expensive texbooks are still a problem

https://www.facebook.com/372280739820732/posts/1561044264277701/

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2022-04-19-expensive-textbooks-are-still-a-problem-will-higher-quality-oer-help

Expensive Textbooks Are Still A Problem. Will Higher Quality OER Help?

Cost savings are not the only benefit to OER, according to proponents. They argue that the open format also gives faculty the tools to make their courses more responsive to student needs.

Achieving the Dream also announced that it has received an $800,000 grant from the Hewlett Foundation to study, along with SRI Education and the Tennessee Board of Regents, how OER grantees use it in the classroom in Tennessee.

 

CA 4 100% OER

California colleges set 100% OER goals as textbook publishers go digital

The state passed its budget in July with $115 million for developing OER

The textbook publisher Pearson last month announced a new digital subscription model that allows students unlimited access to titles for $14.99 a month, following similar services offered by competitors Cengage and Chegg.

OER work valued for tenure

The Tenure Review Process Must Evolve

https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2021/08/10/work-open-educational-resources-should-be-valued-tenure-review-opinion

when the Digital Humanities emerged as a field, most tenure and promotion systems didn’t address digital scholarship, leaving this new form of academic work unrecognized and uncitable in tenure and promotion portfolio.

Many postsecondary institutions in North America evaluate tenure candidates along three dimensions: research, teaching and service.

OER-related activities are forms of research, teaching and service.

unfortunately, OER work isn’t a standard criterion for tenure and promotion evaluation. Moreover, the tenure review committee may not be familiar with OER and thus may not appropriately take this work into account while evaluating the faculty member’s portfolio.

the Driving OER Sustainability for Student Success (DOERS3) collaborative, a group of 25 public higher education systems and statewide/provincewide organizations that are committed to supporting student success by promoting OER, has developed a tool to help tenure-track faculty include OER work in their tenure and promotion portfolios.

The matrix could also be used to incentivize OER adaptation and creation: For example, a department chair who has spearheaded an OER initiative in their department could adapt the matrix to show faculty how they can fit their OER work into their tenure and promotion portfolio, thus piquing faculty’s interest in OER. This department chair could also share the matrix with other chairs on their campus who are interested in OER so they could adapt it for their own departments.

 

OER U of A

https://news.uark.edu/articles/54607/history-department-and-libraries-open-educational-resources-save-u-of-a-students-50-000

six historians worked together with the open educational resources librarian of University Libraries on a new course development project with open educational resources and affordable resources.

The project resulted in saving over $50,000 for students who take the required core curriculum two-semester sequence in American history during the 2020-21 academic year. The project helped reduce the average cost of books in those two courses by 25% since last fall, to just over $36.

E-Books as Open Educational Resources


By Stefanie Panke for AACE Review, October 2nd 2019
https://www.aace.org/review/e-books-as-open-educational-resources-local-government-in-north-carolina-textbook/

The e-book Local Government in North Carolina is produced with PressBook, a WordPress based platform that allows us to publish e-books in multiple formats (epub, mobi, html, pdf) from one single source document. This allows for maximum accessibility so that people with different e-readers (Kindle, iPad, Nook, etc.) and platforms (phone, web) can use the resource with ease. It also allows for a variety of export options for other learning organizations to adapt the content.

OpenStax

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-10-24-how-a-university-took-on-the-textbook-industry

Some economists say OpenStax and other OER producers helped to halt the decades-long rise of textbook prices, which, along with other supplies, now set the average undergraduate back between $1,200 and $1,440 each school year, according to the College Board.

Feeling squeezed, for-profit publishers are searching for new revenue by selling colleges digital homework systems that charge students up to $100 for a semester’s worth of access. Since professors typically require use of these tools to participate in class, students complain that they are essentially being charged to turn in their assignments.

First, OpenStax came for textbooks. Now, it’s coming for courseware.

And for some faculty, the biggest question is: What about the extras the publishers give us (like those homework systems that automatically grade work students turn in)?

“They’re not very inclined to take on a new textbook that will require them to change the way they’ve been teaching, significantly altering their syllabus with new tests and resources and ways of assessing students, changing their PowerPoint slides,” says Nathan Smith, philosophy instructor and OER coordinator at Houston Community College, which offers a few “Z-Degrees,” the catchy phrase used to describe entire programs that have zero textbook costs.

“But once faced with intense competition from Open Stax, et al., the ‘textbook cartel’ had to, for the first time, start offering low-cost options for students to maintain their market share, or suffer from a significant loss of market share,” Perry said in an email interview.

For example, this year, giants Cengage and McGraw-Hill announced plans to merge and offer a subscription-based service that combines their digital libraries. Many publishers are also pushing “inclusive access” programs, in which colleges buy access to digital textbooks from publishers in bulk and then charge students a fee to cover those costs.

Commercial texts and tools make it too easy for some faculty to outsource their teaching and course design, Smith says, although he’s empathetic to part-time instructors whose workloads outweigh their resources. Open materials return some power to professors.

“We’re letting publishers determine what gets taught in our institutions,” Smith says. “I think a part of reclaiming faculty integrity and academic freedom—and what we think is most important about our jobs—is to reclaim the control of your course materials.”

results have been mixed, but a meta-analysis published this year in the journal Educational Technology Research and Development found “students achieve the same or better learning outcomes when using OER while saving significant amounts of money.”