Our project here is called the Open and Affordable Course Materials Award. Each of these terms have specific meaning in this context:
Open means free plus rights to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute, which is generally accomplished through a Creative Commons license.
Affordable means using materials freely available to our students which are not and cannot be licensed as Open, such as articles and resources available on the open web or through library databases.
One way to grasp this distinction: Both Open and Affordable materials are free (or low cost) to students. But Open materials have the additional power of being more customizable, through the ingenuity of CC licenses (more on this in the next section). Most Open materials are designed to be easily shareable and altered, edited, changed, recontextualized, reused, or remixed. An example of an Open source is an OpenStax textbook.
Have you ever linked your students to an article in the library databases or freely available on the web? These are examples of Affordable materials. The student pays no fee for access. However, the material is "static", it cannot legally be adapted, edited, or changed in the way CC licensing allows Open materials to be.
Since one of the main motivations for the OA awards is simply to save students money, we want to support instructors seeking either Open or Affordable course materials for their students.
Course Materials refers to any material students are required to access in order to fully engage with the course and meet all the course outcomes. This includes anything students are required to read, view, listen, or do: Textbooks, books, scholarly articles, popular articles, images, videos, podcasts, tutorials, homework platforms, etc. Course materials may also include instructor resources such as assessment tools, test questions, discussion and activity guides, presentation slides, etc.
"Inclusive Access" merits mention here as well. Many large commercial publishers such as Pearson now market course materials as all-inclusive online packages or bundles where students get access to textbook/readings along with homework, tutorials, tests and other learning features. Though these may be quality products and relatively less expensive for students, they generally do count as "affordable" for the purposes of our award. However, there are many similar platforms that actually bundle and sequence existing OERs into learning platform for students. Examples of this include My Open Math and Lumen Learning. Platforms such as these are more likely to fit the objectives of this award and count as Open or Affordable, even if students still do have to pay a fee (generally no more than $50).