Open educational resources (OER) have been in the news a lot recently. The Maryland General Assembly included an additional $100,000 in the FY19 state budget for the Maryland Open Source Textbook (M.O.S.T.) Initiative, and the U.S. Congress included $5 million for an open textbook program in the omnibus appropriations bill signed into law just last month.
OER are free teaching and learning materials which are in the public domain or which have been distributed by their creators under open licenses. Because they may be freely reused, revised, and redistributed by others, OER relieve students of the grossly inflated expense of commercial textbooks. They also allow instructors to tailor the textbook to their teaching (rather than the other way around). What’s more, OER are already being used by your colleagues, many of whom have received grants supporting their adoption of OER.
Cook Library has provided an online guide to finding and using OER at http://towson.libguides.com/oer. The guide contains information about where to find OER by subject or discipline, the teaching benefits they provide, and testimony from TU faculty who have incorporated OER into their teaching.
