Partnership for Affordable Learning Materials (PALM)

Create open content

• You are an instructor and want to create a freely available lab manual based on 10 years of lab notes.
• We help you use OER Commons, OpenStax CNX, or the Open Textbook Library to publish your lab notes and make them freely available to students.
• You can also attach an open, Creative Commons license onto the new materials so that others can benefit.

Republish a textbook

• Copyright for an existing textbook is returned to you as the textbook author.
• Work with librarians and library staff to re-publish under an open license using Pressbooks.
• Distribute to your students and peers at other institutions.

Students help write new content

• You have the rough outline of a new open textbook or open educational resource that you would like to write, but you feel a $500-$1500 grant does not help much in getting the materials created.
• Propose to have students help create the content. Students work in a team to write chapters or sections of your new textbook or resource as part of their assignments for the course.
• Each semester you offer the course, students either add new content or change existing content. This keeps your content fresh and up-to-date.
• Librarians help create your assignments and publish the new content.

Each of these examples require faculty and instructors to stretch from what has traditionally been done with course readings and other materials. If you are willing to stretch and commit to working with librarians to discover and implement new content options, we can help you find high-quality, low-cost content that will work for your course.