Zero-Cost Content

Create Content


Pre-creation considerations

Creating affordable content can be accomplished in a variety of ways.

Some faculty will embrace the idea of open-licensing and the 5Rs, so for those faculty you’d do well to share information about Creative Commons licenses.

In other circumstances, you will have faculty who want to save their students money and/or author their own materials, but don’t necessarily want to openly-license their intellectual content. In such cases, faculty may decide to put an All Rights Reserved or NonDerivative license on their work, yet still offer it at zero ($0) cost to their students.

All of these choices are important and relevant in the affordable materials conversation.

Most of us have authored a document using Microsoft Word, and some of us have taken one step further to author content on a website or some other sort of web-based program like Canvas/Webcourses@UCF or even Pressbooks.

Talking with faculty about authoring content can be as hands-off or involved as you’d like, depending on the type of resource the faculty member wants to create.

Allow me to provide a few faculty scenarios:

  • Some faculty appreciate the familiarity and tightness of third-party integrations (e.g., Lynda) they have with Webcourses@UCF.
  • Some faculty prefer using Microsoft Word or Google docs for their collaborative qualities and robust reviewing tools.
  • Some faculty want to create content in a more flexible, web-based environment that provides tools to make their text more interactive (via annotations or inline formative assessments), such as Pressbooks.

There is no wrong answer when it comes to content creation, only different answers depending on the need.

Open Content Examples

License

Icon for the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Affordable Instructional Materials – ID Handbook Copyright © 2019 by James Paradiso, Aimee deNoyelles, John Raible, Denise Lowe, Debra Luken is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book