Help Lower Textbook Costs for Students

Are you an instructor who is concerned about the impact of high textbook and other course material costs on your students? Learn the basics for understanding what OERs are and how to use them in your teaching materials. Receive a $300 incentive award for completing this workshop series.

Did You Know...

• The high cost of some course materials can impede students’ academic success.
• The cost of textbooks is rising at a rate of 4 times inflation.
• Seven out of 10 students don’t purchase a required textbook during their academic career because of cost.
• 60% of students have delayed purchasing textbooks until they’ve received their financial aid.

Open Educational Resources

Open educational resources or OERs can help alleviate the burden of textbook costs for students and provide faculty with content that can be customized for their course. According to the Hewlett Foundation, "Open Educational Resources (OERs) are teaching, learning, and research resources released under an open license that permits their free use and repurposing by others. OERs can be textbooks, full courses, lesson plans, videos, tests, software, or any other tool, material, or technique that supports access to knowledge."

What This Workshop Series Offers

This professional development series will give you the basics for understanding what OERs are and how to use them in your teaching materials. It will give you basic copyright, fair use, and licensing information and open your world to more than one billion OERs online. It will give you the foundation you need to add OERs to your class, to adopt and modify existing OERs, or create new OERs. This knowledge will make your work much easier if you want to move your course to Textbook Cost: $0 (TXT0.)

Workshop Objectives

1. Define open education, including its core benefits, challenges, and potential

2. Understand how OERs can support equity, diversity, inclusion, and social justice in the classroom

3. Define open educational resources (OER) and explain the functions of the 5Rs

4. Understand copyright and fair use

5. Distinguish between openly licensed, public domain, and copyrighted materials

6. Define Textbook Cost $0 (TXT0) and understand when and how to add this designation to a class

7. Know where to find OER repositories and understand the differences between them

8. Find and evaluate relevant OERs using a set of criteria 

9. Understand the difference between adaptation and remixing of Creative Commons (CC) licensed works

10. Create a proper attribution when reusing CC-licensed works

11. Add a CC license to an original, adapted, or remixed work

Workshop Dates

February 4, 11, 18 (Fridays, 9:00-10:30 AM)

Time Commitment

Estimated time for work: 15 hours, including 3 in-person, 90-minute online meetings

Eligibility

Current UHCC faculty, lecturers, and APT only. The $300 incentive award will be processed as overload, subject to participant eligibility. 

Meeting and Facilitator Info

Additional meeting details and a Zoom link will be sent separately to registered participants. Your workshop facilitators include UHCC System librarians, instructional designers, and instructors. See the UH OER Team page for a list of UHCC representatives.

Questions

Contact Jason Yamashita at uhccoer@hawaii.edu or your campus OER lead.

Mahalo for your interest in learning about OER!