Monday marked the beginning of International Open Access Week, but the Open Educational Resources Consortium at the University of New Mexico started celebrating Oct. 1 with webinars and workshops. This week it will host a free book fair.
Open Educational Resources (OER) is an initiative that works with educators to provide their learning materials to students for free. Sammi Williams is the OER Program Coordinator.
“We encourage and help faculty to create free textbooks, that can be either writing of their own or writing or adapting someone else's work to fit in their class. So that textbook is free to use forever,” Williams said.
When she said forever, she meant it. Not only do students have access to these materials while in school, but once the book is published on the consortium's website it’s available in perpetuity.
This initiative has saved New Mexican students over $1 million in the 2024-25 school year. OER also works with Central New Mexico Community College (CNM) and Santa Fe Community College (SFCC). The work being done with these three schools is going towards building a consortium for the entire state of New Mexico with funding through the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education Open Textbooks Pilot Program Grant.
To celebrate and educate on all of this, Williams thought a free book fair would be perfect.
“The more you read, the more you know, the more critically you think,” she said. “So what I wanted to do was bring books that could be freely given, and use that time of people coming up to us as a moment to introduce them to Open Access and Open Education.”
Friends of the Public Library is providing the books that will be given away, ranging across topics and genres.
The book fair is open to the public. It will be set up outside of Zimmerman Library (near the “Stone, Paper, Scissors statue) Oct. 21 and 22, followed by other events like a movie screening at the Guild Cinema and workshops.
