Shakespeare Isn’t Worried about His Copyright: Building an OER Textbook from Scratch

At CSN, approximately 2500 students enroll in a section of ENG 231, World Literature to c1650, each year. The standard textbook for this course, The Norton Anthology of World Literature: Beginnings to 1650, currently retails online for $99.10, a steep cost that often prevents students from purchasing the book or passing the course. So, given that all the primary texts contained in the Norton Anthology are in the public domain (i.e., free and accessible), CSN’s literature faculty were posed with a simple challenge: how to replace it? To answer that question, this session will describe the full process of creating an OER textbook for a general education course: identifying an area of student need, finding openly licensed or public domain resources, drawing on internal instructor expertise to replace publisher additions, integrating those materials into a Canvas pilot course, collaborating to gain institutional support, and building the final product on an open publishing platform. Attendees will learn from our successes (and mistakes) and will come away with some helpful tips for creating their own open tools.