Using OER at Lower Columbia College

1. A New Kind of
Textbook
OER at Lower Columbia
College

2. What’s the problem?
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Textbooks are expensive.
Students may wait 2 weeks from start of quarter for
financial aid to purchase textbooks.
Students may drop out because they cannot afford
textbooks.

3. Possible solution?
Open Educational Resources:
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.
(definition from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation under CC-BY Creative Commons license)

4. Advantages for Students
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Inexpensive.
Available the first day of class - or even in advance
of classes.
Still available after the course is over.
No “extra” material - only what you really need for the
course.

5. Advantages for Instructors
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Pick and choose the parts you want.
Ease of finding different formats (video, text, audio,
etc).
Librarians will help you find appropriate items.
Prepared by other community college instructors
teaching similar courses.
photo of “Happy” by insouiciance used under a cc-by license.

6. Disadvantages for Instructors
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Not the familiar “publisher” route for finding
textbooks.
You need to identify the items you want to use in
advance, rather than just “select a textbook.”
Under development - so not all courses will have
OER material.

7. Together, we can do this!
Our smart choices help students keep LCC
as “The Smart Choice.”
Andrea GillaspySteinhilper,
Reference Librarian,
Lower Columbia College.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-By License.