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Inclusive Access

Inclusive access is a model by which students lease course materials from publishers.  In this model, instructors assign materials to students in a class and a fee is charged to all students in that class and course materials are delivered digitally to students.  

Nicole Allen, director of open education for the scholarly publishing and Academic Resources Coalition said that she feels the term "Inclusive access" is a misnomer, she said "It’s the opposite of inclusive, because it is premised on publishers controlling when, where and for how long students have access to their materials and denying access unless they pay for it," She further  said OER is an alternative to inclusive access. OER is completely free, can be edited, downloadable and can be adapted by the instructors they way they think it is best. [Inside Higher Ed]

To learn more about inclusive access, see InclusiveAccess.org, a community-driven initiative to raise awareness of the facts about automatic textbook billing. 

How is Inclusive Access different from OER?

  • OER is completed free.  Students are charged a fee to obtain Inclusive Access content.
  • Instructors can edit, modify, and redistribute OER thanks to their intellectual property licenses.  Inclusive Access content is all rights reserved.
  • Instructors may combine multiple open educational resources and tailor them to their own needs. –not true with inclusive access. 
  • Students may keep OER forever.  They have no access codes or DRM unlike Inclusive Access.

What is Top Hat and how it is different from OER

Top Hat is Canadian Education technology Startup, and Top Hat Marketplace is an initiative of the Tophat to create more interactive and easily customizable educational content digitally for professors and students. [Top Hat]

Top hat Market is a digital hub where instructors can create, share, adapt and collaborate on interactive course content. You can suggest recommended changes to the authoring team and they can accept/reject. Additionally, instructors can start a course from scratch. 90% of the Content is free for instructors and students to use for free, and for the rest need to pay a fraction of the traditional publisher’s content. Instructors and students can use Top hat marketplace platform for free. [Top Hat Market Place]

How Top Hat is different or similar to OER? 

It seems like the Top hat marketplace is very similar to OER commons or Merlot. Top Hat Marketplace has course materials from OpenStax, Project Gutenberg and other OER sources like Open Oregon. However, it’s all courses are not free, up to 90% is OER/free.

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