What if you aren't able to adopt or create an OER for your courses this semester? You can still try to utilize low-cost options to help students with textbook affordability. This page offers some options for using the Library's resources and course reserve system to offer students ways to access required texts without buying a textbook. Also, remember that you still can incorporate open resources into your teaching to supplement traditional texts as well.
The Library course reserves are a collection of books, movies, and other materials instructors have told us their students need to have access to for class. These items are kept at the Circulation desk, they can only be checked out by UCCS students, and they have limited check out periods (set by the instructor) to insure students have enough time to complete a reading or do an assignment, but prevent any one student from keeping an item for the whole semester. Depending on their nature and availability, course reserve items can be electronic or physical.
If you would like help finding subject specific resources, you may want to contact the subject librarian assigned to your area.
Considering assigning an eBook from the library as required reading? This is a great way to help students save money, but it can be problematic if the library's license restricts the number of concurrent users. In such cases, students may be locked out of the resource when they need it most.
To avoid problems, contact the library's Research Assistance Desk at refdesk@uccs.edu before assigning an eBook from the library's collections. We can help you determine if there are restrictions on the eBooks, and often we can arrange for a purchase of unlimited access.
Affordable Course Materials: Electronic Textbooks and Open Educational Resources by Do you teach a course at UCCS and want to make your textbooks and other course readings more available to your students? Use course reserves!
Course reserves are library items (books, journal articles, streaming videos, etc) which are designated for special class use. All course reserves requests should be submitted to Kevin Jacobs (kjacobs@uccs.edu) at least one week before the date needed for the course.
Place books, movies, cds, or other materials on physical course reserve in the library and your students can find your course reserve at the Library’s main circulation desk.
Request for links or PDFs of online materials to be posted in Canvas. We can even digitize a physical copy of an item, such as a chapter in a book, and put it in your course shell.
Course reserve requests follow the fair use statute of U.S Copyright Law. The Library is unable to fulfill requests that fall outside the U.S Copyright Law.
The Library keeps some textbooks on course reserve behind the Main Circulation Desk. You can borrow them for a short period of time, which varies by book. Search for books by title or course number. If you know the book's ISBN, you can do a keyword search.
The library DOES NOT own a copy of every textbook, and cannot guarantee that the textbooks we do own are currently available.