What if the best textbook for your students cost $15?

Lowering Barriers to Adopting, and Customizing OER

Many institutional leaders are urging faculty to adopt more affordable teaching materials. Some develop cohesive alternatives, but others struggle to maintain quality. Without time to fully redesign their courses, faculty often default to expensive options or settle for less effective materials.

Expert TA is helping Instructors by letting them,

  • Edit OER textbooks to fit the scope and sequence of their course.
    • All OpenStax titles (70+)
    • Access to hundreds of other OER Textbooks
  • Import thier own course materials — Integrate them into an OER Text, or distribute as a standalone resource
  • Meet Accessiblity Compliance Requirements: Our platform and eBooks are WCAG 2.1 AA compliant. When instructor materials, such as lecture notes or lab manuals are imported, that material becomes compliant.
  • Keep Materials Affordable: Just $15 per student

A Powerful Editing Platform

  • Foundation: Rich Text Editor, built in Equation Editor, MathML/LaTeX support, WCAG 2.1 AA Compliant
  • Scope and Sequence Edits: reorder, add/remove chapters or sections, and in one click digitally distribute their custom edition to their students.
  • Copy Editing: edit text, add/edit images, embed videos and simulations, and more.

No-Cost Editorial Support

  • General Support: A dedicated account manager can provide a Zoom orientation and additional web-based follow-up meetings as necessary.
  • Editorial Support: Our account managers can take direction from instructors to enact their vision.
    • Want a mash-up edition that contains material from multiple OpenStax books?
    • Want us to help import your lecture notes from PDF and incorporate them into the book in a specific way?

    We can take your direction and let you know when it's ready, all at no additional charge.


Overview Video

The following two minute video provides a brief introduction about how instructors can customize OER, such as the textbooks from OpenStax, and digitally distribute to their students.

Portability of Materials

It is important for students to have a copy of the textbook that they get to keep. This is particularly true for introductory courses — that foundational material will be leveraged in other courses and students will need to be able to reference it.

  • Formal Print Copy: Even for custom editions, students and instructors can order a print copy in a number of formats (hard cover, soft cover, color, black and white, etc.)
  • Self-Printing: From within our eReader, users have the option of printing the entire book, or specifying any portion of the material to print.
  • Save as PDF: Similar to self-printing, users can choose to export either the entire book, or any combination of chapters and sections that they want.

Why Low-Cost can be better than Free

A $15 textbook that is custom designed for a course is better than a free textbook that creates extra work and confusion for students.

Most students and parents don’t want $300 textbooks, but most also don’t think they have to be free. Consider that sales of Cliff’s Notes are still high (roughly $15). Students will readily pay a reasonable amount for resources that they think will help them do better in a course.

Realistically, not all faculty tasked with teaching an introductory course, are able to dedicate their full time and attention and put in place free resources in a seamless and organized way. Many have research, graduate students, and other things that get in the way. If the expectation set is that materials MUST be free, often students will be presented with something cobbled together less clear and less quality than it could be.

Our goal is to bridge this gap.

Our Broader Goals

  • Give instructors an immediate tool that allows them to effectively and easily customize OER textbooks.
  • Work with as instructors as possible to incorporate any improvements that they are making to the main versions of the books improving them for everyone.
  • Establish editorial teams that coordinate with the community of instructors to create improved versions of OER textbooks, making them more immediately adoptable.
  • Provide great additional resources to accompany the books: online homework, secure testing, in-class clicker systems, etc.
  • Commit to keeping our prices affordable.