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Affordable Learning

What Is Affordable Learning?

Affordable Learning Resources are quality, low- or no-cost educational resources that encourage student success while lowering student costs.  These resources include library-licensed resources, Open Educational Resources (OER), and items freely available or in the public domain on the web.

Library Resources

While library-licensed resources are not OER and may come with copyright and licensing restrictions, using materials available through your library can save your students money. The library offers e-books, databases, and journals that can be easily linked to and freely accessed through Blackboard. If you'd like help locating library-licensed content to use in a class, please contact the Rice Library Scholarly Communication Unit or your College Liaison Librarian.

Check out the online journalsdatabases, and streaming video available from the Rice Library.

Open Educational Resources (OER)

Open Educational Resources are educational materials offered freely and openly for anyone to use.  Most licenses allow resources to be shared, remixed or customized for your class.  Open educational resources include textbooks, full courses, course materials, modules, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other resources used to support access to knowledge.  If you would like help finding OER for your class please contact Rice Library Scholarly Communication Unit.

The General OER Collections and OER by Subject pages have links to resources where you can find OER materials for your classes.

Free Online Resources

Free Online Resources are resources that are available online but are not always open, so you may not be allowed to change or revise them to suit your needs.  For those resources that do not fall under the public domain, it is best to use them by linking to the resource through Blackboard and sending your students to the specific site and not re-posting the information.