Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay
There are two main factors that contribute to high textbook costs:
Lack of Competition
Four publishers— Pearson, Cengage, Wiley, and McGraw-Hill—control most of the textbook market, which create monopolistic conditions.
Lack of Consumer Choice
Since faculty or universities assign textbooks, often without the say or feedback from students, it allows textbook manufacturers to raise prices without the fear of market repercussion.
Even if a student has received scholarships or financial aid, textbooks are often not factored into the college expense. For many, this unexpected cost has students struggling to pay the textbook bills.
Fortunately, since OER comes at no-cost to the user, assigning open textbooks is an effective way to save students money.
A large collection of open textbooks is available online and can be instantly accessed. Check them out today!
"Community" by Selsharbaty. CC0
Even though the student population has become more racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse, that diversity is not often accurately represented in educational resources. Textbook companies often create content that can be used in any classroom, but this technique often results in homogenized content that does not reflect unique student populations. For example, a traditional economics textbook will avoid spending an exorbitant amount of detail discussing the economics of Boston, but that type of content may be useful for those who live in other parts of Massachusetts.
As the axiom goes: If you try to appeal to everyone, you'll appeal to no one. Students can benefit from seeing themselves represented in the course materials, whether culturally, socially, or demographically.
OER allows resources to be modified, tailored, and combined with others resources in order to address specific teaching and learning goals. Materials in the public domain or those that have a Creative Commons license allow users the flexibility to design their resources to better fit the needs of students and faculty as a whole.
Sometimes, traditional assessments are often disposable and can lack value other than a graded assignment. To quote David Wiley in his famous essay "What is Open Pedagogy":
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[Disposable Assignments] add no value to the world – after a student spends three hours creating it, a teacher spends 30 minutes grading it, and then the student throws it away. Not only do these assignments add no value to the world, they actually suck value out of the world. Talk about an incredible waste of time and brain power (an a potentially huge source of cognitive surplus)! What if we changed these “disposable assignments” into activities which actually added value to the world? Then students and faculty might feel different about the time and effort they invested in them. |
Open pedagogy (OP) has students create and design project-based assessments that can later be used openly to the public. These types of projects can spark creativity, empowerment, and collaboration from students not always observed by traditional assessments.
OP allows for students and faculty the opportunity to create assessments in a customizable and engaging way. For example, Austin Community College created an open textbook called An Open Companion to Early British Literature. Students contributed to the book by designing the introductions, question banks for tests, digital learning objects, annotations, and essay assignments.
Using OP can provide students and faculty with a unique learning experience while also providing a useful open resource to the world.
