Faculty using open education resources (OER) or free resources to help save students thousands of dollars on textbooks is not new, it is just getting more popular and easier to do. With the proliferation of tablets and growth of OER sites like Connexions, MITOpenCourseware and Flatword Knowledge it is getting much easier for faculty to include high quality FREE textbooks and related content in their courses.
The UMass’ Open Education Initiative is not the only major open educational resources project that focuses on offering high quality free learning resources to students. Washington State’s Open Course Library initiative includes 42 courses that provide free textbooks, or course content. Both UMass and Washington State projects are looking to significantly expand and are offering faculty incentives for converting over more courses to free course content.
