How much do the materials for this course cost students?
- $0/student
What is included in this course?
- Course Materials: OER modules aligned with student learning outcomes for topics developed for this course from various OER sources. Adopt and adapt or hide/remove.
- Instructor Resources, including the following. Adopt and adapt to use in modules, ignore or remove:
- Additional Resources
- Assignments
- Exercises
Where did this course come from?
This template course was developed from generally available open educational resources (OER) in use at multiple institutions, primarily drawing from the textbooks English for Business Success and Communication for Business Success in a collection from a publisher that focuses on (mostly entry-level) college textbooks. From their beginning until the end of 2012, this publisher licensed all of their books under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license, allowing anyone who so desired to copy them, give them away, or modify them, as long as they acknowledged the authors, released the copies under the same license, and didn’t do so for commercial gain. This was an unusual model, but they hoped it would work. (They sold access to additional study materials, as well as copies of books that would fit well on e-readers.)
In late 2012, this publisher decided that the process of giving away access to their textbooks online wasn’t working, and decided to switch to a different model, requiring students to pay for access to the books starting in 2013. (At least initially, these fees are rather cheap compared to normal textbook prices, but still not free.)
Because the books were still available under a Creative Commons license at the end of 2012, they have been copied to a public archive, and then repackaged so that they are available outside of the publisher’s website, and can be used by anyone under the terms of that original Creative Commons license.
Each page of open materials includes licensing and attribution information describing its original authorship and terms of use.