Our Journey, Day 65
In the Q&A portion of my talk on Textbook Affordability last Friday, I was asked which of my courses still had a textbook that students had to pay for. This question was prompted by the fact that during the introduction, the host of the event had said that I had converted nearly all of my courses to use OERs or some other solution for readings that was free to students. This is true, I've written open textbooks for most of my courses. For others I have adapted existing OERs and supplemented them with article or chapter readings that I was able to get for free via the BSU Library's subscription to JSTOR (which students don't pay extra for) or via monograph chapters I scan and deliver inside the learning management system. You can use small portions (usually less than 10%) of copyrighted materials in a class under the Fair Use principle. The one class that I hadn't figured this out for was Women in History, which I had only taught a couple of times. Actually, there was one more that I thought I would never teach again so I didn't count it, History of World Religions.
I mentioned the Women in History class and pulled out the paperback textbook, which I happened to have in my backpack. It's a small volume that nonetheless costs $41 for students, unless they can find a used copy. I was surprised when a librarian chimed in and said, "yeah, we could have got that for you."
Turns out, the book was available as an ebook via EBSCOHost. This surprised me, since I normally think of EBSCO as a provider of research databases. But they had this book in ebook format, and the librarian said they could have bought a license for it for $200 that would have allowed all my students to access it for free. And even better, this could have been done using the library's budget. That means that for $200, we could have saved twenty students $41 each, or a total of $820. This may not seem like much, but imagine if it had been a class of 100 students.
During my final semester at BSU, I've agreed to teach History of World Religions. I hadn't planned to return to this course, so I had not counted it in the courses I hadn't found a solution for. But the department thought it would be popular and we're desperate for enrollment. The textbook for this course (which I inherited from my predecessor) costs $135. If that class filled, that's $5,400 in cost to students. If I could get this as an ebook for the students, then they would not have to buy it. So I've asked my librarian to look into it and let me know.
If I CAN get it as an ebook, then I'll tell the bookstore I don't need any textbooks. It's about that time in the semester when we have to turn in our textbook adoptions. It's a bit of a dilemma, because if I tell them I'm using this textbook they'll get some and then students who buy their books before the semester starts will not see that there's an alternative. This is something that would need to be resolved in the long run, if people were going to begin having the library get books like this. We'd probably have to make it very clear to students as they were choosing their courses the previous semester, what textbook options were available.