Course Materials: Faculty vs Textbook Publishers (& Faculty?!?)

Colleagues,

I am in need of professional succor! In a bout of irony, it was during open-access week, which concludes today, that my considerable efforts to reduce costs for course materials to students in the California State University (CSU) system have been assaulted. My goal here is to share the issue at hand and, hopefully, to collect your feedback and perspectives!

The Background

Being one of the largest institutions of higher education in the world, the CSU system, which serves a huge number of financially disadvantaged students, has a number of programs that emphasize reducing the total cost of education, particularly with regard to course materials. These include Merlot, Affordable Learning Solutions (AL$), and others, with other CSU programs supporting them (e.g. @courseredesign, @cool4ed @courseredesign, @affordableCSU on Twitter).

We also have local initiatives, like Fresno State's "Be a Hero" campaign to promote faculty-bookstore communication, which helps give our bookstore time to research alternative (lower-cost) materials and to ensure that orders can be placed far enough in advance to get the best price on materials.

Over the last couple of years, as part of Fresno State's 1:1 mobile technology initiative, called DISCOVERe, and also as a faculty cohort lead in the CSU Course Redesign with Technology program, I have been working to adopt Open Educational Resources (OER):

• I record course materials as videos for students to watch before class
• I develop my own exercises for students to use to practice class concepts
• I supplement these resources using OpenStax textbooks. These are open-access PDF textbooks that my students can download and use as references.

Doing this, I saved my students over $11,000 in expenses this semester alone.

The Challenge

While celebrating my intellectual contribution to my field and these cost savings for my students, I received an e-mail from a former student. The student had transferred to a different CSU campus and requested my course syllabus. The student's major department at the new campus wanted to evaluate the content of the class to see how/whether it articulated with their requirements.

To my disbelief, after I provided the syllabus, the student later sent me an e-mail response from the department. They made two main points:

• The OpenStax textbooks I listed on my syllabus aren't suitable as upper-division textbooks: "The texts for the course aren’t genetics texts, but, rather, fairly basic online biology texts that we might use to teach our freshman-level core biology class."
• That, although I provide much more detail in class (as evidenced by lecture capture videos, course exercises, exams, etc.), it would take too much work for the new campus to assess the quality of my instructor-created OER to accurately measure whether my upper-division genetics class would substitute for theirs: "The content has also not been demonstrated to be equivalent, but the level of verification this would require is more appropriately done at the university level. Faculty don’t have the time to do a point-by-point articulation between the two courses." It would be unreasonable to ask the faculty at the new campus to watch my lecture videos to do this sort of articulation assessment.

So, in the short-term, I might be saving students money, but am I doing them a favor? Now this student has to pay to retake a class.

The Call to Action

I was taken aback. Now that I've had a week or so to reflect, I'm still puzzled by this response from a sister CSU campus. I can understand that perhaps the individual faculty who responded aren't on board with our system's emphases on reducing course materials costs, or they don't want to take the time to evaluate the rest of my course materials (which I can understand). Regardless, this anecdote raises a larger issue that I think we must all, ultimately, address through discourse:

• Should the choice of textbook used in a class be the sole determinant of whether units transfer? more broadly
• Should the choice of textbook, alone, represent the quality, "depth of content," and rigor of a class?

Using the choice of textbook itself to deny my former student the ability to avoid re-taking a course borders on ludicrous. If this is how it is going to be, then I'll just put the latest and most expensive "real" textbook on my syllabus, just so it is listed there. After all, just because materials are listed on my syllabus as required doesn't actually guarantee that any student has actually purchased the textbook, much less cracked it open and used it!

Ultimately, I believe that this isolated encounter means we need to take action. This event might indicate a broader perspective in higher education about the importance of which textbooks are used in classes. Please consider informally reaching out to as many of your colleagues as you can to help inform our profession about:

• the value of blended learning (flipped classrooms) and instructor-created course materials
• the concept that lecturing from a textbook is not the only (nor the best) method of helping students learn

Finally, please remind them of how much course materials cost our students, and that adopting OER is a useful method of helping students afford to earn a college degree!