Post-secondary education can be a financial burden to many families and the ever-increasing price of textbooks adds on that. Every new semester, the students must purchase new textbooks for the new courses, and the textbook companies take complete advantage of it and keep the prices high and the students are left with no choice but to purchase those expensive textbooks. In the recent years, a different pattern can be observed. The students and the teachers have started moving away from the traditional textbook teaching to Open Education Resources.

 

Open Education Resources are the resources that are available to the students at a very little cost or no cost. University professors are gradually moving away from the textbook learning to Open Education, providing them with content collected from various sources and not only from one author. All sort of content can be available in Open Education ranging from online textbooks, to condensed pdf files, educational videos etc. The students can access and learn from contents of many different contributors and authors. These resources allow even those students who may not be financially sound, to study to a higher degree of their choice at a much lower cost. Many people utilize these resources to brush up their skills as well and keep themselves updated about the latest trends in the industry they work for. Textbook prices are also skyrocketing because students are being required to purchase textbooks as a course requirement in the universities (Stommel, n.d.). The universities need to promote the use of Open Education Resources more instead of the costly textbooks. One of the reasons why Open Education Resources are gaining popularity is the high price of textbooks. Often textbook companies bundle up the textbooks with some digital files and series of online tests which makes the prices even more high, and these are bundled in such a way that no other student would be able to use those online content because these come with a set of online tests which can only be done once and for other students to do the test they will have to purchase the whole bundle with textbook and other digital tools, basically the bundle has no resale value and since they bundle it up, they are priced high.

 

Creative Commons is an organization whose aim is to help content creators legally share their knowledge and creativity to build a more equitable, accessible, and innovative world (Bailey, 2018). They give out licenses to the creators so that their content can be used, remixed and copied by others. Many online platforms use Creative Commons license, some of them are, Wikipedia, YouTube and Flicker. This is a really good way to add on to someone’s work and improve the work.

 

As we see advancements in technology, financial problems will never hinder someone’s desire to study and learn something. Open Education Resources allow users to access the content from anywhere without letting location and time to affect it, same as online courses. And as Open Education gains more popularity, hopefully commercial textbook companies will lower their prices as well, making education affordable for all.

 

References:

Stommel, J. (n.d.). Textbooks, OER, And the Need for Open Pedagogy. Retrieved from:

https://criticaldigitalpedagogy.pressbooks.com/chapter/textbooks-oer-and-the-need-for-open-pedagogy/

 

Bailey, J. (2018, July). What Is Creative Commons Anyway? Retrieved from:

https://www.plagiarism.org/blog/2018/07/24/what-is-creative-commons-anyway