Open Education
A new "channel"
I mentioned in my retrenchment diary post a couple of days ago that I had a bit of an epiphany about my potential relevance as an advocate of open education and reducing student textbook expense. So I'm going to begin a new section of my Substack and my YouTube channel that are devoted to this, where I'll post content on a much more regular basis. This will be concurrent with my work this fall semester on the Z-Degree Exploratory grant I received, to assess the potential and put together a plan to implement zero-textbook-cost bachelors programs at BSU. Now that I may not be able to do this implementation at BSU in particular, I'm going to be reporting more generally on what a university would need to do to radically reduce student textbook expense on an ongoing basis.
The content I'll post in this new "tab" on the Substack header will be about all aspects of the situation, from what OERs are and where to find them to how libraries can facilitate reducing student expenses, to how instructors can redesign courses to be less expensive, to how institutions can provide incentives or compensation to help faculty and staff move in this direction. I should note that although the term "Z-Degree" is somewhat sexy and eye-catching, this is really not a binary issue. It's not a question of achieving absolute zero cost or giving up and letting students pay a thousand bucks a semester on books. There's a whole spectrum of possibilities to explore, and every little bit helps. Additionally, reducing textbook expense can also be part of a movement toward increasing accessibility, updating content, and expanding the media it can be consumed via. In other words, modernizing courses to meet the needs of 21st-century students. So if that's something that interests you, watch this space.
My reference to $100 was intended to apply to a single book. It was my understanding that the buyback price was 50% and the resale price was 75%. The bookstore would only buy back books that were to be assigned again. At UND the University bookstore had competition from student organizations such as the Vets club running a parallel service. Faculty were encouraged to make a commitment to the same texts if teaching the same course in consecutive semesters. I know book reps push the latest options for a given course as this is where the profits were. The book reps would emphasize the most current info their company made available. As national booksellers became an option for students things got much more complicated and books rentals became a counter strategy.
The money ploy was something I wrote to indicate the cost to students needed to be understood within the context of the used book market. It was intended to be funny, but there was also an effort to explain that the issue was more complicated than the cost of new textbooks.
I been interested in the issue of textbook costs for some time and my original interest was in considering the actual cost that would be reasonable. Some of my thoughts considered whether the cost issue was overhyped. Here is a post I wrote to be humorous about this issue more than a decade ago. I titled the post - The beer money ploy. https://www.learningaloud.com/curmudgeonspeaks/2013/12/19/beer-money-ploy-repurposed/