The Lecturer's Re-entry Plan: Designing an Encouraging First Week of Teaching

<p>There is a large body of genuinely free teaching material, openly licensed and stable enough to build a course on. This section names the main sources, says what each one actually holds, and says how you would use it. None of it requires a licence, a purchase, or a request for access.</p> <p>Use this material to buy back preparation time, to give students a legitimate no-cost route, and to make your course more accessible to students who cannot buy books. It is also the fastest way to fill the gap between the last thing you taught and the first thing you are about to teach.</p> <h3>The sources and what they are good for</h3> <table><thead><tr> <th>Source</th><th>What it actually holds</th><th>How to use it in a course</th><th>Licence to note</th> </tr></thead><tbody> <tr><td>MIT OpenCourseWare</td><td>Complete course materials from thousands of MIT undergraduate and graduate courses: syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, exams and, in many cases, video</td><td>Use as a template for your own course structure, and as supplementary reading for the parts of a topic you do not teach</td><td>CC BY-NC-SA, varies by course, check the course page</td></tr> <tr><td>OpenStax</td><td>Peer-reviewed open textbooks for high-enrolment subjects: maths, sciences, economics, business, nursing, humanities</td><td>Adopt as the required or optional course text where a mainstream textbook would normally sit</td><td>CC BY, some CC BY-NC-SA</td></tr> <tr><td>Open Textbook Library</td><td>A catalogue of open textbooks and other OER, mostly Creative Commons, peer reviewed, with reviews from faculty</td><td>Compare two candidate texts for the same course and pick the one your students will finish</td><td>Varies per title, shown on each book page</td></tr> <tr><td>OER Commons</td><td>A search index across open textbooks, courses, lecture notes, media and other learning materials</td><td>Find a single lecture, problem set or diagram you need rather than a whole book</td><td>Varies, check each item</td></tr> <tr><td>LibreTexts</td><td>A wiki-style library of open textbooks and reference works, mostly science, maths, social science and some humanities</td><td>Use the chapter-level editing, plus its exercises, as assigned preparation and problem sets</td><td>CC BY-NC-SA, some CC BY</td></tr> <tr><td>Project Gutenberg</td><td>Over 70,000 public-domain books, with plain text, EPUB and Kindle formats, plus audio in some cases</td><td>Set a public-domain text as the core of a reading seminar or a writing course; use the plain-text version for accessibility and low-bandwidth use</td><td>Public domain in the US, check local terms elsewhere</td></tr> <tr><td>Open Library</td><td>A catalogue of books with an open catalogue API, and a lending arm for borrowed digital copies, plus links to scanned public-domain works</td><td>Look up bibliographic details, editions and identifiers for your reading list; use lending copies for material that is not public domain</td><td>Public domain</td></tr> <tr><td>Internet Archive</td><td>A vast archive of scanned books, journals, manuscripts and audio, including lending collections of in-copyright material</td><td>Source scanned primary sources, historical documents and out-of-print material; the lending collection is for borrowing, not free download</td><td>Mixed, per item</td></tr> <tr><td>PubMed Central</td><td>The free full-text archive of biomedical and life-science journal literature, with millions of articles</td><td>Build reading lists in medicine, biology and public health; teach appraisal of a single paper properly</td><td>Open access, variable licence, many CC BY</td></tr> <tr><td>DOAB</td><td>The Directory of Open Access Books, a quality-controlled index of peer-reviewed academic open-access books from academic presses</td><td>Use scholarly monographs where students would otherwise read a single borrowed copy</td><td>CC BY, CC BY-NC, or publisher open access, per book</td></tr> <tr><td>Open Educational Resources in Harvard and MIT collections</td><td>Subject-specific collections of open course materials assembled by universities</td><td>Fill a gap in a syllabus you do not cover yourself</td><td>Varies</td></tr> </tbody></table> <h3>How to use open material without creating work for yourself</h3> <ul> <li><strong>Replace, do not pile on.</strong> If you adopt an open textbook, drop the equivalent chapters from your reading list. An open textbook plus twenty other readings is a workload, not a saving.</li> <li><strong>Check the licence and the currency yourself.</strong> Some texts are dated in their examples even when the theory is current. A 2012 open textbook with a 2019 edition available elsewhere needs care.</li> <li><strong>Mirror what you use.</strong> Link directly to the specific chapter, not the homepage. Students who cannot find the right chapter are the most common reason an open text goes unread.</li> <li><strong>Keep a local copy of your own slides and notes.</strong> Do not rely on a live external page for the core of your session.</li> <li><strong>Watch the file size and the format.</strong> PDFs of 60 MB are a failure on a train; offer a low-bandwidth route and a text alternative.</li> </ul> <blockquote><p>Free material is not a compromise. For a student who cannot buy a 70-pound textbook, a well-chosen open text is the only textbook they will read.</p></blockquote> <h3>A note on what free does and does not mean</h3> <p>Be accurate with your students about what is free and what is borrowed. A book in the Internet Archive lending collection is free to read in the browser, but it is not free to download or distribute. A book from Project Gutenberg is genuinely free to download and keep, because the text is in the public domain. Make that distinction explicitly and your class will trust every other claim you make about access.</p>