In an effort to save money and promote access, Kansas University’s School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures now offers open educational resources for 11 different language programs.

The school’s open educational resources — called OERs for short — are free, online textbooks that can be accessed by anyone. The school is excited to be using them in place of traditional textbooks for some language classes.

“We’ve made it a priority to showcase what we’ve been doing,” school of languages director Marc Greenberg said.

OERs are part of an open access movement that advocates for free online scholarly materials, such as research articles and textbooks. KU has been a leader in the movement, according to Greenberg, and considers its next step to be identifying where the OERs are being used and incorporating more of them.

“Right now one of the projects we are doing has to do with open textbooks, and that’s specifically because nationally it’s become recognized as a serious problem for students and a barrier to learning,” said Ada Emmett, head of KU’s Office of Scholarly Communication and Copyright.

One goal of OERs is to help ease the burden of rising textbook costs. From 2003 to 2013, textbook prices went up 82 percent, according to a Student Public Interest Research Groups study. The same study showed that high prices stopped students from buying textbooks, even if they thought the textbook would be beneficial to their grades.

“Higher education is getting more expensive, public funding is decreasing, and those costs are passed on to parents and students,” Greenberg said. “(Textbooks) contribute a lot to the rapid rise of tuition, and KU is trying to do something about it.”

Open access and OERs help the university save money, as well. Academic journal subscriptions cost on average $4.5 million a year, Emmett said. Online publishing helps cut that cost.

“When we turn scholarship into a commodity that someone can make a lot of money from, we cut off access,” Emmett said. “The whole open access movement is trying to fix that problem of cost.”

Professors also told Emmett that OERs can enhance the classroom experience through customized learning materials. Online materials can be altered by professors to fit the class so students get materials that match their syllabus.

“The big picture of the language school is to really highlight careers and future opportunity for students with language skills, and this helps with that goal,” said Nadia Rhodes, an Arabic lecturer at KU.

In order to grow the number of OERs available, KU has offered incentives, such as small grants, to professors to review textbooks that are already online to see if they could be used in place of traditional books, Emmett said.

Emmett shared data from a similar initiative at Kansas State University, which showed significant savings. K-State gave $96,000 to professors to create or adapt OERs, which led to savings of $1.1 million for students on textbook costs. Emmett hopes to see savings like that at KU.

“This really speaks directly to the bold aspirations and the goals of the university to help students get through their programs quickly and successfully,” Emmett said.

She said the next steps are to reach out to stakeholders, including KU’s student senate, professors and administrators, and get people participating in the conversation.