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Faculty Select

OER and DRM Free Books for you to use with your classes

Use Faculty Select Now!

Use this link to access Faculty Select. You may want to bookmark in your web browser for quick access in the future.

Faculty Select Flyer

What is Faculty Select?

Faculty Select is a new tool, offered through the Archbishop Alemany Library, that allows you to easily search for Open Educational Resources (OER) and DRM Free textbooks for your classes. These textbooks give you more control to customize your classes and at the same time lower the cost to students.

Faculty Select provides a familiar and easy to use interface so that you can easily find electronic textbooks that are either OER or DRM Free (see the definitions below). A couple of things to note:

  • Books listed as OER are free for you to use
  • Books listed as eBooks Available for Purchase are DRM Free eBooks that the Library will purchase for you; however we ask you to make a 2 year commitment to use the book.
Important: If you request a book purchase you must use your Dominican email address in the request form. Requests made with an email not using @dominican.edu will be ignored.

How to Use Faculty Select

Definitions

Creative Commons - Creative Commons is a form of copyright licensing  in which the creators gives permissions to users on how they can use their materials. For instance this webpage is under a CC 4.0 BY-SA-NC license which means a user can take reuse this page and modify it as long as they acknowledge the original author (Me), they share it under the same Creative Commons license, and they can't use it for commercial purposes. 

Digital Rights Management (DRM) - DRM is technology that controls access to copyrighted materials. You may have encountered DRM if you bought a song online or an eBook and you couldn't make copies of it or could only play/read it on one device or through one vendor.

DRM Free - DRM Free materials are digital copyrighted that don't have DRM. That means you can download an item to multiple devices, share it, make copies, etc. Beware of pirated items; although they are DRM Free, the removal of the DRM was done without permission and illegally.

Open Access - Open Access items are digital items found freely available on the internet and that aren't behind a paywall. They may be under some form of copyright but access is free. For example, the master's theses, senior theses, faculty and staff published articles that we post on Dominican Scholar are open access. They are still under copyright but one does not have to pay to access them.

Open Educational Resources (OER) -  True OER are materials (books, lesson plans, videos, etc.) that available either in the public domain or under an open license that allows users to do the follow:

  • Retain - Keep and make your own copies
  • Reuse - Use the materials in a wide range of ways
  • Revise - Adapt, modify, or improve the work
  • Remix - Combine multiple works 
  • Redistribute - Share with others

This means you can take an OER textbook, pull out the chapters of the books you want to use, change the examples in the books to match your teaching style, combine them together and redistribute the new customized text to your students.

Often times when we talk about reducing the cost of classes we are discussing a combination of OER, Open Access, and DRM free materials. Not everything free is OER, but all OER are free.
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License