Open educational resources (OER) are freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes. W&M Libraries are interested in helping the campus community to learn about and incorporate OER's and other textbook alternatives into their courses. Looking for OER's to use in your courses at W&M? Check out our research guide to see several sources of them.
Faculty can also pursue integrating OpenStax textbooks through Barnes & Noble’s Faculty Enlight, which is its faculty textbook and course materials tool. Using this tool (which can be integrated with Blackboard), faculty can link to customized course materials such as OER’s and course packs. They can also get estimates on student textbook costs, see what has been adopted for the course in prior semesters and even see what other universities have adopted. Read more on their courseware information.
Interested in decreasing textbook costs for W&M students, but haven't found an OER yet or don't have time to adapt it to your needs? You might consider the following alternatives:
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Placing a physical copy of the textbook on reserve in the library.
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Adopting an ebook licensed through W&M libraries and available through the online catalog. (Contact your liaison librarian or the digital scholarship librarian for more info.)
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Linking via course e-reserves to articles in journals or chapters in ebooks subscribed to via W&M libraries.