Happy Open Access Week! Last year, five faculty were accepted into an Open Educational Resources (OER) grant program through Cowles Library, with support from the Office of the Provost and the Deputy Provost’s Office. OER are free, adaptable, and easily accessible course materials that help reduce student costs while giving instructors the flexibility to tailor content to better fit their teaching and students’ learning needs. The grant helped support participants in replacing their course materials with an adopted, adapted, or newly-created OER. Some participants are using their OER this fall, and others continue to work on updating their course materials for implementation later this year.

Cowles Library maintains a Textbook Alternatives Dashboard that displays OER, Open Access eBooks, and library-purchased eBooks currently being used by Drake faculty as course materials.

For more information about the library’s OER initiatives at Drake, contact priya.shenoy@drake.edu.

Image provided by openaccessweek.org, licensed under a CC BY 4.0 International License.

— Andrew Welcch, Cowles Library