OER -- Open Educational Resources -- are any educational materials that are provided with an open license, which means free-to-use*. This can include A/V materials, slide presentations, assignments, quizzes/tests & answer-banks... and textbooks.
Unfortunately, a commercially-published and thus copyrighted textbook cannot be made into OER. A "free version" of a copyrighted text would be illegally pirated, and the library does not condone, support, or encourage piracy. However, oftentimes the same general academic information is presented in a work that was -- legally and with the creator's full knowledge and consent -- created and published with an Open/free license. Nielsen Library strongly encourages all faculty to consider these "parallel" works when selecting course materials, all the more so when the students enrolled are incarcerated, with fewer resources than our other student populations. However, that decision remains up to the faculty.
I'm happy to provide students with information about alternative materials. However, it must be understood that if OER are used instead of faculty-assigned commercial textbooks, chapters are not going to line up, content may be missing, and authors may express differences of opinion when compared to the assigned texts. Faculty-assigned material will better (more closely) match the course.
*Please note that "Free" in this case means that the intellectual property is free, and digital access is free. There are charges that can be incurred for printed versions of Open works, but you're only paying for the paper, ink, binding, and shipping, not the intellectual property. For comparison, a commercially-published library science text cost $125.00 from the publisher; an OER of comparable content (color printing, matte paper, paperback binding) from SUNY (State Uni of New York) cost $14.00 with shipping & handling, and rounded up to donate to charity.
Please reach out to the Distance Learning Librarian with questions, including about print-on-demand of OER textbooks.
There is also an Open Education Library Research Guide (LibGuide).
