As the educational community responds to COVID-19, faculty may be receiving emails from vendors offering limited-time free access to their tools and platforms. We encourage instructors to explore open textbook or library-licensed e-book textbook alternatives during this transition to online teaching, which are always free or affordable.
Please remember that students may be experiencing greater financial stress than usual if they’re not able to work due to the coronavirus. You might want to consider investing your time in trying resources and tools that will continue to be free to you and your students after the crisis is over.
Subject librarians can assist faculty in finding resources to support your course design and class assignments - this may include openly licensed resources or library-licensed content. If you are interested in adopting a library e-book for your course, please consult your subject librarian so we can check on the resource license as not all of our e-books are available for multi user simultaneous usage.
At this time ACC Library Services does not have access to the print collection of textbooks which make up the Student Support Center Textbook Collection located at the HLC Library. We also do not have access to print textbooks on course reserve at campus libraries. The solutions below provide suggestions to students and faculty for alternative and online access to these resources.
Adapted from "SUPPORTING STUDENTS THROUGH OPEN AND AFFORDABLE COURSE MATERIALS" by FSU Libraries is licensed under CC BY 4.0
The textbook may be freely available as an open educational resource (OER). Check these repositories and collections:
More information on OER can be found on the Open Educational Resources guide.
Under Fair Use instructors may be able to provide access to the content for the students.
Fair Use provides for spontaneity and brevity (see Circular 21, pg 6-7) - an instructor may spontaneously choose to add content for a single semester, and then permission is needed for this same content if used for the next semester as well.
More information may be found in this statement, Public Statement of Library Copyright Specialists: Fair Use & Emergency Remote Teaching & Research.
Faculty should work with the ACC Copyright Officer for specific questions.
Through our expansive online resources ACC Library Services may already have access to the textbook as an eBook in our collection, with unlimited users. See the following tabs in this guide to search:
Several textbook publishers and providers released ‘free temporary access.’ Remember this access is for a specified limited-time period and the resource will not always be free.