An innovative program at Nicolet College has saved students tens of thousands of dollars in textbook costs.
The college has found a way to get the textbook course material online at a free source which students can tap into. Manager of Open Educational and Instructional Resources at Nicolet, Cindy Domaika outlines how it works...
"...open education resources come in a variety of forms, anywhere from textbooks, videos, sometimes entire courses. They're free and mostly come in digital You can do print versions at a reduced cost, but the free versions are digital..."
The majority of the material came from oercommons.org, content-rich website where educators from across the globe openly share a wide variety of digital instructional material that is available at no cost. She says the content can be altered to apply to an individual cost. She says more content is becoming available, especially in what's called "general education"...
"...right now a lot of material is there for your gen.ed. classes, but as the o.e.r. expands, more and more materials are put out there. We're finding more for our business classes, accounting classes, you can do a search for all types of classes, but a lot are in your gen.ed. classes...."
Domaika says last semester, students saved $30,000 in textbook costs, and this semester, the total could top $39,000. She says students also liked not having to lug so many heavy books from place to place. For people who like having a paper copy that is also available. The students like also not having to use their scarce money resources on textbooks.
