Affordable Initiatives

Welcome to our affordable initiatives' website! We invite the UC Irvine community to review our current and past initiatives as well as updated content. Throughout the website navigate to

• information for faculty and schools about collecting and tracking affordable courses,
• links to an anonymous student survey to aggregate evidence that this work is warranted,
• information for students about the benefits and goals of Open Educational Resources (OER) and affordable course material, and
• a low and no-cost course list for upcoming or current terms—giving students a choice to select affordable courses from the start

We welcome feedback and encourage collaboration and connection across campus to learn more about what your school or department is doing to assist students with the financial burden of textbooks, access codes, and other proprietary educational resources.

Connect with us at OER@uci.edu.

Textbook Affordability Program

The UC Irvine Libraries Textbook Affordability Program is an ongoing effort to track the use of library-licensed resources in courses. The program tracks titles submitted through the Course Reserves form, as well as titles that are ordered by subject librarians for use in a course. Based on course textbooks provided by the UC Irvine Libraries in FY24-25, the cost savings to students was $530,000.

In total for the 2024-2025 academic year, the Libraries provided an average of 67% of the known course material each quarter. The bookstore generously shared their course material adoptions lists with the Libraries. However, on average we were informed of only 10% of courses taught each term. Please refer to the Collecting Evidence of Low/No-Cost Courses section below to share information about your course's materials with the Libraries.

Affordable Course Materials & OER Initiative

The initiative ran from May 2022 through May 2025 and provided funding for instructors to adopt, adapt, or create low-cost or free alternatives to expensive traditional textbooks and access codes. Priority funding was given to projects that impacted large numbers of students and/or centered diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.

The UC Irvine Libraries provided financial incentives and guidance aimed to eliminate barriers and increase the use of library-licensed or library-owned materials, including OER adoption. Open educational resources are teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium—digital or otherwise—that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation, and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions (UNESCO definition).

Awardee Achievements and Courses

Updated Information for Affordability Faculty Advocates

To accompany the work of transitioning or creating an affordable course, we encourage faculty and instructors to review the following sections on adding a statement to your syllabus, as well as keeping our team informed by using the collection form and student survey.

Syllabus Statements

Using OER or affordable materials in your course? Here are some sample syllabus statements you might use to share that information with your students effectively. Please feel free to use and edit any of the samples you like listed below by copying and pasting them into your syllabus. In addition to adding it to your syllabus, please fill out our collections form and select the OER option when quarterly adding material to the bookstore website.

To keep your course materials costs to a minimum, this course uses

1. Open educational resources (OER). These are high-quality, openly licensed educational materials available at no cost to you. The OER materials are licensed under a Creative Commons [insert appropriate CCBY license]

OR

2. an openly licensed e-book available at no cost to you through UC Irvine Libraries, rather than traditional textbooks.

[Include citation for the material here.]

You can access these materials through [insert directions here].

We are interested in your experience using these materials and welcome your feedback at any time throughout the semester or through the anonymous end-of-course survey.

**Many thanks to OER at Penn State for their leadership and scripts**

Collecting Evidence of Low/No-Cost Courses

Make sure students know about your affordable courses! Please consider notifying our team of your low/no-cost course by filling out this short collection form.

In addition, please consider implementing a student survey each quarter. The survey collects data and student perspectives on affordable courses in contrast with their interaction with traditional textbooks.

If you'd like to implement any customizations, we can reset a survey specifically for your course and share the targeted results with you. Please contact oer@uci.edu to discuss customization and access results. Otherwise, please use the shared generic version of the student survey.

Examples of ACM and OER course materials

There are a variety of formats and options for OER course materials. Please refer to the resources in the Affordable Course Materials and Open Educational Resources (OER) for Faculty guide.

We support campus research as well as course materials with ebook collections at the UC Irvine Libraries. If a title is already licensed or needs to be licensed, your subject librarian can review the library purchase options in advance of the course start date.

Examples of affordable course materials via UC Irvine Libraries licensed resources:

• Classics 45B: Anthology of Classical Myth
• Film & Media 85A - Limited user access: Film Art: An Introduction
• Physics 234A: An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory