Mhm. My name is Anita Walz. I serve
as the open education, uh copyright and scholarly communications
librarian here at the university libraries. Um And with
me today is um Dr. Eddie Watson from the University
of Georgia, who I'm told has four degrees from
Virginia Tech. So he said lifelong Hokie. Um
And here for the day and we're really pleased that
he is coming to talk with us about the institutional
costs and benefits of open educational resources. So without
further thank you. Yeah, please hold your applause
. Whose new is there anyone new? A couple
of new people? Okay, so some of you
guys can put the snooze on at the beginning here
. Um Mhm. So I wanna talk a little
bit about institutional costs and benefits of working through adoption
processes um for open education resources, what sort of
thinking about what the institution has to kind of put
into the game skin they put in the game versus
what what faculty have to put in the game instead
of. You've been through talks already and some of
you are new. I'd like you to maybe just
chat with each other a little bit, not necessarily
this prompt, but I'd like to maybe just a
little bit of brainstorming like from what you thought about
what you heard today, what do you think are
some of the costs of um university is going down
the road of promoting open education, resource adoption.
Especially it's sort of a textbook model like I've talked
about and what do you think are the benefits?
I think certainly the benefit is safe students money but
are there other logical benefits? So maybe you can
get into Groups of two or more? I think
you guys are kind of spread out and Peter took
off on you. Yeah, Because it takes like
two minutes just to do a little bit of chatting
. Um What are the costs and benefits from your
perspective? Uh huh Were you? Yeah, I
think mhm mhm. There she was. Okay.
Yeah. Yeah, probably. Mhm. Nice.
First. Yeah. Close. Yeah. Yeah,
obviously first. Right, remarkable. Yeah. Yes
. Hey. Yeah, this is like the thing
you work in. Mhm Oh it was you.
It's just nice to meet you. Yes, try
first. Wait. Mhm. Part we are building
your students a lot of reading office, there's trip
and in some respects. That's right. That's what
you're selling. Yeah. Okay. No, now
you have to get the pepper mm I'm Yes.
Three. Mhm. Yeah. Still what? Austin
texas and especially. Mhm Our delivery? Yeah,
not even counting yet. Different. Yeah. Mhm
. So Okay. Yeah. Exactly. No way
. Whoa. Here, I think that was all
over the hour. Your life must right. Yeah
. And you have to pay. Yeah. Generally
you married three. Uh huh. Really likes sector
your father? Yeah. Okay. So a cost
or a benefit one way or the other. One
thing that kind of you're really excited about institutional benefit
or you're really worried about an institutional cost. Anyone
have a thought on one of those two. Yes
, thank you. Well, yes, questions.
Especially open text books are created digitally and that digitally
they're probably more access screen used for visually. Yes
, I've been largely tax that helps as well because
it's a book of course. But yes, open
stacks and a few others are indeed quite handicap accessible
whose benefit you would have a cost something you're worried
about time. Yes, invariably it's the process of
getting from what you're currently doing to somewhere else.
And I think that if there's not dissatisfaction with the
status quo, it's hard to get someone to go
and what we found on our campus. And I
imagine this is pretty much the case at all large
universities, but we have, our publishers are fairly
aggressive and they go after they can do the same
math that I've been doing. You know, lot
of lot of students, if I can get them
to fact remember to transition to a free textbook,
it saves a lot of money. So we have
faculty who are here from publishers every week, in
the worst case um that I've heard this for last
month, um a publisher was waiting outside of psychology
professor's classroom and she comes out and get a sales
pitch and for her that kind of broke the,
you know, the camel's back and she's also very
adept at social media. She has lots and lots
of friends and followers, so it kind of created
this life of its own as a result. But
publisher practices often provide a lever or that dissatisfaction with
the status quo to really kind of start faculty starting
to engage when you're kind of feeling like you realize
that you're being preyed upon so that someone can get
to your students and profit from your students. So
sometimes that helps with the time issue. But time
is definitely one of the big, big challenges.
Okay, so This, I think three new people
here, so everyone can kind of put their clocks
on snooze for the next 10 minutes because you like
, you've set through this. But for the new
people here, this is for you. Um,
what are open education or open educational resources? You
kind of see it written both ways, but I
like the Hewlett Foundation's definition for o er, that
they're teaching and learning and research resources that reside in
the public domain or have been released under an intellectual
property license that permits free use every purposes by others
. So the repurposing piece is kind of a key
piece. It's not just that you find a free
online, like a ted talk, but you're actually
allowed to take it, change it, do something
else with it and then um use it. However
human life. So open educational resources can be lots
of different things. Course materials, learning objects,
textbooks, even full courses or software fall can fall
within the open educational resources domain. There's been several
initiatives that were sort of the first generation, but
they really didn't have a huge uptake of adoption.
I think we're sort of figuring out how to offer
open education resources. There's lots of things that are
out there today where you can find things that seem
to be just free and open and their educational resources
, so they must be O E. R.
S. But by definition, many of these things
are not O E. R. S because the
license doesn't allow reuse or reshaping or modification. So
ted cops are really good example of that. That's
a, they have their intellectual property and it's really
quite highly managed the property and certainly not something that
you can download and make changes to and then post
back online that that certainly would be allowed. So
kind of a key notion here regarding O. Ers
is around the license. So everything intellectual property,
there's a copyright who owns the thing and then there's
the license. Well how can other people use it
? So the copyright remains with the copyright holders will
be talking a bit about open stacks and you'll see
on the back textbooks and on their website, the
text of the copyright holder is Rice University, where
open sex resides, a sort of a non profit
at Rice University, But there's a license that enables
other people to use it. There's a sort of
licensing conglomerate that people can use to enable the free
distribution of otherwise copyrighted work and what you can do
with. So you can use a big changes to
what you have to give attribution to the initial author
or you can make changes to it. But when
you make changes and you share it, it needs
to be under the same or very similar license to
the one that it was initially authored under. So
there's different ways to share and kind of give away
free use to educational resources and that's how they can
adopt this notion or take on the characteristic of being
an open educational resource. But really kind of the
key concepts are copyrights wherever it is. But the
license allows it to be free and to be shareable
, and likely it can be changed and things can
be done. That's that's really what makes uh something
free online different from just it's online and makes it
indeed an open education resource. So, I'm going
to briefly go through um wide open educational resources.
Um you know, there's I think when it comes
to this discussion of costs and benefits, there's some
very easy costs and benefits that you see right off
the bat around open educational resources. So, you
know, been at conferences, and I've talked about
what I've what we've been doing around the we are
, and I've had someone say Close to Verbatim,
um Wow, that's great that you say students$200,000
, but how does that help the institution? And
I guess let's get pr right, pr I guess
. And they were also talking about, well,
what's the return on investment? So you put money
or resources behind helping faculty adopt the free open textbooks
. But students bottom line is not your bottom line
. So you save students$2 million. How much
did you save the institution? Well, nothing.
I mean, I didn't we didn't profit from faculty
adopted. So it's a very it's very reductive to
kind of quickly go to that place about, well
, if you're investing um institutional resources, personnel,
uh, time to move in this direction, what
is the real benefit tough through that? So,
we know that textbooks are definitely on the rise and
as a result of the cost of textbooks and the
changes in the tuition structure, I'll go ahead and
I'll let you take your picture and then I'll jump
to the next uh huh, just to the next
slide. So, kind of summarizing this, this
is a change over five years in uh state funding
for public institutions, 50 states. So in this
left hand column, those in red received cuts in
state funding for higher end. See that 48 out
of 50 states cut state funding between 2008 20 13
and those in the blue, which is everyone on
the right graph. They increased tuition. So looking
specifically at what's now my home state and your state
Georgia Over a five year period 2000 and 2013 they
lost per student about 3000 states. Then we increase
Tuition by about 3000 to make up the difference.
So we're kind of breaking in Virginia. You're doing
exactly the same game, mostly the same. You
guys lost about 2000 and state funding. You increase
tuition money just over 2000. So the difference just
a few dollars between what you lost in what you
gain. So just to be able to kind of
stay where you are as we've lost, leaving all
of public higher education as we've lost funding, the
only place to make up what the state takes away
is through tuition. So this is a picture of
what we serious and as a result we're seeing tuition
going through the roof Since 2000 2001 is whenever the
real shift took place, when we started to decrease
public support for higher education, We decrease public support
for higher education. The only place to make it
up was through tuition. And there was the intuition
outpacing inflation by a 5-1 ratio. As a result
of that, we now have a student loan.
The collective's in the U. S. Is now
greater than the collective auto in the US and the
collective credit card debt in the U. S.
Of course here is the great recession, we see
a downturn in debt and auto, great heart By
the new car in 2000. Right? Yeah.
Um, people held off on purchases, they go
on their credit card around that same time, but
we really consumers could not control um, the notion
of Tuition, your child's assistant at Virginia Tech in
2007. Either they change schools or you pay the
tuition as it's going. So there's lots of obvious
benefits, obvious um, institutional benefits. Um,
there's there's a student savings which kind of speaks to
this notion of college affordability, making uh college a
little bit cheaper, a little bit easier for students
to pay for. And I think one of the
reasons why textbooks is such a unique challenges that other
parts of what a student pays to go to college
. They have a long timeline to kind of prepare
and pay and seek financial aid grants and parents can
plan and all of that. Um, kind of
, you know, what tuition is now. You
can project what tuition is going to be next year
. You can plan, you can plan the same
thing about your rent and your, you know,
your fees and your car payments. You might,
when you choose to get a car. The thing
that you can't necessarily predict our textbooks, you sign
up for classes, you go to class the first
day you get the, the syllabus, you got
the textbook on. It rarely does a syllabus say
how much the textbook is. In fact, in
some of the conversations that I had after my talk
this morning, um, I had three or four
faculty up here and I asked how much is your
textbook and the faculty that had gathered after my talk
, they didn't know how much their textbooks were for
their students. They couldn't even guess. I said
was probably over 200 right here in this discipline is
probably over 200. And they were like, yeah
, I guess so. I think, I think
so. So if the faculty don't know how much
the textbooks cost the students certainly won't know until they
get that syllabus and um, I think it did
start making changes. That's the real challenge is just
around that formula for what students find out how much
they have to pay in textbooks each year. So
other institutional benefits would have certainly been a lot of
positive press, at least at the University of Georgia
. Following our work with the open education resources and
saving students About two millions of this on here has
been stories in the local newspaper and I was interviewed
by CNN Alumni magazine covered in and there's ongoing stories
from the student newspaper Red and Black. So that's
a positive institutional benefit. Other benefits is that I
think it speaks to the greatest challenges that we have
in higher education today. So this notion of the
completion and attainment gaps, students graduating on time,
the quality of learning at the institution, I think
that actually O ERS can help us have better courses
through a strategy of of course redesign associated with the
adoption of O ERS, especially over us, like
textbooks. And then of course, this notion of
college affordability and the savings that are, that are
associated with the adoption of NPR's. But I think
ultimately right now, because of that cost shifting that
are highlighted through those series of grass, there's um
, as students and families take on more of the
cost of higher education, the dominant public concern is
really not completion or quality of learning. It's really
the notion of the cost affordability of higher education.
So that's really where a lot of the energy focus
is going. So it's not surprising that we see
such positive pr as a result of the work that
we've been doing. But thinking about that completion retention
and affordability because I think they're kind of connected.
Like if you can help save students money, then
it's going to make it easier for them to move
through college. We know that students are paying about
$1,000 annually just for textbooks. Our campus university of
Georgia. About one third of students have unmet financial
needs after grants, after financial aid, after scholarships
. After all of that, they still report having
some and the financial needs. But nearly half of
all students say that the cost of textbooks impacted how
many, and which classes they took each semester.
So think about that. When you think about all
of the decisions that should influence courses that that our
students might take, it's like, okay, what
, what do I need to graduate that? The
like one big question, what's the prereqs for the
other courses that I want to take as part of
my major half of students are making decisions each semester
, probably making decisions within the first week of classes
regarding what they're going to take based on the cost
textbook. So when we think about completion and retention
and graduation rates, it seems like the cost of
texas is actually a fairly important variable in that formula
that leads to students matriculation through college. So certainly
this kind of challenge impacts under represent and specific socioeconomic
populations the most. So when you talk about the
attainment gap in the different races are getting uh higher
percentages of college completion than others. And that's why
there's the attainment yet. This is one of the
variables that certainly contributes to. So I C O
E R S. It's certainly an affordability argument,
but it's also an equity minded strategy in that regardless
of socioeconomic class, everyone who is in a class
that's using a free open textbook or a set of
open materials and they all have the materials on the
first day of class. There's no there's no waiting
get this material. So, other research regarding the
high cost of textbook and what students are doing as
a result of that, 65%, about two thirds
of students said that they decided against buying a textbook
because it was too expensive. They decide, you
know, I can't can't afford this text. Um
And of that 65% 94%, it's almost all of
them said, you know, whatever. I decided
not to buy that textbook, I'm concerned that it's
going to impact my grade, it's going to impact
my performance in the course because I don't have the
materials, but because the variable of cost outweighs this
concerns that it's indeed, even though, wow,
I know I need these materials, but I'm just
not going to purchase them this semester. I can't
can't afford them. Four out of five students felt
that they would do significantly better. And of course
, if the materials were available freely online or buying
a hard copy was optional. So really through the
doctor who we are is in an individual course,
students in that individual course will all have access to
materials on the first day. What and this translates
success and higher grades and certainly studies emerging um that
show that students who all have the materials on the
same day versus students who don't. Um the first
test is definitely differences between the first test in the
same course. If you're using an o er versus
an expensive textbook, invariably they're going to be some
students who aren't going to have those materials on the
first day, whether it's they just don't have the
money yet or they're waiting for the financial aid system
to kind of work through its process of allocating funds
to enable the purchase textbook. There's a whole number
of host of variables that can contribute to that.
So, o ers do translate the notions of higher
grades, especially early in the class and to notions
of student success, matriculation, graduation rates, things
like that's the way that the formulas kind of shaping
up. So there's a lot of the benefits.
But we start thinking about costs. And I think
that maybe Gail said that someone said this just a
few minutes ago that the real cost is time,
the materials are free, so there's no financial costs
necessarily. What are the various types of time?
Well, there's faculty adoption time. There's faculty course
redesigned time. Um, so that's just, you
know, to process, is that faculty have to
work through every time that they adopted textbooks. Those
are things that they do, They review textbooks,
they make a decision they adopted and then there's the
building of course around or in concert with those textbook
materials. So then there's other time, I think
it's ideally these last four bullets are indeed part of
the formula for the cost that is time. So
that there's hopefully as faculty begin thinking about open education
resources, they'll reach out to whoever curates open education
resources on that particular campus. I know what yoga
, we have librarians that are focused on that.
I know that you've got a needle here, who
does a lot of that work? In fact,
we put a lot of faculty to your website.
It's such a rich website on who we are.
In addition to that, that kind of work around
identifying materials. Then there's the course, redesigned practices
and instructional designers are brought on to help warning technologists
or pedagogical expertise. All of those things can contribute
to a better richer um, course as well.
So, you know, and, and certainly the
fact that we can go alone and certainly these people
have happened most times on campus. In fact,
remember in isolation makes a choice about their course and
off they go. But ideally other experts and resources
on campus would be a vote too to help reduce
costs but also improve the course. So I think
there's a number of questions and these are sort of
questions that have come up earlier today in various conversations
, but when you think about launching an o er
initiative, I think you first have to kind of
decide where are you going to set the bar.
So one place to set the bar is like increased
faculty awareness and then they can kind of go it
alone, you know? So I just let people
know about all the great resources out there, maybe
since some people some direct email saying, hey,
check this out. But then another place to put
the bar would provide faculties support in locating the O
E R. S. So if you if you've
got a fact member who comes to you or maybe
you seek out people who are your instructional innovators and
then you help them locate O. E. R
. S. It's easy in core curriculum courses,
the big courses that you find on every college campus
, lots of opportunity for things out there. But
if people teach these specialist courses a unique course,
maybe it's a unique to unique curriculum and interdisciplinary curriculum
, something like that, maybe there aren't obvious choices
. Some real help locating materials would be a good
idea. Maybe another place that you set the bar
is provide faculty support through workshops or course redesign training
or L. M. S. Training, all
kinds of things like, okay, so identifying materials
is one thing, but we can also help you
think through what you need to do to build your
o er course. And then of course, maybe
the highest bar is whenever you provide dedicated staff.
So like almost like an initiative where you've got someone
who is part of their job description is x.
They work with faculty to go through a particular process
. So that might be some some different levels you
can think about where to set your bar because maybe
another target, Like are you thinking about, you
know, I want to try to let everyone on
my campus know about O. E. R.
S or maybe you're thinking about a specific discipline because
there are some high quality resources that you believe in
and that you think should be used on your campus
. Um more you might identify an individual based on
key merits. It could, you know, you
might be doing all three of these but at different
levels, like you do awareness things, you want
to let people know about the resources and you know
that there are some resources for specific disciplines, but
maybe there's a couple of faculty that you try to
target. So these aren't really intended to be mutually
exclusive, It might just be sort of percentage of
effort Like maybe identifying on key metrics, maybe that's
where you put 80 of your energy and then maybe
you let an apartment and then you do kind of
create a bit of a drumbeat on your campus.
So that might be one way to kind of think
of at U. G. A. We kind
of set the bar at let's look for an individual
person. So that was kind of the target and
let's provide some copious support to have a successful case
narrative to be able to share with other faculty on
campus. And we could have one case that goes
really, really well and this would make it easy
. The kind of maybe sell it down strain here
. It is actually working. I mean, one
thing that we continually here is a disbelief that things
are free because nothing's free, especially in higher ed
. Really. Right. So, um, that
there are high quality, open education resources that are
free and that's, that's one of the challenges.
But having someone who's been through it who's taught two
or three semesters and students were never charged anything.
They weren't given a lot of spam. They weren't
given, um, lots of ads was talking about
the possibility of ads textbook. It's like, wow
, it's a brilliant idea how please it will be
to keep things going. But um, so what
we did is we focused on a specific person focused
on a single course. And we were again looking
for those who were teaching large enrollment classes and those
who currently use an expensive textbooks. So we were
just looking at the formula, how can we save
the most money for the most students through a single
adoption? Um, we've had lots of people who
have come to us who teach like 20 or 30
or 40 people a semester and we try to help
them and point them towards resources. But you know
, they're using a$40 textbook and they've got 20
students. Um, there's not significant savings and I
just think about my centers time or have to decide
where am I gonna put forth energy. So we
, we certainly help that person try to find materials
, but we're really focusing on how can we help
the most students, um, through the resources and
efforts that we, that we have. So there
was a call from the university system of Georgia in
2013 and we were already sort of exploring these ideas
and we received a$25,000 seed grant that funded a
grad student and a small summer sleeping for the fact
that we got the grant in June and we wanted
to transition the course for the fall. So that
gave us like six weeks. Georgia starts really early
in august, I don't understand Like August seven,
it's like really, but we get out early for
the holiday, so maybe that's the Mhm. Um
anyways, um We felt like we needed to incentivize
for this one project. How do we get the
faculty member to put some time toward it this summer
? So we had a little sighting of about$1,000
and the rest of the money to fund the graduates
. Isn't, that worked with us throughout year and
we based our selection, the fact that we put
a call out and we had three or four candidates
, the one that we selected um large classes helped
. Several sections of it had a fairly expensive textbook
and that particular fact never had opinion leadership on campus
. So, so it came to this decision,
we kept the other three on the back burner,
like we'll come back to them and we have since
then, you know, they had interest and so
we wanted to kind of keep that going. But
we also felt like you could get one one example
of success and could quantify it with numbers of students
, number of dollars say. Then that creates a
narrative for buy in for um my reporting line for
other faculty on campus, all of those things that
you kind of have to think about. So the
courses that we looked at were Biology 1103 and Biology
1104. They're both non major courses. And collectively
, if if everyone signed up for every available seat
we were looking at, it might be up to
2000 stewed. Yeah, they used a textbook called
discovered biology$97. So we were thinking best case
scenario, we would have an 8-1 return on investment
. The snake gave us$25,000. If we could
save the students. About 200,000 map, 2030 times
9 7. That would be fantastic if we could
have those kinds of stable. So we were just
sort of excited to see if it really would play
out the way that we thought it would. And
open stacks. College was fairly new at that point
, so we weren't really sure what we were going
to experience with them. Mhm. Um, so
open sacks is indeed the book that we went with
. And one of the reasons why is that?
It's a, it's funded through several foundations and they
hired someone out of the Pearsons engage uh structures to
be their editor in chief. A guy named David
Harris who's um phenomenally proactive and high energy guy.
And he set up processes that mirrored the processes that
they have a traditional textbook publishers where there was a
peer review, they were faculty author, they were
developed through a process that mirrors what you find there
. So there were editors, all of the things
that you would expect all the attributes that you would
help for in any textbook. They were part of
what they've done at open sex through that develop.
So fortunately for us, it turns out that intro
biology kind of looks the same and lots of different
textbooks. So the ordering and the sequencing were pretty
similar. So it made the course redesign hurdles a
little lower than maybe they could have been if it
had been a more dramatic shift between one book and
the other. Um So they have two different biology
books at open stacks um focused with a little bit
different level. And it turns out the fact remember
really liked some aspects of one and some aspects of
the other. So we ended up Blending the two
because it's just an online book that you can deep
link into. We blended the two on textbooks you're
allowed to reshape, its an open education resource.
The license allows for you exactly what we did.
We use an instructional designer a. G. A
. Um to develop our o. Er structure that
blending those two books and it's got its own name
and title within the open stacks structures. If you
search for University of Georgia, concepts of biology it'll
take you right to it but here's a bit just
jump right to it. And then we did the
course redesign richly using our learning management system. So
where certainly the learning management system has been used as
a repository for materials. And of course we really
change that structure. Here's a screen capture of what
what it looks like. So for a particular topic
or module within our learning management system. So they
knew for the course were itemized learning outcomes, learning
objectives. Then you have deep links to the region
mike within the LMS. Then there are video controls
, other open resources that were found out there.
Common open. There were just things that were available
online. So the license wasn't necessarily, we use
here are links to other stuff out there online.
There's a self assessment quiz that was available. Power
point slides were available here. So for students,
everything is kind of neatly packaged together with very clear
objective and so we found that students were indeed reading
the objectives and using them as the guide for what
they should focus on. And we often hear that
students say, just tell me what I need to
know, just tell me what I should read.
Well, learning objectives actually provides a little bit of
that kind of scaffolding that they say that they need
. So students see that these are the six important
things. Well, that's indeed what they're kind of
focusing on or looking for, renate, actually assist
them through their learning process. So one of the
unanticipated benefits that we have through this process, um
we learned very early on that it launched the faculty
member into not just simply, okay, we're gonna
do this reading this week instead of that reading,
and then the next week it's this reading instead of
that reading, there are lots of rethinking that took
place. It's like if I'm doing this this is
a little bit different. Maybe I should change the
way I do this in class. If I change
that class and I have to change the assessment.
So now this became a true course redesign process.
So content ordering pedagogical strategies in class as well as
the assessments were all rethought. And so the company
has instructional design expertise helping this particular fact that number
we were able to articulate learning objective. We were
ready to help them with course design alignment throughout.
So in other words, the assessments matched what the
objectives said that they were going to be assessed on
. So that kind of nice alignment that you would
hope to see. And of course the pedagogical strategies
in the middle um function as you would hope that
they've led students to be prepared to do the assessments
. So the another sort of cost benefit, I
think one of the benefits is that the o er
adoption, which our initial idea was quite simple,
just let's say students money. But it led to
us bringing about a significantly better course because so many
elements were rethought really, every aspect of the course
was rethought as the content was reordered. So we
were able to do a lot with. That probably
wouldn't have happened if it had just been a faculty
member who had been given a course by out and
go build the course when you in your free time
during the fall semester to teach in the spring and
whatever. So I guess that's one reason why the
strategy, I see there's a lot of benefits associated
with having instructional design partnership with faculty rather than just
the faculty member kind of being on there. People
can work through the redesign. So yes we are
led to a better course and everyone celebrated it was
great. Okay so benefit of course improvement. I
think we are facilitate that course improvement. It brings
a lot of expertise across campus. At the university
has already committed resources to to have people, librarians
and instructional designers and pedagogy experts to help work through
all of these things. Just described outcomes, changing
pedagogy. Even adopting new learning models are second project
was actually um focused in U. S. History
. This was 2014 2015 and the focus with that
course was not just the adoption of O. E
. R. S. But it was flipping with
O. E. R. S. So the
notion was we were intentionally going to change the pedagogical
practices as a part of the process of o er
adoption. So not just as sort of a bipartisan
, let's capitalize on what we see happening. We
went into it very intentionally in the 2nd project.
Yeah, So the outcomes from the first project,
not as many students as we thought completed the course
, but we estimate that that's about$160,000 was collectively
saved by those students and then thinking about from 2013
to 2016, that's just under a half a million
dollars that was saved by students as a result of
the$25,000 grant. So that's a 20 to 1
, saving something like that for this particular course.
As long as the faculty continue to use that textbook
, um these savings will continue to model and when
you think about switching textbooks isn't an easy task and
we know that the big cost is going to be
time. So actually, faculty, I think there's
a low probability that faculty will switch to another textbook
unless they have some kind of really horrible experience with
with the open stacks. So unless there's again,
that notion of dissatisfaction with the status quo, there's
not dissatisfaction with the open stacks textbook, it's likely
to just continue to multiply savings for students. So
since that first grant, we've received five other grants
, including the bill and litigate foundation grant. And
We're looking at the end of the spring semester this
spring, we'll have impacted about 21,000 students, saving
right at$2 million dollars in savings. And we
continue to target those large enrollment courses and courses that
we've now transition to an open stacks or another.
We are history biology for majors and non majors,
theater, psychology, sociology and adam have all adopted
open stacks or another who we are. So really
, as long as faculty just kinda keep with the
status quo will continue to see. I mean,
even if we stopped doing ou our work yesterday,
we never did another project. We would see this
number of two million continue to kind of click up
. Yeah. As a result, just faculty just
continuing to teach whether their current. So this was
faculty reaction in their first project, what they liked
and what they didn't like about the er um they
recognized that the o er wasn't perfect and that no
textbook is perfectly all kind of commented on different challenges
they had seen with different textbooks that they had used
but that they noted that an imperfect free textbook is
better than an imperfect, expensive textbook. You're going
to find challenges arata with all of the text books
that might be out there. He also no,
look there's no text bank and there are no power
point slides at the end. There weren't as many
end of chapter questions as you see in some textbooks
, but they also noted that while, you know
, the power point presentations, other materials are usually
really quite terrible anyway. So they often don't use
them or only use them as a reference if they're
just kind of rethinking something that they might do.
I'm thinking about buyouts versus support because that's kind of
the question is what do you do you pay faculty
too, do the transition or do you just provide
them with support? Yeah. People in the First
Biology project noted that having a dedicated G. A
. That it was really very helpful and they didn't
see it as being more helpful than if my center
had just offered a series of workshops on the top
. And they also know that if you build force
around the textbook, switching is really hard, but
that wasn't really how they had their course structured.
It wasn't as though the course was the textbook and
as a result, you know, just using the
textbook as a resource important resource. But it's not
the course, It really makes the transition. Not
that hard, it's really kind of probably good advice
for anyone. Teaching using a traditional textbook is think
about how how deeply ingrained you want to have that
course. So with that said, I'm happy to
answer questions that you might have about notions of costs
and benefits to the institution. Yes, there.
Yes, course Syrians. Yeah, criteria. Yes
. That that assumption seems to be true, I've
heard depending on the type of institution and the type
of dependency that school might have on income from the
bookstore, there's varying levels of response. So I
know we have technical college in our area this whereas
a factory towards. So we are really really impacted
significantly their bottom lines. That they were quite anti
the institution was quite anti open education resources regardless of
how it will truly help that particular population that they
were serving. Um So that's that's a little problematic
. Our bookstore hasn't been um They were looking they
realize what we're doing. I met with their manager
and uh he's looking for other ways to increase their
bottom lines. So they shared some strategy. We
have a solid bookstore that they pay for privileged to
be on our campus. And uh huh. When
you see numbers like$2 million dollars in student savings
, Well that came directly out of the bookstore out
of amazon or other places. Yes. Yes.
It's that money exists. Somewhere that it's in our
students pockets. Would have been through the bookstore another
path. So they're aware of that. They're coming
up with inventive strategies. One of their inventive strategies
is for students to for the university to adopt a
textbook fee that goes to the bookstore. And by
doing that students can then budget for it, ask
for it through financial aid, pay for it up
front. And then whenever they first day of classes
they find that work classes they take, they go
to the bookstore, the bookstore gives them a package
of books. Um From talking with our folic representative
, he said that there were two schools in Georgia
I guess that had adopted that and he said it
had increased their bookstore bottom line by 60%. Which
suggests that 60 of students not buying books previously but
now because it was a fee. So in one
hand it's kind of a Positive and that all students
in all courses had all the materials on day one
. So I applaud that, but it also several
things that are wrong with it deny students choice.
It ensures that textbook becomes just translate straight into students
student debt. Uh, as soon as we have
a choice in that also, it looks like the
textbook fee was the same regardless of your major.
So if you were an English major and you're buying
a bunch of$8 paperback, your textbook fee was
the same thing as a chemistry major, engineering major
if they had engineering at the schools. So in
other words, those are the humanities or those that
are disciplines that have cheaper books are subsidizing those that
are having more expensive books. I'm, I'm troubled
by that notion. Um, but it's a strategy
that's attractive to some because it guarantees even though there
was an inequity and and how textbooks are being purchased
and who's actually paying for the um you do ensure
everyone's got these materials on the first day of class
, so there's no one that's disadvantaged as the class
gets underway. So there's pros and cons in there
sound Yeah, I got a sense since they sought
me out, I got a sense that they weren't
real thrilled with the Mhm. It's just a sense
that, like he never said that. Yes.
Okay. Yeah balls ST five. Right, What
, what is that? Um Well, it is
indeed assuming that all students would indeed by the texas
. So yeah, so it be fair to say
that that could be inflated knowing that some students would
not be binding what you're Yes. So what didn't
stop, I guess. I don't really, I
mean, what dollars, nervous dollars watch this party
and again, in the long$5 nothing Gather that
$100,000, huge difference across campus. And the university
itself does okay supporting student Jack. Right. Yes
. That approach rather from my saying, why do
you use the student line because we're going to be
the better. Well, here's why we can't do
that at Georgia. Is that in 2011, the
board of regents, which you guys have a board
of visitors for each individual state school. We have
a Regents that oversee all 29 of our state schools
and the regions froze feeds so we can't where this
was exactly the strategy that I was going to promote
because we have a student uh, feet committee,
you know, that things through these things. And
I think if you didn't say wait, so I
pay$5 but I saved$300. You know,
I think that everyone would be on board with that
. But right now we're just in a climate where
fees have been frozen. But Virginia Tech, this
might be very palatable as a strategy to your to
your board of business. Uh this is self um
I mean, I know that there's places in university
initiated for different causes, I think years it would
be allowed, but it has to be approved by
the Board of Regents and they for the last four
years have made the state fee neutral. So no
one is raising fees, like we have a student
tech fee that goes to several things that it's already
earmarked for. Mhm. I mean, the strategy
that you suggest was exactly the strategy that I began
to pursue and discovered that this is a this is
a frozen. There's there's not, there's no place
for a conversation on that point currently. Now that
that may, I'm sure that it will, that
will change. Maybe it'll change this coming academic year
. Maybe it's the next academic year. I mean
, it's been frozen now for four years. So
it's it's an opportunity for just leave it at that
. Yeah, it's a great idea. Do these
studies? How many classes? Okay. I mean
with a dozen classes? Yeah. Right. So
get those high enrollment classes sing the song. Mhm
. Well, what we've come up with, like
on our website, we've got two pages and what
is kind of faculty facing and one is really intended
to be more student facing and the student facing one
is, this is the course, this is the
faculty member. This is a link to the free
textbook they're using. So as you're signing up for
classes, look at this page, make choices.
You know, appropriately, if there if if the
courses are offered at times that you could attend and
if financial issues are, You know, play in
your mind about your college education, make make the
appropriate choices. And so, you know, I
haven't, we haven't looked at enrollment data like I
said, 21,000 students. So that is indeed a
real figure of a number of students that have received
free materials through this work. Now, the 21,000
, there may be some students that are counted more
than once. So someone took psych and then took
biology. Right, so college right issues over there
. Mhm. Please this, wow. Strong spring
. Yeah. I mean, for me, I
mean, I think that most teaching learning centers,
most departments, there's some level of discretionary funds.
You get to make choices about what you do this
year and what you don't do next year. And
so, well while much of this work has been
funded through grants, I had made the decision previously
, oh, I can afford a g a dedicated
to this. I have three Gs anyways and they
kind of move around to different projects. I was
gonna do this anyways. I mean, I think
that thinking about the notion of, I mean,
I don't know the mechanics of how Virginia tech work
certainly, but the notion of like Going and asking
for$23,000 on something that's already part of my core
mission, you know, improving instruction. And uh
, this is just, it just seems like that
the it's such low hanging fruit that it would be
easy for for someone in an institution to pick up
this volunteer, you know, why we're gonna,
maybe, I'll get together with three different units and
we'll each put$8000 in and let's see what we
can do with one or two faculty members this coming
year. And then once you have that ratio of
6 to 1 or 8 to 1 or 10 to
1 return on investment, um, in addition to
attend to one return on investment, you also have
the notion that the course has indeed been improved.
It's a better course as a result of this process
. Um, if it's an easy argument, I
think to make, I know that you had a
question. Um, it wasn't really a major question
. I just was sort of curious, like,
you know, if we were to take over here
, it's uh, logical conclusion where we have a
majority of courses or like plurality, I guess at
least of courses that are no textbooks and the bookstores
decide like they're not going to be alleged to be
on any more. Like what I just because of
the month, I don't have a lot of experience
. Like in the way the universities and colleges work
bookstores like is that a cost production two institutions to
possibly lose this book. So I'm not worried about
, I'm not worried about right folks or companies and
they're just curious. Well, I think between like
architecture supplies and sweatshirts and foam fingers and things that
bookstores sell, I think that I think that we're
already seeing when you walk in a campus bookstore,
I know that it looks very different than it used
to just a few years ago. So there they
see their bottom line shifting and so they're they're adjusting
appropriately. So they have a right yes. It's
sort of like, you know, shift to demand
I guess. Sorry. Right. I just,
I just didn't know like how much of a possibility
or reality it would be that they would just be
like, it's not profitable for us to stay on
campus anymore. We're not going to. Yeah.
I don't, I don't know if, I mean
I would think that amazon would be more of a
root cause for something like that. Then you know
, a dozen faculty using a free textbook. Right
? And it's just, I mean I I accidentally
got amazon prime, amazon prime, you do the
30 day sign up. And because I had to
order like one thing, it's like I'll try the
video stuff and everything and then 30 days past and
then I was charged. It's like, well now
I'm stuck with it for a year, but now
I order stuff for like$4 and get it in
like 36 hours. And it's kind of like really
? So it's like I just, It's not Barnes
and noble is 20 minutes from my house and Amazon
is 36 hours from bringing it to my house.
I love the bookstore. I mean I was an
English major so I really love spending time in books
for my kids, love time in bookstore. So
I'm very pro bookstore in a certain respect. But
I don't I don't think that a textbook zero strategy
in a discipline or several core courses going down this
path is going to be the demise of the campus
bookstore. It might be a thread where there's lots
of other threads that people are tugging at, whether
it's amazon or book holders or other things that are
available online or outside of the campus structure. Yeah
, because I'm, the goal in the community college
system is first both go through their entirety to purchase
the textbook, like the end goal this, we're
not there yet, But so you know, it
just sort of makes you think like if they have
the option of going through the entire program and not
purchasing a textbook, why would they, why would
they choose the option where they do have to?
You know, So I mean, certain students will
because they want they want thanks. What? Yeah
. In any case. Yeah. Yeah. I
know that there was a certain point in my academic
career where I realized I wanted to keep books because
I would need them later on. And indeed,
I still do need some things that I bought whenever
I was a student. So yeah, probably not
that much. Thank you. Sure. David many
for the right right. Said, okay. I
really like to print. I'm sorry, order this
. Yes. Yeah. No. You know,
open stacks may have that data on their website.
I know that it's a small percentage. It's like
under 10%. I know that our bookstore like you
know Class at 300 by 30 copies for students to
come purchase. But a lot of students are going
to I mean everyone priced shops now you go you
go to best buy, everyone's got their phone down
there look the L. G. And then there
shopping somewhere else you know compare to see it.
You know, is it worth getting it today and
paying an extra$50 or whatever rather wait this shit
and see how that works out. So I think
students are doing a lot of price comparing but I
would imagine that they would know how many textbooks they're
printing. You know so David Harris is completely approachable
and amazingly transparent. I mean to be honest if
he has an individual within open stacks has made has
contributed significantly to open stacks success because he is he
follows through. Yeah. He's comfortable talking with faculty
. I mean, there's just so many things just
attributes of him as a person that made as we
began our explorations. Like this seems like he said
, he said unequivocally, it's free those are going
to paint. You know, it just kind of
move down the line that narrative regarding David makes me
believe that if you just look him up open stack
site and send him an email and said, Eddie
Watson said, you tell me this. So tell
me He'd be back in touch in 30. Yeah
. So I actually earlier, the bookstore has some
if your student and you want kids should drink well
, you have choices and you can order it and
you can, they're actually available on amazon. There's
a little bit of Mark up are available at the
bookstore. There's a little bit of mark up,
but you can order directly from open stacks as well
. So get it today at the bookstore you can
get male and you have pride 24 hours. 48
hours. Okay. What? No, let's go
. Here's sure faculty medals here here and there apartment
controls that there's something. Yes. Okay. Well
it varies dramatically I think from one department to the
next and from one institution to the next. So
I think the bottom line notion is that individual faculty
make the choice regarding the materials that they're going to
use in their class notions of academic freedom. However
often there is sort of a collective, You know
, we're all teaching the same section. Let's work
together to try to provide some level of equity across
our students were teaching six faculty, teaching 10 sections
of the same course. Well, let's, let's
, if we adopted the same textbook, we could
collaborate in the creation of assessments we could share,
you know, teaching materials. So sometimes there is
a committee, uh, I think I've heard,
I've heard very different stories from one department to the
next regarding how the such processes are determined, but
it's certainly decision regarding this whole adoption notion of O
. Ers. Okay. Mm. Yeah. Mm 1041 --> A:middle L:90% .