Material Detail

The California State University and MERLOT have partnered to showcase how and why faculty have adopted Open Educational Resources (OER) to facilitate equitable access to their students’ course materials. This Faculty Showcase represent Open Educational Practices where faculty are sharing their "know-how" for adopting OER in their courses.

An e-version of the textbook Tectonic Geomorphology that is freely available to students via our campus library is being utilized in a Geology course for graduate and upper-level undergraduate students by Sally McGill, Ph.D., at California State University, San Bernardino. Students can access the entire e-book for free during the course and for a limited time afterwards. They can also permanently download a limited number of chapters for free (up to about 20% of the book). I was looking for a new textbook for this course and was delighted to find an excellent textbook that our campus library has available for free as an e-book. This book is just as good as the book I was using previously (and is more up-to-date), so there was no downside to reducing the financial burden on our students by adopting a textbook with a free option. About half of the students in the course chose to take advantage of the free, e-book format of the textbook.