OER









OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES-OERs

One of the most exciting movements in the last 3 years in higher education has been the explosion onto the scene of additional tools and resources for faculty to build content and even entire courses from OERs. OERs serve to offer to students education on comprehensive variety of topics across all academic disciplines at a lower cost--or even free--compared to the cost of off-the-shelf textbooks.


Motivation for OER at Coastal

CCU cares deeply about helping our students be as successful as possible in their courses. One critical factor for students at Coastal, as with students across other higher education institutions, is access to required and recommended course materials, including textbooks that may span upwards to $200.00 or more per text, per course.

With this in mind, the Coastal Office of Online Learning (COOL) applied for and received a Student Achievement Funding (SAF) grant from the institution, with the central goals of educating faculty on OERs and assisting them with building out online and hybrid online courses that are high quality and lower- or no-cost options for our students. We're excited to note that to date, a total of 32 courses in the College of Science, College of Business, College of Education, and College of Humanities and Fine Arts have been and/or are being developed at this time.

In conjunction with faculty liaison's from the Kimbel Library, faculty are being provided with OER educational workshops, direct assistance with content selection, and research to support their initiatives in building out OERs on the CCU campus. An OER Faculty Resources website is available to assist faculty with the development of their work, as we continue to work to meet students' needs in terms of affordable, high quality learning activities through the use of digital learning tools and techniques.

Additional Reading on OERs:





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