Student access
Do you know your students’ preferences for accessing course content? It is important to support a variety of flexible formats. Your accessibility services department and bookstore can help you with logistics.
Depending on what type of open educational resources you are using, consider the following places that students might find your course materials:
- External link to existing content
- Bookstore shelf
- Links in syllabus or other course documents
- Embedded in the online course
- Downloadable document
- Library reserves
- Course website or wiki
Wherever your course materials end up, be sure you have clear instructions on how to access them. It is often useful to have somebody test out your instructions before giving them to students. Your students depend on you to communicate clearly what content they are responsible for, when it is due, and where to find it.
When you change your course materials, follow your institution or department’s procedures to make the change official. The bookstore and other departments need to know so that they can stock the right materials and let students know about no-cost and low-cost course materials that are in use.
Best Practices
Consider best practices on Student-Centered Course Material Adoption to help a wide variety of audiences consider how issues like flexibility, cost, accessibility, cultural relevance, and privacy in course materials/platforms impact students. Here are checklists for specific audiences:
These checklists may be good conversation-starters for departments, student groups, or institutional planning groups. Because they’re openly licensed, you can also revise them and build them into workflows at your institution.
These resources do not address the quality of content. For information about evaluating the quality of instructional materials, see the Quality Concerns page.