SUNY Empire Library News & Alerts

Making Your Education More Affordable with OER

Education can be expensive, and one of the major expenses students will encounter is the cost of textbooks. 

Our library has not always been able to make textbooks available via our online collection. For one thing, not every print book has an ebook equivalent, and when it does there's no guarantee the edition we purchase will be the edition your instructor would like you to use. That said, we have been making strides to add more textbooks to our collection of library ebooks. For details, visit our library FAQ on how to determine if your assigned textbooks are free in our library and, if not, find them elsewhere.
 

There is another option for keeping your education costs down, and you may have never noticed it exists. Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials developed specifically to be freely available to both faculty and students. SUNY Empire encourages our faculty to adopt OER wherever they exist with sufficient quality to meet the educational need.

As you register for courses for Spring Term 2024 and beyond, be aware that there is a search attribute in Banner, the university's course registration system, that allows you to search specifically for courses that use free OER and courses that have no associated textbook costs. Visit the library's FAQ on how to take advantage of this search filter to get the most bang for your educational buck.