Professor Amy J. Schmitz and Electronic Services Librarian Cindy Bassett have developed the University of Missouri Law School’s first Open Educational Resource in participation with the University’s Affordable & Open Education Resources Initiative. The initiative is designed to encourage faculty to create, adapt or adopt open educational resources in order to lower the cost to students of expensive textbooks. Once created, the resources are made available to other professors and students worldwide when hosted on an open-access website with a Creative Commons license.

Professor Schmitz teaches Dispute Resolution in the Digital Age, exploring the growing field of Online Dispute Resolution (ODR). Textbooks on this topic typically cost several hundred dollars each.  To save her students this cost, Professor Schmitz created and adapted freely available resources for her class taught in Spring 2018. Cindy Bassett then formatted the resources and included them on Mizzou Law School’s Scholarship Repository, where they are now freely available. The class materials include a detailed syllabus and class plan, PowerPoint presentations, and exercises for other instructors to use to teach a similar class.