Overview
The Professional Learning Community for Textbook Affordability and Open Educational Resources (OER PLC) leads the charge at IRSC to make an impact on student success through fair, equitable practices in selecting materials for classroom learning. Faculty are encouraged to seek out and develop open educational resources when appropriate. The OER PLC can help faculty in locating, creating, and using OER effectively in the classroom. The committee will also update the IRSC community on best practices as it concerns changes in copyright, OER initiatives, federal/state mandates, grant opportunities, alternatives to publisher-supplied content, and understanding terms of use for teaching materials.
Goals of the Committee include:
The Professional Learning Community for Textbook Affordability and Open Educational Resources (OER PLC) leads the charge at IRSC to make an impact on student success through fair, equitable practices in selecting materials for classroom learning. Faculty are encouraged to seek out and develop open educational resources when appropriate. The OER PLC can help faculty in locating, creating, and using OER effectively in the classroom. The committee will also update the IRSC community on best practices as it concerns changes in copyright, OER initiatives, federal/state mandates, grant opportunities, alternatives to publisher-supplied content, and understanding terms of use for teaching materials.
Goals of the Committee include:
- Discover existing career pathways at IRSC to develop the first two-year, textbook-free degree (see Tidewater Community College's Z-Degree Initiative).
- Create awareness and opportunities for faculty to collaborate across disciplines to make the first two-year, textbook-free degree possible.
- Develop a faculty self-reporting mechanism which indicates to students when a section or an entire course is available textbook-free. Students looking to save money on earning a degree should have this information made more easily transparent at the time they sign-up for a course. Students need to be able to make informed decisions about their coursework, this decision means making them aware of textbook costs associated with the courses at the point they sign-up.
- Online access codes come with end-user license agreements (EULA) which require the student to accept publisher privacy statements and terms of usage with respect to information gathering and collection of student data without having the option to opt-out unless they forgo taking the course. The problems with these EULA are listed in a blog post by Billy Meinke (see his blog post):
- Publishers do collect data about our students when they use products such as digital textbooks and homework tools
- The terms of use (TOU) or end-user license agreements (EULAs) for most of these products are hidden (read: not publicly viewable)
- The EULAs are legal contracts solely between the student and the publishers (excluding the education institution and instructor)
- The EULAs grant broad permissions for publishers to buy, sell, trade or use student data for any purpose.