The Libraries are partnering with Global Campus to provide grants to faculty for adopting and creating open educational resources: textbooks that are freely available and open for anyone to adopt.
Open Educational Resources (OER) not only help to make college more affordable, they also offer instructors the opportunity to adopt, expand on, and customize course content and to share their efforts with others in the academic community.
If you are new to the concept of OER, you may wonder what kinds of texts exist out there already. The Open Textbook Library, a collaborative effort of the Center for Open Education at the University of Minnesota and the Open Textbook Network, offers a great place to start your explorations. Search by keyword or browse categories such as
- Accounting & Finance
- Business, Management & Marketing
- Computer Science & Information Systems
- Economics
- Engineering
- Foreign Languages
- General Education
- Humanities & Language
- Law
- Mathematics & Statistics
- Natural & Physical Sciences
- Social Sciences
Here you will find texts authored by faculty at institutions such as University of Virginia, NYU, the University of Michigan, and the University of Texas. Author biographies and detailed reviews help you to find the text that might be right for your course.
OpenStax , an intiative from Rice University, offers more than 25 peer-reviewed college and AP texts in the fields of math and science, the social sciences, and humanities. Textbooks are free to read online and adopt; create a free faculty account to access additional materials, such as problem sets and manuals.
The OER Commons offers a special section on Higher Education Textbooks. Explore by subject area, including:
- Anthropology, Archaeology, and Cultural Geography
- Applied Science
- Arts and Humanities
- Business and Communications
- Career and Technical Education
- Education
- History
- Law
- Life Science
- Mathematics
- Physical Science
- Political Science
- Psychology
- Sociology and Social Work
While some of these texts are targeted to the general education core or lower division classes, you will also find more specialized topics, including textbooks on MATLAB or medical anthropology.
Visit our website for more information on OER faculty grants here at the University of Arkansas and for general information and resources related to Open Education.