks has become a serious obstacle to the affordability of a college education. The textbook market is rigged so that publishers can generate huge profits and engage in bad practices at students’ expense. Fortunately, we have solutions to this problem, most notably in the form of “open textbooks”—high-quality books that are available online for free or for a very low cost in print. With solutions like these, we can break the publishers’ stranglehold on the market and help make higher education more accessible to everyone. These changes won’t happen on their own—students will need to work for them. This toolkit provides the resources that student governments and state student associations need in order to bring open textbooks to their campuses and save students money.

For students, the high cost of educational resources and textbooks can be a serious obstacle to the accessibility and affordability of a post-secondary education. For instructors, traditional educational resources may also present a barrier to innovation in teaching and curriculum design. Fortunately, open educational resources (OER) provide a viable solution to both these issues. OER can be accessed for free online or printed at a fraction of the cost of a traditional textbook, and can be edited to better fit the curricular or pedagogical goals of an instructor.