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"It raises the question of which is better for students: an imperfect textbook or no textbook at all? To address this concern, publishers of open textbooks are beefing up academic oversight to offer peer-reviewed material that they say is comparable to proprietary textbooks. And, they're finding an audience."

"Sometimes the post-secondary instructors who create the content are given grants through the project's funding and sometimes they do it "off the side of their desk," she said. "Instead of getting a royalty fee every time someone buys their commercial book, we give you money up front to do this work," Coolidge said. According to BCcampus, 26 per cent of students in the province have at some point chosen to not register for a course because the cost of the required textbooks were too high."

"Key findings from the report include: When publishers bundle a textbook with an access code, it eliminates most opportunities for students to cut costs with the used book market. Of the access code bundles in our sample, forty-five percent-nearly half-were unavailable from any other source we could find except the campus bookstore. This eliminated student's ability to shop around and meant that they were forced to pay full price for these materials. For the classes using bundles, students would likely be stuck paying full price, whereas for the classes using a textbook only, students could cut costs up to fifty-eight percent by buying used online. Schools that have invested in open educational resources (OER) generated significant savings for their students. OER are educational materials that can be downloaded or accessed for free online while carrying many other benefits for students and professors. For example, in Massachusetts, Greenfield Community College's use of OER in three of the six courses in our study meant that students there could spend as little as $31 per course on materials, compared to a national average of $153 per course. Switching the ten introductory classes in our study to OER nationwide would save students $1.5 billion per year in course materials costs."

"Every dollar a student can save matters. That is why Virginia recently passed legislation (HB 454) to mandate that every public institution of higher education in the state create a framework to adopt and use open educational resources and low-cost resources across the state."

""The goal is to build awareness on campus, so students know that OER brings textbook costs down and increases accessibility," said Professor Ching-Jung Chen, Digital Scholarship Librarian, who, working closely with the Provost's office, is spearheading the initiative at CCNY. "We also want faculty to recognize that there are resources on campus and colleagues who have already adopted OER successfully.""

"these days when we say "textbook" we seldom mean textbook. We mean course materials. As the Vox article makes clear, the book is not always (not usually?) the hideously expensive part of the deal - the online access codes and other ancillary materials are. Certainly, there are amazingly expensive books out there that get assigned in classes (I hear law books are hundreds of dollars, I know some economics books are, some science books, etc. Even in Literature, a relatively inexpensive field, big anthologies can be pricey). But often - and maybe even usually - when we complain about the cost of books, we're complaining about the cost of supplemental media, password-protected websites, and other items that may include text but are certainly not books. The term "Open Educational Resources" recognizes this. It's a strange habit of language that has kept us from parallelism, though: What OERs oppose is not textbooks, but CERs, Closed Educational Resources."

"The plan, announced by Gov. Gina M. Raimondo earlier this month, is among a growing number of attempts to encourage college professors to turn to free, open-licensed materials. And, in this case, the effort is being billed as a way to cut the costs of a college education."

"A handbook for faculty interested in practicing open pedagogy by involving students in the making of open textbooks, ancillary materials, or other Open Educational Resources. This is a first edition, compiled by Rebus Community, and we welcome feedback and ideas to expand the text."

"Effective immediately, the single sign-on and gradebook syncing capabilities between the two companies are available for all current and prospective Canvas users. This is especially important for the many faculty who would like to enjoy the benefits of OER but have not had adequate tools and services to support this. With panOpen, not only can faculty make use of the platform tools, but also of panOpen's editors and instructional designers to help ensure that both faculty and students have the best possible experience with open content."

"students using the openly licensed material were able to more efficiently internalize and remember the information conveyed. Students also rated the quality of the print version of the OER higher than the commercial equivalent, although the digital version received a lower ranking. The authors acknowledge that "the open textbook (in its first edition) and the commercial textbook (in its tenth) are written by different authors with differences in the breadth and depth of content coverage, organization, and writing style" and that a text's quality leans on several other factors besides the nature of its copyright."

"At the time, DeRosa was an English professor teaching a course with the Heath Anthology of American Literature, a textbook she said cost about $90. In May 2015, she and a group of student volunteers began work on what would become her free open textbook, the Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature."