Sedar Ngoma
The use of Open Educational Resources (OER) around campuses across the nation and worldwide is getting more and more popular, though there is still skepticism among many faculty members who question the quality of OER materials. Some think that OER are low quality materials while others don’t know of a possible availability of OER in their field of study. The simple truth is that there are good quality and poor quality OER materials just like there are for commercialized textbooks. With the help from the Milne Library Open Service Committee, one may find very good and valuable OER materials for their course. Among other benefits, OER provides flexibility in customizing learning materials for faculty and students. Moreover, OER allows students to be ready on day one of classes and decreases textbook costs. For instance, when I teach differential equations, I use the Open Access Textbook Elementary Differential Equations by Trench, accessible to students free of charge. The closest commercialized textbook that I would have used would be Elementary Differential Equations and Boundary Value Problems by Boyce and DiPrima, for which a used hardcover costs $80.15 on Amazon.
The Open Access Textbook provides rigorous treatments of mathematical concepts and includes a thorough investigation of applications of differential equations in real-world than is covered in the commercialized book above and many others in the field. I learned a lot of applications that I was not aware of in this book and even use some ideas from it to construct undergraduate research problems that students presented at GREAT Day. I was introduced to the book by a colleague who has been using the book for a long time. After using the book in my class, I suggested it to another colleague who has been using it since then in his classes. In fact, the book has a huge influence in our Department because all faculty who teach differential equations use it in their classes. Many of our students have expressed their love for the book, not only because it is free, but also thanks to its simplicity in presenting the materials, the enormous number of examples and exercises solved, and many exercises for practice.