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Paper No. 313-7
Presentation Time: 9:45 AM
OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES IN THE EARTH SCIENCES: EXAMPLES FROM THE UC BERKELEY LIBRARY’S AFFORDABLE COURSE CONTENT PILOT PROGRAM
Access to geoscience publications can take many forms. In the digital era, textbooks continue to provide a foundation for many students in a highly visual subject like the earth and geological sciences. Rising textbook costs can impact a student’s ability to engage with the material and may influence their decision to continue in the discipline. To address this issue locally, an affordable course content pilot program was launched by the Scholarly Communications Office of the UC Berkeley Library in the summer of 2017. The pilot offers two services to assist faculty in the adoption and creation of open educational resources. In the first service, the Library will process faculty syllabi to locate free or Library-licensed resources to defray the cost of print course packs. For the second service, the Library will offer grants and assistance to encourage faculty to adopt open or library-licensed ebooks, or to create their own open textbooks.
This talk will examine textbook trends and the adoption of open educational resources in the earth sciences broadly, and offer details of the Berkeley pilot. Examples of past efforts by librarians in the Earth Sciences and Map Library to support and license course materials will be described as well as the Library’s current outreach to and coordination with the Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS) Department. Libraries have been long involved in making course content available for students and this pilot provides a renewed opportunity for libraries and campus departments to partner in reducing fees and increasing access for students.