This week we were task to write about a technology tool that helps/supports people in their learning. I am choosing to write about a tool that my college has been talking about for several years but is not something I have used. It is no doubt college is expensive. It is not just the tuition, but you have room and board, fees, and books. Educationdata.org said the average undergraduate pays between $339-$600 for books. Ouch!
For anyone who has gone to college then you have experienced the professors who didn't even use the textbook but made you buy it. It was also ridiculous when we had to buy the newest addition everytime they updated the textbook. I would often rent/buy used but sometimes the accessories where not guaranteed so I had to buy new.
College is expensive enough without all these additional fees. My college encourages Open Educational Resources (OER) which is "are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others." https://www.unesco.org/en/open-educational-resources Basically we are encouraging professors to use open resources that are free for students to access.
One of the resources we have is called Pressbooks https://pressbooks.com/. Pressbooks is a user friendly publishing platform educators can use to create, share, adapt web-books. Essentially educators can create educational books that can be used among educators for their audience. For example someone teaching a human resource management class could either write a book on HRM or use a books someone else has created. Students then has access to the book for free on the open market.
Anyone can use OER materials. Someone can use them to gain new knowledge, expand on old knowledge. or anything else. I googled OER human resource and came up with OER Commons. When I checked out the site I got multiple resources for human resources. These would be valuable to learn in any classroom.
