Students with blindness or visual impairment face learning barriers in the typical higher education classroom where a great deal of information is conveyed visually. Instructors can use a variety of strategies to accommodate such students and make visually presented information accessible. One common and inexpensive strategy is the use of tactile graphics, which are graphics created with raised lines or bumps printed on special paper. However, due to the ways tactile information is processed, pedagogically these two-dimensional tactile graphics are not always ideal for understanding course concepts and developing mental models. We describe the benefits and logistics of a promising recent technology, 3D printing, that can benefit visually impaired students. The use of 3D printable designs shared as open educational resources can increase accessibility in the higher education classroom, even for instructors who have no interest in designing tactile learning aids themselves. The technology allows for incremental, iterative improvement and customization. For examples, we describe our experience using a 3D printed learning object in an introductory statistics course with a blind student, and we also describe our experience teaching an interdisciplinary service-learning course in which student teams worked with visually impaired individuals to design new 3D printable educational models.