March 6 kicks off Open Education Week. OE Week is an annual platform to show the world what’s happening in Open Education, encompassing resources that are free of barriers and can be fully shared. OE Week activities and events are free and open to all. Join throughout the week and meet the wonderful community behind the open education movement.
Student textbook course survey
The cost of textbooks has steadily risen over the past 20 years, at four times the inflation rate, making textbooks an equity issue as they can be unaffordable for many students.
In light of OE Week, UNE librarians are collecting data about the cost of textbooks so that we can better understand the needs of our students. Students – please take our survey (less than 3 minutes to complete!)
Last year, an informal campus survey found that 87% of UNE students did not purchase a required textbook based on the cost. A poster presentation from UNE Librarians summarizes those survey findings.
Affordable Course materials
Wondering where to find OER? Visit the Library’s Affordable Course Materials webpage for resources.
OEN Network
UNE Library Services has joined the Open Education Network (OEN) to help support faculty’s use of and students’ access to free, openly licensed academic course content. The OEN helps support colleges’ and universities’ instructional use of open textbooks and practices. Its Open Textbook Library (OTN) is a great resource for peer-reviewed academic textbooks; it currently offers 1178 open textbooks published under a Creative Commons license and freely available to download, adapt and distribute. To help ensure its open textbooks’ quality, faculty from OEN member schools are invited to review their faculty peers’ textbooks in the Open Textbook Library. According to OEN, 70% of its textbooks’ reviews have four stars or higher – all reviews and comments are freely available.
Want to learn more? UNE Librarians are happy to help you locate OER or present on the topic to your department.
Stay tuned! UNE Libraries intend to leverage OEN membership to hold on-campus workshops to support faculty awareness and use of open textbooks.