Dan Crump, American River College Dolores Davison, Foothill College

 Textbook costs have increased nearly 200% in the last two decades.  7 out of 10 students have reported that they have not purchased a textbook for a course because of cost.  Open educational resources have become a popular option (in the opinion of many) to replace traditional paper texts.

 The US Government Accounting Office (GAO) reported in 2008 that the national average spent on college textbooks was $900; at the time, more than one and a half times the cost of tuition for a full time schedule at a CCC  In response to this, the CCCCO created a task force to look at textbook costs and make recommendations; these recommendations included the following:

 Standardize textbook adoption policies  Urge faculty to decide on texts early, to allow for maximum used copies  Avoid adding classes to the schedule late, forcing the bookstore to get copies of texts  Promote programs such as textbook rentals, library reserves, and quantity discounts.  Create college and/or district textbook affordability task forces

 Consider having the CCCs participate in the CSUs digital marketplace plan  Promote and encourage the use of Open Educational Resources and other low cost, pedagogically sound alternatives  Ensure that the use of digital and other works would not hamper transfer and articulation

 How many of your colleges currently do any of those things? All of them? Some combinations?  What are faculty doing at your campus to combat the prices of textbooks?  Have you been pressured to cut the costs of texts or adopt OER materials?

 Academic Freedom in choosing a text  Quality of OER materials  Availability of ancillaries and materials to use with the text  Reliability/availability of alternative or OER texts  Others?

 There is always some piece of legislation going forward to “solve” the textbook issue

 Textbook prices on (or linked to) the college online class schedule  Price the publisher charges the bookstore (“net price”)  Price the publisher would charge the public (“list price”)  Copyright dates of the previous 3 editions  Major differences/revisions between the current and previous editions

 Prohibit the use of textbooks unless they are:  1)offered with pricing tiers that include (at a minimum) a “rental price” and a “lifetime purchase” price  2) offered with cloud storage access  3) include a refund policy

 Establishes the California Open Education Resources Council (includes academic senate appointees from CCC, CSU, UC)  Determine a list of the 50 most popular lower-division courses to develop into open source materials  Publishers must be willing to provide 3 copies of textbooks to campus libraries  $25 million dollar investment (estimated cost of $500,000 for each textbook

 Establishes the California Digital Open Source Library to house open source materials and provide free/low cost access for students and faculty  Creative Commons attribution license  Intent that CCC, CSU and UC campuses provide incentives to faculty to choose open source textbooks

 Provide information about textbooks, including ISBN number, in a specified order  This information to be submitted to MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) and be available for public use

 Require textbook publishers to provide price and content comparison information to faculty to help them choose least expensive textbook for students  Re-introduction of SB 832 (Corbett, 2007) which was vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger

What are your thoughts?