Mon 14 Jun, 2010
Open Education Resources, Textbooks, and Libraries
Comments (0) Filed under: Institutional Repositories, Open Access, Open Education
Steven J. Bell, associate university librarian at Temple University, contributed an interesting post to Inside Higher Ed recently. Titled Taming the Textbook Market, it is of particular interest to me as the Texas A&M University Libraries prepares to participate in Open Access Week in October.
Textbook costs are increasing at alarming rates, and many students wonder what can be done. Student PIRGs (Public Research Interest Groups) have made textbook affordability one of their campaigns: https://www.studentpirgs.org/textbooks. Open Educational Resources (OERs) are one way faculty and institutions can help control the costs of textbooks. Learning resources can be made freely available online. Bell argues that faculty can use technology to publish open textbooks — freely available online, or available print on demand for a modest fee. And librarians’ experience with institutional repositories can help with distribution of open textbooks. Of course, there are still costs associated with online distribution, and free textbooks do not generate royalties for the author.
The Texas Digital Library is developing TxLOR, a learning object repository. TxLOR will provide the infrastructure for faculty at member institutions to make educational resources freely available. Read more about TxLOR on the TDL wiki: http://wikis.tdl.org/lor/Main_Page.