With each new semester comes another list of required textbooks that can cost students hundreds of dollars, contributing to an already heavy financial burden.
For some, this price is simply too much. Human relations junior April Garrett said she took a math class that required a $250 math book, forcing her to choose between financial stability and her grade in the class. Garrett opted not to purchase the expensive book, which she said made it difficult to keep up in the class.
“It can be really difficult if you don’t have a book because it affects your grades and that affects your GPA,” Garrett said.
Garrett’s story is not uncommon. When biology professor Eli Bridge polled his class of 120 students, he said only a handful said they purchased the $230 textbook.
In response, a department in the University Library is spearheading a movement to combat this issue with Open Educational Resources, or OER. OER are free learning resources found in the public domain that professors can use and modify to replace textbooks. The university has two librarians working on the initiative.
“We can’t, as an academic institution, afford to have students forgoing access to information simply because a company has to turn a profit,” said Cody Taylor, an emerging technologies librarian who helps with the project. “OER is important because of the students who would otherwise, without it, go without access to that information. It’s just something we can’t afford to see happen.”
More than 20 faculty members across campus have replaced traditional, potentially pricey textbooks with OER materials, according to the OER website.
American government professor Glen Krutz uses an open textbook he helped develop through Openstax. One of the most popular sources for OER materials, Openstax is a non-profit that offers a consortium of freely available and accessible textbooks in many subject areas.
“It’s a high quality book, as good as things on the market, written by peer-reviewed subject matter experts,” Krutz said.
Krutz said he thinks it is beneficial to offer students free textbooks in some classes.
“Let’s say if you cut your book budget from $800 to $400 each semester, that’s $400 that might be buying a student their meals — it can be sort of the pivotal amount,” Krutz said. “At OU we want to be excellent, but we also want to be accessible. And so if we can make OU more accessible to students by having more free textbooks, then that’s a good thing.”
Other professors have taken alternate approaches to implementing OER in their courses.
After realizing only a small number of his students ever bought the $230 textbook for his physiology class, professor Eli Bridge created his own textbook by compiling his lecture notes, pictures and figures into one comprehensible online source.
Bridge said creating his own textbook helped his students and allowed him to make it fit his course better.
“For the 70 percent of students who didn’t buy the textbook before, now they have no excuse, at least, not to read the chapters,” Bridge said. “I’m not answerable to an editor or anything, so I can put whatever I want to in there, and I can leave out whatever I want."
OU Provost Kyle Harper said the publication world has been entirely revolutionized in the past several years.
“With the rise of digital technology that have disrupted the publishing industry, we see faculty taking advantage in different ways of all of the different possibilities of publication to bring the best materials possible to students in the most cost effective way,” Harper said.
OU Libraries offers an alternative textbook grant award to incentivize faculty members who have not adopted OER to do so. The awards range from $1,000 to $2,500, with matching funds given by the College of Arts and Sciences and Price College of Business, OER coordinator Jen Waller said.
The grant helps compensate faculty for the time it takes them to assemble and design an OER for their class, Waller said.
“If they are creating something from scratch, that takes a tremendous amount of time,” Waller said. “It kind of pays for their time so they can afford to take time out from something else that they’re doing.”
The grant program also offers recipients of the award personal assistance from librarians trained in the process of finding and developing OER, which Waller said is the first step.
“There are so many OER already out there, not just textbooks but other openly available things that they can use, that they can also modify. So they may not have to start out from scratch. There is probably something out there already that they can use," Waller said.
The grant program had five recipients in its pilot year of 2014 and 15 recipients in 2015. With just the most recent fifteen projects, the projected student savings on textbooks is over $270,000, Waller said.
Waller said the availability of free textbooks is dependent on the generosity and goodwill of many people involved.
“I would say there is some generosity involved in it,” Waller said. “If you think about what the goals of higher education are and what our mission is, I think most people who work in higher education, professors included, they really have a goal of knowledge for everybody and information to be freely available. That’s what kind of creates a better society and a more enlightened populous and they feel very strongly about contributing to that.”
