Affordable and customizable, they contribute to making higher education more inclusive and accessible. Given a choice between paying $200 for a textbook or taking an equivalent course with a free textbook, what would you do? The prices of college textbooks have skyrocketed: From 2011 to 2018, they went up by 40.6% in the US, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index. That can add up to as much as $1000 for a single semester. So it’s no surprise that freely available, openly licensed textbooks, lectures, simulations, problem sets, and more—known collectively as open educational resources (OERs)—are having a moment.
