Textbooks Options in Brightspace

SUNY OER Services Catalog of Open Access Textbooks

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are a great way to provide your students access to course materials and save them money, and give us as faculty more flexibility. SUNY OER Services maintains a catalog of openly licensed texts that have been collected and developed by Lumen Learning and Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative. SUNY has licensed these libraries so that all the texts are free to use by faculty and students. All of the texts are vetted to meet accessibility standards, come with a variety of self-check and formative assessment activities, and can be integrated directly into your Brightspace course through the related external tools that have been added to our Brightspace tenant. You can browse and search the SUNY OER Services catalog to preview any of the open texts (referred to as ‘courses’ on the site). Contact SUNY OER Services (oer@suny.edu) for questions about adopting any of the texts.

Perusall Textbook Catalog

The Perusall external tool in Brightspace allows you to promote student engagement with course materials through social annotation. With it, your students can collaborate on doing mark-up of course materials, by adding comments or asking questions directly on a shared copy of the course resource, whether it’s a PDF, Word doc, PowerPoint, web page, or even web videos. The questions and comments are directly in context within the course resource, instead of in a discussion forum or some other location, and you as the instructor can seed your course resources with questions and get reports from Perusall on how your students are engaging with the materials.

If you are using a commercial textbook, you can likely bring it into Perusall for use by your class. You can then set up Perusall assignments in your Brightspace course for students to collaboratively mark up individual chapters or other sections of the text. You can search the textbook catalog in Perusall to see what they already have and if the text you want to use is there. If not, you can contact Perusall Support to see about getting it added. They have arrangements with dozens of publishers to make digital copies of textbooks, novels, etc. available through Perusall.

For questions about adding a Perusall library and course activities to your course in Brightspace, contact the TLTC (TLTC@purchase.edu).

Keith Landa

• President, SUNY University Faculty Senate
• Member, SUNY Board of Trustees
• Purchase College (on leave to SUNY system 2021-2025)
  • Director of the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center
  • contributing faculty, Environmental Studies

Also:

• SUNY provides free faculty professional development on a number of topics (Course Design for Student Success; Active Learning; Evidence-based Teaching with Generative AI; and more) through the SUNY Lumen Circles project.

• I’m co-leading a project to develop a SUNY AI Tutor platform that faculty from across SUNY can use to support their students’ learning. We’re looking for faculty feedback on any current AI tutor explorations and what faculty would like to see in a SUNY AI Tutor platform. Please take a few minutes to fill out the AI Tutor Survey - SUNY Provost AI Tutor Project.