Open/Alternative Textbook Initiative course fee

If you use no-cost educational resources in your course, you can apply to have the course fee applied to your class. The fee is $10 and is paid by each student enrolled in the class. Ninety percent of the fee goes to your department, and the remaining 10 percent supports the Open/Alternative Textbook Initiative.

Qualifications

To qualify for the fee:

• The course must be one that needs course materials (practicums, exercise classes, etc., are not eligible).
• The course or course section (if only the lecture uses the resource for example) must not require or recommend any course materials students have to purchase. An exception to this is iClickers, since they can be used across courses.

Requirements

The fee can be applied to one or multiple sections of the same course. An eligible course may rely on any combination of the following no-cost options:

• an existing open access textbook
• library resources
• high quality open educational resources (OER)
• multimedia resources (e.g., audio, video, TedTalks, YouTube videos or Wikimedia Commons)
• faculty-authored materials (e.g., websites, PDFs, educational presentation slides or lecture videos)

Materials not eligible for the fee include:

• commercial e-text versions of existing print resources
• textbook rentals

Reporting and receiving the fee

The Office of the Registrar is now handling the collection of the course fee data to streamline the process. More information will be shared as it is available. Please contact the Office of the Registrar with any questions.