Making College Affordable: Open Resource Means No High-Priced Textbooks

The price of textbooks can be a barrier for some SLCC students and cause financial challenges. However, since the introduction of the Open Educational Resources (OER) in 2014, there has been an estimated $21 million in cost savings for more than 243,000 SLCC students.

OER are free or low-cost, high-quality resources for teaching and learning. Instead of purchasing a textbook, students access OER that professors have developed and customized for their class, which can include chapters, key terms, interactive exercises, and can be downloaded.

Currently, one in three SLCC faculty use OER. “Faculty enjoy the flexibility within the resource to adapt it to real time so they can include relevant, current content. Unlike a static textbook, the content in OER can evolve,” says Andrea Scott, OER coordinator. She mentions while other Utah institutions of higher education use OER, SLCC was one of the first to broadly adopt it.

The bulk of SLCC’s OER offerings come in math and English classes, followed by history, geography, education, biology, business and other courses. Newer additions include communication classes, occupational therapy classes and languages.

“OER makes education more affordable and accessible to our students because they have access to class material on day one [of class] and don’t have to pay textbook prices,” says librarian Jen Hughes, who helps oversee SLCC’s OER. “It also empowers faculty to customize the content in their course and engage with it in new ways.”

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