Open Access, Open Education, and Copyright

Textbook costs have outpaced inflation by 300% over the last 30 years, creating a huge impediment to college success and retention.  Textbooks cost the average student $1,200 per year and 65% of students say they have not purchased a required textbook due to the cost, according to a 2014 Public Interest Research Group survey and the 2018 Florida Student Textbook and Course Materials Survey.

The high cost of textbooks is negatively impacting student access, success, and course completion. In addition, required textbooks are not always used in course instruction. OER, supported by Creative Commons licenses, is one way to increase educational equity for our student body.

“OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.”

William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

If you are considering developing and writing a text for your class, it should follow the “5Rs of Openness”:

• Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content
• Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
• Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
• Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
• Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

(From The Access Compromise and the 5th R by David Wiley https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3221)

Open Educational Resources are any teaching, learning, and research resources that are free to access and enable the 5R permissions described above. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support your instruction. Using CC licenses allows you and your students to realize the full potential of the 5Rs.

• When students can retain copies of a resource, they can make it more available to themselves via multiple devices, and digital access never expires due to a time limit placed by the publisher or author.
• When instructors can reuse a resource, there are no restrictions on how they can teach using this content.
• When students and instructors can revise a resource, they can make versions of the content that are more relevant to their course, make more accessible versions of the content for people with disabilities, or add corrections to the content before using it in a classroom.
• When students and instructors can remix a resource, they can combine chapters from different open resources to make a newly-arranged textbook, or combine open textbook content to fit the needs of the class,
• When instructors can freely redistribute a resource, students can have their required course content on the first day of class with no restrictions, at no cost to them, strengthening their chances of performing well in the classroom.

Text from Affordable Learning Georgia Unless Tutorial 1: Finding Free and Open Resources shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.