Overview
Welcome to the TCSES Libraries Affordable Educational Resources Guide!
This guide was developed to help promote resources, ideas, tools, and partnerships that can help lower the cost of textbooks and other required readings for students attending TCS Education System affiliate institutions.
In addition to providing help in finding library-licensed materials to replace expensive textbooks, our library team will be maintaining a guide to Open Educational Resources (OER) that will include links to Open Textbooks, OER Repositories, OER by Disciplines, as well as best practices on adopting and evaluating OER. Our librarians are also willing to work with faculty to identify potential opportunities to use library-licensed materials or OER resources instead of cost-prohibited textbooks.
Affordable vs Open Educational Resources
What is the difference between Open Resources (OER) and Affordable Educational Resources(AER)?
The Affordable Education Resources include any resource that can reduce the cost to the student, but may not be an Open Education Resource. What's the difference?
| OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES (OER) | AFFORDABLE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES (AER) |
|---|---|
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Open Educational Resources (OER) are "teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others." (William and Flora Hewlett Foundation) |
Affordable Educational Resources (AER) can include Open Educational Resources (OER) but also supplemental resources such as library-licensed materials (eBooks,Journal Articles, Streaming Videos, etc). low-cost print-on-demand textbooks, and subsidized resources. |
More OER Information
OER materials are released under an open license granting permission for everyone to:
- Retain -- users have the right to make, archive, and own copies of the content
- Reuse -- content can be reused in its unaltered form
- Revise -- content can be adapted, adjusted, modified, and altered
- Remix -- original or revised content can be combined with other content to create something new
- Redistribute -- copies of the content can be shared with others in its original, revised, or remixed form.
OER include digital learning materials such as:
- open textbooks
- full courses
- modules
- syllabi
- lectures
- homework assignments
- quizzes
- lab activities
- games
- simulations
Attribution
Lansing Community College (LCC) Library Research Guide on Open Educational Resources (OER) by Regina Gong is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Modified and adapted by the TCS Education System Libraries