Open Education
TRANSFORMING EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES AND PRACTICES
Open Education breaks down barriers that prevent students and instructors from accessing quality course materials and pedagogical practices, creating a world where knowledge is freely shared and adapted.
Open Educational Resources (OER) are used in many UCF courses in place of proprietary course materials. Faculty can innovate, customize, and augment materials, while students have immediate, permanent, and free access.
Collaborate with a librarian to find OER and explore affordable course materials
Lily Dubach, Open Education & Textbook Affordability Librarian
John Venecek, Humanities & Open Education Librarian
GUIDES & LISTS
Explore more OER
Open Educational Resources minimize barriers and maximize access and flexibility, but there are other options.
1
Check for library eBooks
Your current textbook may already be available free to your entire class through the library.
2
Explore alternatives
We can help you find a collection of quality, digital library materials or open access content that cover the same topics.
Explore for yourself using Leganto or meet with us.
Testimonials
“As a long-time advocate for open and free knowledge, I have been able to develop free textbooks for two of my large literature survey courses by using openly licensed material. Students that take ENL2012 and LIT2110 are not always literature majors and were previously obligated to purchase large, expensive anthologies. By developing Open Educational Resources (OER) for my students, I not only help the students save money on textbooks, but I’m able to integrate, arrange, and highlight particular texts that a corporate publisher might not include or discuss in their anthology. Furthermore, creating an OER provides the opportunity to expand your research agenda. For example, I translated the Old English poem ‘The Wife’s Lament’ to be included in my Anthology of Medieval Literature OER and licensed it under Creative Commons so that anyone can access it and use it in their courses or research. The UCF librarians and the CDL instructional designers that brought these two OERs to life have a shared desire to provide our students with the best possible resources that, in the end, make knowledge freely accessible at little to no cost for the students. If we truly have our students’ best interests in mind, then utilizing our library resources and providing cost-saving options (without sacrificing important content) does our students a great service.” – Christian Beck, English
– Christian Beck, English
“The turning point for me came when one of my students said, ‘I always look at the cost of the textbooks before I sign up for a class and I was hoping yours was not too expensive because I really wanted to take this class.’ It suddenly dawned on me that regardless of how careful we are in designing a class, if the textbooks and other materials are unaffordable, the whole class becomes inaccessible to students who do not have the means to spend hundreds of dollars in addition to tuition, housing, meals, and transportation. Since then, I have made it a priority to ensure that all my classes have a no-cost set of learning materials and resources. The benefits have been enormous. Students can begin the class right away, without having to wait for financial aid to come through. In addition, I have the flexibility to add a variety of sources whereas before I would stick to one or two textbooks. Retention and completion have increased as well. Students have provided very positive feedback such as being able to use the money for other more pressing needs (housing, food, transportation). I, therefore, strongly recommend using OER or low-cost textbooks whenever possible.”
– Annabelle Conroy, Politics, Security, and International Affairs