By John Hilton III and Kenneth L. Alford
Brigham Young University, Utah
john_hilton@byu.edu; ken_alford@byu.edu
College textbooks are expensive, and prices continue to rise. The Bureau of Labor reported a 600 percent increase in textbook costs between 1980 and 2012. The average 2015 American college student graduated with over $35,000 of student debt, a portion of which came from textbook costs. In a recent survey of over 22,000 college students, 64 percent reported not purchasing a required textbook because it was too expensive, 49 percent stated that textbook costs caused them to take fewer courses, and 34 percent declared they had earned a poor grade in one or more courses because they could not afford to buy the textbook.
Students cope with this problem in a variety of ways—purchasing older editions of textbooks, delaying their purchases, sharing textbooks with other students, or avoiding textbook purchases altogether. What can be done to alleviate this problem?
One promising solution is open textbooks, part of a larger Open Educational Resources (OER) initiative. OER typically use Creative Commons licenses that provide professors and students with more permissions than traditional copyrights do, such as granting permission to edit or delete text. OER have been used in hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the United States and Canada, including Harvard University, University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), Ohio State University, Purdue University, Brigham Young University, University of British Columbia, and the University of Calgary.
Advantages
- Inexpensive. One obvious advantage of open textbooks is that they are free. Digital copies can be accessed freely online; printed versions can be made available at cost. Whether choosing texts in print or digital format, students save money in courses that adopt an open textbook.
- Adaptable. A second advantage is that open textbooks easily support reuse and revision. They can be customized to match your course by adding, removing, reordering, or modifying content. You can even combine content from two or more open texts to create a new book. For example, a colleague of ours who teaches nonnative English-speaking students adapted open psychology textbooks to create a text appropriate for his students’ language skills. Additionally, some professors have observed that adopting an open textbook provided them with an opportunity and incentive to look at their courses anew, improving them.
- Portable. Electronic open textbooks can be accessed by students on essentially any computer, tablet, or smartphone platform. While not all students will want to read textbooks digitally, it has been our experience that a majority of students are happy to read textbooks on their devices—especially if those textbooks are free.
- Timely. Standard textbooks in many disciplines tend to lag behind the state of the art because they are slow and expensive to produce. Open textbooks, on the other hand, can be updated quickly. If you find information that is out of date, you can update it and provide the corrected text to your students.
Concerns
- Quality. If the old adage “You get what you pay for” is true, then some might ask, “If open textbooks are free, how can they be any good?” A review of nine recent studies regarding the use of open educational resources concluded that using OER does not appear to decrease student learning. Roughly half of the almost 5,000 students and teachers surveyed found OER to be comparable to traditional resources. Approximately 35 percent believed they were superior, and only 15 percent found them to be inferior.
- Availability. The question quickly arises: “Is there an existing open textbook appropriate for my course?” Hundreds of open textbooks exist. It is true, though, that they are more likely to be available for introductory courses than for specialized and upper-division courses.
- Convenience. Like everything else associated with teaching, there are trade-offs involved with using open textbooks. Recognize that it will take time to identify suitable texts and reject others that do not meet your needs. It will also take time to adjust your syllabi, slideshows, assignments, and assessments to closely align with any new textbook.
Getting Started
After you decide to consider the possibility of switching to an open textbook, how can you find and survey your available options? One resource is the University of Minnesota’s Open Textbook Library (http://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/), a repository of open textbooks that also includes faculty textbook reviews. Numerous other repositories are also available. Using these, you can find, download, and evaluate potential open textbooks as desired.
If a quality open textbook alternative is available, the decision to switch can provide immediate financial benefits to your students and result in a textbook you are able to tailor to your students’ needs. You will never know what is available until you investigate for yourself. Based on our experience, we recommend that you give it a try!
Notes
1 Bureau of Labor Statistics. http://www.bls.gov/cpi/.
3 Florida Virtual Campus (2012). Florida Student Textbook Survey. Tallahassee. http://www.openaccesstextbooks.org/pdf/2012_Florida_Student_Textbook_Survey.pdf.
4 For additional information on OER, see https://library.educause.edu/resources/2010/5/7-things-you-should-know-about-open-educational-resources.
5 For additional information on Creative Commons, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.
6 A list of colleges that have adopted open textbooks published by Rice University is provided at https://openstax.org/adopters. Note that these textbooks are only a small fraction of the total number of open textbooks that are currently available.
7 Bissell, Ahrash N. Permission granted: Open licensing for educational resources. Open Learning, 24 (1) (February 2009), 97–106.
8 Hilton III, J. Open educational resources and college textbook choices: A review of research on efficacy and perceptions. Educational Technology Research and Development. (Forthcoming.)
9 See also the California Open Online Library for Education (http://coolfored.org/) and the repository finder hosted by BC Campus in Vancouver, British Columbia. https://open.bccampus.ca/open-textbook-101/where-to-find-open-textbooks/.
