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COTC: Open Educational Resources

How Do I Adopt Open Textbooks?

Provide your students an alternative to expensive textbooks by following these steps:

  1. Check with your department to see if there are others who already use OER
  2. Take a look at the list of OER Repositories to view the websites and repositories that contain OER. Try to familiarize yourself with the sources by going to their website.
  3. Search for the appropriate course content or textbooks for your course.
  4. Review and evaluate the textbooks based on the content and whether it suits your teaching style and your students.  See the box that outlines evaluation criteria. You can also print and download this adoption worksheet to record your evaluation. 
  5. Decide if you want to use the textbook as is, edit, or modify the contents. One of the benefits of open textbooks is flexibility to customize them for specific course designs as much or as little as you desire. If you want to make edits or append content, make sure the licensing allows that. Different repositories will have different options for editing and publishing revised copies.
  6. Begin using it as part of your course.  
Creative Commons License
Lansing Community College (LCC) Library Research Guide on Open Educational Resources (OER) by Regina Gong is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.