Choosing Course Materials

Choose relevant and meaningful material that reflects your discipline or subject area and fits firmly within the confines of your course as defined by your student learning outcomes. Consider the importance of student-friendly, contemporary content and strategies for connecting disciplinary excellence to real-world relevance.

students study in the library

Contacts and Resources

Key Considerations

  1. Educational Value

    • Are these textbooks and course materials the appropriate level for your course?
    • Will you assign or have students use a good portion of them?
    • Do they offer varied examples and perspectives?
    • Do they support the way you want to teach your course? Or is the format too rigid (making it so that you need to use all the chapters in order, for example)?

  2. Cost

    Often when a textbook is expensive, students will not purchase them or may delay purchasing them. If you have an expensive textbook ($100 or more), see if there are cheaper alternatives. Do students need the most recent edition? Or will a previous edition suffice? Would a different text work? Would a collection of resources work? Are there library resources you could use? 

  3. Access

    To ensure all students have access to course materials, where possible, instructors should place materials on reserve at University Libraries and/or use Open Educational Resources (OER). For more on Open Educational Resources (OER), Open Access, and Open Textbooks, see University Libraries’ research guide on OER. Consult your department’s liaison librarian for suggestions and guidance on library and/or open materials for your course.

Additional Resources

Resources