The Landman Library supports cutting student costs of textbooks and other course materials through library-licensed resources in the form of ebooks and streaming video and with Open Educational Resources (OER), whether for new or existing courses. We connect faculty with course materials, offer consultations, and, as of Fall 2023, offer mini-grants to faculty and teaching staff seeking to explore or adopt OERs for their courses.

The costs of college textbooks and supplementary materials (like homework software and lab manuals) have risen far beyond the concurrent rate of inflation over the last two decades. Too often, students find themselves faced with the choice of purchasing or leasing their course materials versus paying for basic necessities like food or utilities. This affects our students of color, Pell-eligible students, first-generation college students, and otherwise marginalized students even harder than most. Going without required course materials leads to poorer outcomes – lower grades, lower retention, higher withdrawal rates, and even changing to majors seen as more affordable. Our students come to us to move forward in their lives; we cannot allow the cost of learning materials to hold them back.

By using Open Educational Resources (OER) and library-licensed resources, we can cut or eliminate those financial barriers to our students and help them focus on their studies instead of their wallets.

(Note: we do not include consumable items like lab equipment and art supplies here – those are beyond the scope of this initiative.)

Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely available, openly licensed, editable, & remixable course materials. They are usually licensed under Creative Commons (CC), which allows for relaxed copyright restrictions – or none at all. The most commonly used CC licenses allow faculty to adapt OERs with only the requirements of attributing the original authors and prohibiting commercial use. This allows OERs to be:

The freedom of the “5 Rs” allowed by CC licenses gives faculty the power to tailor Open materials to the needs of their courses and their students.

The Landman Library licenses ebooks and streaming video through subscriptions and direct purchases. Some – but not all – of our ebooks are available with unlimited access license terms, which allows all students in a course to access the materials (as opposed to single-user licenses, which only allow one person at a time to read them). There may also be Digital Rights Management (DRM) restrictions on the number of pages available for downloading or printing; we will seek out DRM-free licenses for course materials where available.

Open materials have standardized terms of use under Creative Commons (the “5 Rs”) or Public Domain. “Free” materials have widely varying terms of use, and while some may allow some of the freedoms allowed under Creative Commons, often they do not or may change their terms later on.

Starting in Fall 2023, the Landman Library offers small grants to faculty to either to adopt and adapt Open materials for their existing courses or to explore viable ones for later adoption. Our 2024-25 grant application is now open through December 6, 2024.

Our library faculty can help you identify materials, interpret license terms, and support you throughout the process of moving to Zero Textbook Cost courses.

This is only a partial sample of Open and Library-Licensed course materials. At present there is no one central repository for these – don’t hesitate to reach out to us to get started.