Introduction

This open educational resource is a collection of material created to support faculty participating in the Course Material Transformation (CMT) Fellowship Program at the Indiana University East campus. This fellowship was started in 2022 in response to the 2021-2023 IU East Campus strategic initiative of encouraging the use of open educational resources/textbook alternatives under the Enrollment & Student Success focus area. The CMT Fellowship Program aims to:

• Lower the cost of college for students in order to contribute to their retention, progression, and graduation
• Encourage the development of alternatives to high-cost textbooks by supporting the adoption, adaptation, and creation of Open Educational Resources (OER)
• Make course material access on the first day of class a reality for all students, regardless of socioeconomic status
• Support instructors in navigating the variety of affordable course materials solutions available and aggregate instructor support across campus into one space

This fellowship was adapted from a program of the same name at the IU Bloomington Libraries.

Based off of faculty questions that arose during our pilot year of this program, Assistant Librarian of Access and Technical Services Beth South has pulled together information from other OERs in order to create this collection of in-depth information to help better support IU East CMT fellows in creating and adapting their own OER. Website links have been updated or localized and some of the information was changed in the text to reflect IU East resources or contacts, but the majority of the text remains true to the original OERs they came from.

For any questions related to this program at IU East or to this text, please contact Beth South at eabrockm@iu.edu.

Note: We recognize that some information in certain chapters may be duplicated in others, but this textbook is not meant to be read as a whole (front to back). It is meant to provide key information that reflects the specific points of one’s OER journey, from just getting started with OER to creating a textbook from scratch. Some information is expanded upon more deeply in one section than in others. Please explore whatever chapters that resonates with you and your current information needs.