Am I limited to only OER? Or can I plan to use hybrid materials (partly open, partly not open) for my students?
Answer
We highly recommend using OERs to bring the course material cost to zero, but the “ZTC” option doesn’t require OER and can allow for "hybrid" materials, whereby a course pack may include a mix of Open Educational Resources, such as articles in Open/Free journals, OERs from MERLOT, etc., and resources that are not “open,” but are free to access. An example of “free access but not open” would be links to articles in licensed library databases. These would require a log-in from off-campus, but there is no additional charge to the students. That being said, these resources are not truly open, so if the Library ever loses its subscription to a particular journal, the resource would stop working. The key requirement is that the resource(s) would be free for students to access.
The OER Committee strongly prefers truly open materials; however, under some circumstances, if adopting open access materials results in ZTC, the OER Committee reserves the right to consider such proposals.
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