Open Educational Resources (OER) are free, openly licensed, and open-access teaching materials. OER reduces financial access barriers to students by lowering the costs of textbooks and course supplies, helping to make higher education more equitable and accessible. As openly licensed material, OER allows faculty to modify and enrich resources, giving faculty the ability to tailor materials to course needs that can increase student engagement. Research has shown that OER increases overall student grades and decreases DFW rates.
According to CMU’s cost of attendance, undergraduate students are expected to budget $2,400 annually on textbooks and course supplies. Expanding OER initiatives at CMU is one way to help reduce education barriers facing our students, as well as the outside community.
The Libraries is piloting an OER incentive program to increase OER usage and participation across campus. This program is funded through the Simon Seed Initiative. It aims to expand Library infrastructure to effectively support faculty to develop, adapt, use, evaluate, and improve OER and to curate, maintain, and disseminate OER materials at CMU and beyond. Through this program, faculty will be awarded to replace commercial resources in their course with free, openly licensed materials. Through this pilot effort, we aim to expand the campus discussion around OER, catalyze grassroots faculty involvement with OER development, and save students over $100,000 annually in textbook and course material costs.
If interested in exploring OER options for your courses or to learn more about the pilot program, meet with Emily Bongiovanni, the Open Knowledge Librarian at CMU (ebongiov@andrew.cmu.edu) to schedule a consultation.
We also welcome you to explore the OER guide for a variety of resources.
Feature image by Lencia Beltran