By Anna Milholland and Jessica Ramey
From March 1 - 5, 2021, W&M Libraries will celebrate Open Education Week! Open Education Resources (OERs) - or freely and openly accessible educational materials, including textbooks, course materials, and multimedia - have significant value among students and educators across the US. As the rising costs of textbooks may negatively impact a student’s ability to complete not only a course, but college as a whole, more faculty have incorporated OERs into their courses.
Joe Wilck, Clinical Associate Professor at the Raymond A. Mason School of Business, shares his experience with OERs: “The Business Analytics and Data Science community has really embraced open-source content, both software programs and educational resources. In the Masters of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) at William & Mary we use the software platforms R and Python extensively, and both of them are open source and also open the door to many packages that run on those platforms (such as TensorFlow)...From a textbook standpoint, half of our courses have at least one open source resource.”
Faculty can learn more about the Open movement at William & Mary by:
- Discovering OERs - including textbooks - by discipline at OER Commons, OpenStax, and the VIVA Faculty Textbook Portal.
- Exploring the Libraries’ Affordable Textbooks & Course Materials initiative
- Contacting your library liaison for help with finding, adopting, or creating an OER for your class(es)
