OER means "Open Educational Resource," which for our purposes means that the texts included in the Composition Reading Bank need to be freely available to everyone, even those outside of Columbus State.
There are a lot of other types of OER projects and materials. If you have questions about those, visit the CSCC Library OER website.
There are many different ways that texts can be used in a Composition course (models for things to do, models for things not to do, models of elements discussed in class, springboards for discussion, etc.). The Composition Reading Bank is not meant to be made up of just one kind of text for just one purpose. That is why everyone is invited to continue to contribute texts for the Composition Reading Bank as long as they can explain why/how they use it in a Composition course so that others can see a reasonable purpose for it. This is meant to be an ongoing project so that readings can stay current and so that we can add new texts as faculty discover them.
Links to scanned PDFs are not included unless they are very good quality and are posted by other educational institutions under their own fair use guidelines and accessible to students with disabilities.
Chapters of books or anything not freely accessible to the public or in the public domain cannot be included in the Composition Reading Bank. We have been lucky to receive permissions from some authors to put their work in the Composition Reading Bank, but if a work is not in the public domain, and an author does not give us permission to use it in this way, we cannot post it.
Efforts were made to select articles that accommodate "reader view," a feature on web browsers that increases readability by changing the page’s text size, contrast, and layout and removes the clutter of buttons, ads, and background images.
To make the texts easier to read, use Reader View, available for most browsers on computers, mobile devices, and cell phones. Reader View increases the readability of texts by changing the page’s text size, contrast, and layout and removing the clutter of buttons, ads, and background images. The Reader View icon typically appears at the right of the URL box at the top of a browser. The icon can look different depending on what browser you are using. Here are the most commonly-used icons:
Please note: Reader View can occasionally omit opening paragraphs. Instructors are encouraged to double-check this before assigning particular readings to students.
Links to videos are included only if the video is captioned, and links to podcasts are included only if a transcript is available.
If a link takes you to an external site (outside of the Composition Reading Bank), follow the appropriate citation guidelines based on the documentation style you are using (MLA, APA, etc.). For articles hosted by the Composition Reading Bank, use this template if using MLA format:
Author’s Last Name, First Name. “Title of Article.” Composition Reading Bank, URL. Accessed Date of Access.
For example:
Thoreau, Henry David. “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For.” Composition Reading Bank, library.cscc.edu/hdthoreau. Accessed 23 Feb. 2020.
Below are some resources that instructors can consider using:
Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching provides a summary of Bloom’s Taxonomy from the original 1956 model to the latest revised model that is good to keep in mind as we build homework and in-class reading activities starting with “remember” and leading gradually to “evaluate” and “create.”
