Barrier to Learning: Why We Can No Longer Afford High Textbook Prices Linda Sizemore Scholarly Communications Librarian, Eastern Kentucky University & Victoria Koger Collection Management Librarian, Eastern Kentucky University Pedagogicon 2017

Textbook prices do not have an impact on how many or which courses students take in an given semester

Since 1978 college textbook prices have risen by 812%

Textbook Publishing is a Competitive Market with a Large Number of Publishers

Access Codes Have No Impact on Students’ Access to Textbooks

Community College Students Are More Likely to Use Financial Aid to Buy Textbooks

Scope of the Problem . www.studentpirgs.org/textbooks Since 2006, textbook prices have increased by 73%. This statistic comes from a February 2016 Student Public Interest Research Group report. This increase is 4 times the rate of inflation. Since 1978, the cost of a textbook has increased by 821%. Why? Two Factors In the textbook market, five major publishers control over 80% of the market. Students do not choose the book; the professor does. Students have no say in the book they’re assigned, meaning the publisher is free to raise prices without fear of market repercussion. . www.studentpirgs.org/textbooks

Scope of the Problem http://www.uspirg.org/reports/usp/covering-cost http://www.studentpirgs.org/sites/student/files/reports/Access%20Denied%20- %20Final%20Report.pdf From the same 2016 report, 4,704 students from 132 institutions in 25 states were surveyed in the fall of 2015. The researchers found that 30% of students use financial aid to pay for their textbooks. Totally 3 billion per year.

https://priceonomics.com/which-major-has-the-most-expensive-textbooks/

Why Is This An Issue? “In an economic climate where mounting student debt is hindering social and economic mobility — and even forcing some students out of college — discussing the economic burden of college textbooks is more critical than ever.” https://medium.com/synapse/the-hidden-cost-of-college-textbooks-6b3a67282609 Student Retention Student Success Student Debt Financial Aid STEM High textbook prices contribute to economic hardship for students, lowers enrollment and graduation rates, and ultimately to student success prospects.   A 2014 Student Public Interest Research Group report, Fixing the Broken Textbook Market, surveyed 2,039 students from 150 universities and found that 65% of the students skipped buying or renting textbooks due to cost recognizing the fact that doing so would impact their grade. Half of the surveyed students said that textbook prices had impacted which courses and how many courses they could take in any given semester. According to an October 2016 report from the Institute for College Access and Success, from 2004 to 2014, the average student debt at college or university graduation rose 56 percent (from $18,550 to $28,950) more than double the rate of inflation (25%). (The institute compiled their data from Peterson’s Undergraduate Financial Aid and Undergraduate Databases)

What is Open Access and Open Educational Resources(OER)? Peer reviewed sources No cost to users Cost to produce Three circles of open access Predatory Publishers who offer open access Institutional Repositories

What Can You Do? Reconsider requiring a textbook Don’t let publishers bully you Explore existing open access textbooks—OER Consider publishing in an institutional repository Explore your existing library resources Work with your librarians

What Can Academic Libraries Do? We can assist with Open Access Publishing Platform OER Use existing library resources We cannot purchase because Budget Space Updates/editions Electronic textbooks Access Codes Interlibrary loan Copyright

What is Stopping you? https://www.onlinelearningsurvey.com/reports/openingthetextbook2016.pdf

Why Should We Try? Evolving practice in academia Keep content current and customizable Improve student retention, student success, future student debt

OER List https://cnx.org -- OpenStax -- Frustrated by the limitations of traditional textbooks and courses, Dr. Richard Baraniuk founded OpenStax (then Connexions) in 1999 at Rice University to provide authors and learners with an open space where they can share and freely adapt educational materials such as courses, books, and reports. Today, OpenStax CNX is a dynamic non-profit digital ecosystem serving millions of users per month in the delivery of educational content to improve learning outcomes. There are tens of thousands of learning objects, called pages, that are organized into thousands of textbook-style books in a host of disciplines, all easily accessible online and downloadable to almost any device, anywhere, anytime. http://www.doabooks.org/ --The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Academic publishers are invited to provide metadata of their Open Access books to DOAB. Metadata will be harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and impact. Aggregators can integrate the records in their commercial services and libraries can integrate the directory into their online catalogues, helping scholars and students to discover the books. The directory is open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access and should contain as many books as possible, provided that these publications are in Open Access and meet academic standards. http://libraryguides.unh.edu/c.php?g=326958&p=2190442 -- Open Educational Resources list compiled by the University of New Hampshire. https://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm -- The MERLOT project began in 1997, when the California State University Center for Distributed Learning (CSU-CDL at www.cdl.edu) developed and provided free access to MERLOT (www.merlot.org). Under the leadership of Chuck Schneebeck, CSU-CDL's Director, MERLOT was modeled after the NSF funded project, "Authoring Tools and An Educational Object Economy (EOE)". Led by Dr. James Spohre and hosted by Apple Computer, and other industry, university, and government collaborators, the EOE developed and distributed tools to enable the formation of communities engaged in building shared knowledge bases of learning materials. https://www.oercommons.org/ -- OER Commons forges alliances between trusted content providers and creative users and re- users of OER. In addition to content partnerships, OER Commons, and its creator, ISKME, builds strategic relationships with organizations, consortia, states, districts, and others, in order to develop innovation and new research focused on OER, to advance the field of open education, and to build models for its sustainability. https://textbooks.opensuny.org/browse/browse-by-subject/ -- The mission of Open SUNY Textbooks is to provide an academic- friendly publishing model and infrastructure which supports faculty adoption, remixing, and creation of open educational resources (OER) and courses. Dedicated to improving student learning outcomes and addressing the affordability of course materials.