Welcome to the OER adventure! Please look over this guide and ask questions. OERs are open educational resources which serve as low- or no-cost alternatives to traditional print textbooks, reducing the cost of education for students. OERs also provide faculty more freedom and creativity to craft or adapt a textbook that suits their teaching program. At Jefferson faculty are adopting and adapting OER material from different sources. There are lots of options!
For SUNY's purposes any course that uses 50% or more of open instructional material - material that can be copied, shared, remixed or adapted and accessed at no- or low-cost to the student - counts as an OER course. Increasing OER offerings will mean additional funding from SUNY for Jefferson.
Josh, Dawn, Cynthia, Lynn and Leah have taken existing open texts and adapted them for their own classes in a Lumen Learning shell.
Brian uses the Excelsior Online Writing Lab.
Cynthia uses NOBA for her Social Psychology course.
Randy uses an OpenStax textbook and MyOpenMath for Algebra.
Associate Professor of English Josh Dickinson (jdickinson@sunyjefferson.edu) is serving as our faculty mentor on all things OER. He has created 10 OERs himself and is eager to help others get involved! Library Director Connie Holberg (cholberg@sunyjefferson.edu) is the campus lead contact for working with the SUNY OER community.
An OER Explorer is at the beginning of their OER Adventure.They are still familiarizing themselves with the concept of Open Educational Resources and have yet to determine whether they want to incorporate them into their courses.
An OER Adopter understands what OER is and are interested in finding and reusing already existing OER textbooks that can be incorporated into one of their courses.
Adapting OER is for faculty who already know how to find and adopt OER for their course, but would also like to learn how to revise, remix and appropriately attribute their own customized OER content.
An OER Creator is ready to write their own textbook or course materials with the intention of releasing the finished version under a open Creative Commons License.