Bay plans Free the Textbooks rally | News, Sports, Jobs - Daily Press
peter.suber's bookmarks 2018-10-11
Summary:
"Bay College will hold its third annual “Free the Textbooks OER Rally” on Wednesday, Oct. 17, from 11:30 a.m. until 2:30 p.m. in the Student Success Center (the “HUB”). The event, featuring free food, soft drinks, and prizes, is being held to bring awareness and energy to Bay College’s open educational resources (OER) degree initiative.
OER are alternatives to publisher-provided textbooks, software, and other course materials, which are often very costly to students. OER reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. The shift to OER can save students large sums of money — potentially thousands of dollars — over the course of their college careers. Most OER are free digitally and very low-cost in print form.
Thanks in part to an OER Degree Initiative grant received in 2016 from a consortium of investors that included the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Bay College now offers a path for students to complete an entire associate in arts degree by taking courses using OER. Currently, 35 Bay College courses are using OER, and 6,131 students have taken courses using OER since the fall of 2016, saving them over $600,000 in textbook costs...."