Textbook and learning material costs continue to rise for students across the world, along with rent and food. Madison College has a fantastic textbook rental program which allows students to borrow many of their textbooks needed for courses. While this is a great step toward reducing the overall financial burden for students, we can do more. This is where “open educational resources” come in.

Open educational resources are freely available textbooks and learning materials which, through the magic of copyright, can be reused, customized and shared by anyone globally.

Unlike commercially published textbooks, like Pearson or McGrawHill, open educational resources can be written by anyone knowledgeable in the subject, including instructors, students, people working in the field and more.

What sets them apart from other freely available online resources is how they go from an idea to a published textbook. Much like peer reviewed articles found in library databases, open educational resources go through a rigorous review and editing process by a team of experts before anyone can access them. This means they are generally just as trustworthy as any commercial textbook.

What’s even better, anyone can adapt the textbook to fit their teaching or learning style, including making it accessible for those who require a different version of the text (for example, making it into an audiobook).

Instructors at Madison College are creating fantastic open educational resources for students already. Let’s give a shout out to the math department for their hard work toward reducing learning material costs and creating specialized content for our students. The nursing program engaged in a years-long process to create open educational resource versions of key nursing textbooks and create virtual reality learning modules.

These, along with other projects, are helping improve learning and affordability for students, not just at Madison College, but for everyone on Earth.

An additional kudos to the Wisconsin Student Government who tirelessly advocated for open educational resource funding at the state level since 2018. In 2023, they saw their hard work pay off in the form of a $3 million grant for Wisconsin Technical College System colleges’ open educational resource development.

Since creating high quality open educational resources takes valuable faculty, staff and student time, these funds will be used to build new open educational resources to support affordable and accessible learning across our Wisconsin Technical College System.

Want to know more? Check out the Madison College Libraries’ open educational resources research guide at https://libguides.madisoncollege.edu/OER.