This post originally appeared on the College of Staten Island Library Newsletter and was written by Asst Professor & Instruction Librarian / OER Liaison Anne Hays

We are very excited to announce our campus’s role in the CUNY OER initiative. During the 2017-18 academic year, the College of Staten Island plans to convert 13 courses with 53 sections into zero cost classes using Open Educational Resources. This semester, the library has adopted open educational resources (OER) for all of its sections of LIB102, a credit-bearing course that teaches students research skills using the library. And next semester, courses in Biology, Economics, and ESL English will follow suit. We hope that this large coordinated effort to create and sustain zero cost classes for our students is merely the beginning of a larger campaign to transform the way our students experience college.

But let’s take a step back for a minute and talk about OER. “Open educational resources (OER) are free and openly licensed educational materials that can be used for teaching, learning, research, and other purposes” (Creative Commons). Textbooks are often prohibitively expensive for students—students may have to make the tough choice between spending hundreds of dollars on books for a single course, or attempting to learn without the book. The CSI Library purchases textbooks for a two-hour reserve checkout, making those readings technically free, but admittedly students cannot make notes in these copies, nor can they read them from home. An OER textbook is one that its author has published under an open license, which allows users to access the book for free (digitally), and allows educators to revise, retain, remix, reuse, and redistribute the work for free. OER imagines a world where high quality educational materials are free for students, libraries, and professors, removing that expense as a barrier to learning. And indeed, “Studies show that 93% of students who use OER do as well or better than those using traditional materials, since they have easy access to the content starting day one of the course” (SPARC).

What does it take to transform a course from traditional materials to OER? At the lower-barrier end of OER adoption, the solution can be as simple as switching textbooks from a traditional one to an OER one, choosing a text that closely mimics the one you had been using, and then teaching the course the same way you’ve always taught it. But because OER texts are generally digital texts, the sky is the limit in terms of transmitting OER materials through digital technology. Professors can combine text with video, audio, interactive multimedia lesson plans, quizzes, and more. One can pull a variety of OER materials into one’s Blackboard course to deliver it seamlessly to students. Professors can also use OER building tools to author their own books, and share those books back to the ever-growing OER community.

Curious to learn more? Check out this guide to OER resources collected by the CSI Library. And feel free to reach out with questions!