[Sydney Thorpe] I'm the assistant director of academic affairs on the Student Government Association
and tonight I'll be the moderator for
the event "You want me to pay what? A student perspective on learning costs"
First we're going to go through the panel and do introductions.
Good evening, I'm Steve Skripak. I'm a faculty member in the department of
management in the college of business.
Hi, I'm Cara Boim. I'm a sophomore in human development and psychology
and I used to be a neuroscience major. Hi, I'm Sarah Umbarger-Wells. I'm
special research faculty here at the university and I'm also
a PhD student in the higher education program.
Hi, I'm Kimberly Kading and I'm a freshman in university studies.
I'm J.T. Addair and I'm a sophomore in university studies as well.
Hi, I'm Anita Walz. I'm the open education, copyright,
and scholarly communication librarian here at the university libraries.
I would like to thank all the panel members for being here tonight and being
able to share their perspectives. So the purpose of this event is to
become more aware of the struggles that students face
in paying for educational materials, allowing for education
of the resources available, and also understanding the process
the professors go through in order to implement open textbook resources
and their experiences in the matter.
And Anita will give us a brief introduction to open education.
Thank you very much for inviting me here tonight.
I want to give a bit of background on open education because
when I talk to people they think a lot of different things
about what open education is. A lot of people think
oh it means you have no admissions requirements,
it means you have free textbooks, it means you
are mainstreaming persons with disabilities in your curriculum,
it's all about MOOCs, and while some of these things might be correct,
open education is a lot more than
each of these things. It's really a movement, a philosophy, and
a set of practices that allow people to do what they need
to do to grow in their learning practices. Really it's about
sharing, and it's about sharing in three different ways:
open access which
is very popular because it means that something
is free you can get to it free you can use it you can read it no
problems everybody's happy
open educational resources these are not only free but they have a license that
allows you to adapt and to share them and i should mention that some of these
things are more exciting for students and some of them are more exciting for
faculty the fact that you can adapt resources
is very exciting um to some faculty but the one that is
probably more exciting we'll get to is the third one open
pedagogy some some examples of open educational
resources how many of you have heard of this word before okay
so open educational resources are a response to
copyright in a certain degree where you can't copy you can't share you can't
change something versus materials that have what we call
5r permissions where you can reuse revise remix
redistribute retain these works most often
these are described with creative commons licenses
that range from allowing
pretty broad use all with attribution down to
allowing use but only for non-commercial purposes and sharing future editions
with the same license some examples that uh the university
library has worked on with faculty around the
university include fundamentals of business which um steve
spreepak will talk a bit about today there's a video series out of that
med that just came out this year and we have a third book that's in the works
right now but the part that i think is most
compelling that drives open education really is
pedagogy it's what teachers want to do in their
classrooms building assignments work for students
that is meaningful that's purposeful that's valuable in the real world
that enables students to explore and to to learn um at their
things that they are that they are interested in
um one of the ways that this is described is uh an intentional
design of creative ways for students work to be
impactful and relevant a few examples of this
that you may have experienced at virginia tech
include some of the work in the world regions course
where students are impersonating
public figures and following their lives and tweeting as if they were them
um others include faculty who are teaching
with something like wikipedia where students are building
and creating assignments and creating real worlds materials that
that add value to the rest of the world
without um further explanation uh just like to say the operative
question really is how can i be more open
and so i just want to leave you with this idea um
open education is not just free freely available
things um but it is based on a series of values of sharing of
collaborating getting feedback from other people
incorporating new ideas using open licenses that we've looked at
giving credit and then focusing on students or learners
and their needs so without further delay that is
open education
and now we will transition into questions for
all of the panel members so this is open to anyone
um
how much did you spend on required learning resources
in college i can start with that and say it was a
long time ago and i remember that a book that was
forty dollars was really expensive
yeah i i don't remember a lot i just remember there were there were some
books that were i thought were kind of pricey
um but i know it's different now yes i've spent um i think last year or this
year um i think around 1200 on books
um for everything so so far i've probably spent over three
hundred on just books and that doesn't include
like access codes or other outside sources that they use
i think i've spent about like 500 including access
and stuff um i've tried to rent versus buy which can sometimes be
good but other times i when i buy it i sell it back to
someone else and make money back but usually that's hard because some of the
books you can't sell them without the access
folks these people may be from the class and a chemistry textbook alone for
general chemistry is like 250.
as a graduate student in my department it's a little bit different most of our
textbooks are um far less expensive than what
undergraduates it seems are paying um and most of the books that i purchase
are things i'm going to use further in my my career as an educator
and so for me there are things that i am going to continue to to rely on
but yet it seems that the materials that i need are
a little easier to come by and probably a little less expensive than
than what undergrads are paying so
so it was so long ago that i went to college that i don't even think the
number is relevant but everything now just seems
so expensive um what did you all generally think when
you were paying for your textbooks was there any semester that was
a lot more than another or less
so i'm on limited funds and my first thought was why are they so
expensive because it's a huge university you would
figure that the book prices would be lower but
instead when i first bought books it ended up being like 422 dollars
and i returned all of them and bought them
on amazon book holders any place i could find it cheaper
because the money that i have i need to like save for other things
because classes will want you to buy like top hat
and just other things and access codes are beyond ridiculous
because some classes it's like yeah i buy this book but
this may or not like may or may not be helpful to your learning
and i just can't afford that
yeah with um the access codes um the university has canvas so i don't
really see like why it's um necessary to buy access codes to
other online websites when we have canvas as a university for free
even though it's included like with tuition and room and board
um so
yeah i definitely feel the same about access foods and um
i also see a lot of people i work at the university bookstore
and so i see a lot of people come in buy like 500
worth of books but i know they can get fined find
through used or cheaper but like the bookstore has unlimited used books
um most books are sold in like a package deal like a chemistry book so you can't
buy just the access code or something um which makes it more expensive even
though you only need one of them so i do know that when i was an
undergrad um being a low income first generation
student i was very mindful of how much books
cost and so that determined in some way my
choice of major i didn't have parents to ask if that was a wise choice should i
be choosing my future based on whether i can afford these books today or not or
taking on another job just to buy books so i made the choice to change majors
something that was a little more affordable
and books happened to be one of the factors in that decision there were
times that i did drop classes when i went to the bookstore and bought
the books or looked to see how much the books were i was like i don't need this
class i can pick one that's cheaper and i
would go to the bookstore and look and see
the classes that maybe only had one book or a few books that were very
inexpensive or ones i knew i could get at the library because i worked at the
library i could check those books out and so
those sometimes would be the classes i would enroll in
um especially it was a class that i didn't have to take to complete a major
so a lot of bad choices based on affordability
how do you believe these educational
materials
well so far
i didn't buy a physical book for one of my classes because
it would have pushed my budget so i just managed to get the online version but i
had to have it because she grades on the learning curves but as for
my other class i didn't buy that access code i bought the used book
online and so far everything's been fine so
um if they're not doing anything with the access codes i don't see why it's
necessary to buy a brand new book when i can go buy it for cheaper
it just seems a bit
online pointless any other materials for the same information
i know for the principles of biology class they put up
powerpoints on earth videos um on canvas and i bought the textbook
never touched it just used the powerpoints and
bought like a b plus a ghost semesters so i didn't need to have it
and for my personal finance class we have um online recorded lectures
um and even at the beginning of the semester he said that we didn't have to
buy the book but it would be good like beneficial if we did i couldn't
afford it but the recorded lectures like really helped
me to learn those uh that and he posts the
powerpoints on canvas so it's really really simple like with
getting access to the information
for other educational materials other than textbooks
such as an access code um how much would you say that these
materials are working
i understand that it like i guess the money goes to the people who
wrote the book but to me it is
really unnecessary and when you're like buying the book that should go to them
but where it gets to the point where i can't afford it and
like probably most of the virginia tech population can't
because like everyone that i talked to at the beginning of the year the first
thing they said was the books are so expensive here and i
was like i agree it is insane so then they're like
listing all these places alternate ways to buy books that are
cheaper which is ironic because you would figure
that the library or the bookstore would want people to
buy their books instead but when people are going out they're losing money that
way
i have a student as the the faculty advisor and also i guess a
member i'm not really a fan of the advisor i guess i'm just a
helper and i don't know what i am anyway um so one of the uh
1g at bt which is first generation virginia tech students
told me that um in the the major that this particular student
is in access codes are a big deal um it's something that's that
they have to have for this particular major and this
student informed me that their financial aid
package was not set up
to provide enough funding to cover the addition uh the cost
that the access code is so you know that's a concern of mine
are we you know is there proper alignment
in all different areas of campus to help students afford
things like access codes is the financial aid office aware that students
in certain majors have this added expense and so therefore
their financial aid um needs to reflect that um
you know is this is the are the common conversations taking place
um so that everyone is aware of what the the cost really is for students
as they're trying to navigate their educational system
i know a lot of students have to buy an eye clicker or
repo which is basically what teachers use to take attendance
um to make sure you're there learning in their class
and it ends up being a bunch of bs and you just buy like
the i clicker itself is like 50 and basically you're answering multiple
choice questions with it um and you do like two or three per
class and then they drop some but like it's like just a small participation
grade and they make them pay like fifty dollars for the remote and then
you have to pay an additional expense every semester you use it
and just like it seems so unnecessary because if they're going to like it
should be like a common thing they should be able to show up to class
by themselves they're not showing up to class then that's
that shouldn't be like an expense um for my freshman year
i actually um i was working two jobs but it was still yet like really expensive
just for tuition and everything because i am a first generation college student
and i'm actually academic or financially
independent so i couldn't afford an iclicker and um
that took i think it was maybe 15 of my grade
um and i did fail the class or i withdrew something like that
but um that definitely definitely played a large role like
in me passing that class um and i even came in contact with like the instructor
and he didn't really feel any like not
necessarily pity but he wasn't like really understanding
that i really couldn't afford fifty dollars for an iclicker and there's an
app for it on the phone and um i think it's like maybe fifteen dollars or
something but for some reason we weren't allowed to
like use that um so i found that a struggle freshman year
do you all have any particular experiences with trying to find
cheaper textbooks i would rather like buy a used textbook
that's been used probably like 10 20 times
highlighted written in as long as i can read the words and like all my pages are
there i will take it over a new book
any day because um like they said i'm a first generation
i'm here on a scholarship the scholarship pays for room board and
tuition not books and uh
there are other things that like play into it i had to get
like a small loan and like books are expensive but nobody actually
um uh pays attention to the other expenses
because that loan goes towards like personal
care um laptops if you have nothing it's very difficult
to buy all these unnecessary things
i know sometimes i will when i get the book list for my class
i'll look and see if i can find an addition that's
um you know the previous year or maybe a couple years back
so that i can you know get a book that's less expensive and generally
a new addition um if it's a couple of years old
it's lots lots less expensive than the new edition of so i'll do that and
just kind of roll the dice and you know probably not going to miss too
much by getting an older edition of a book
i'll also i've done this in the past um i've gotten books for interlibrary
loan i used to work at the library so i know lots of different ins and outs
and i would get my books for interlibrary loan
and keep them for as long as they would let me and then
return them and before i return them request them from another school
and so i would go semesters as an undergrad and even as a
master's student borrowing books through interlibrary loan
so i wouldn't have to pay especially if it was a book that i knew probably was
not ever going to revisit that material again
um and if i found i need the book then maybe buy it or something but
um yeah i used your library loan for years
to do any faculty member i actually decided one semester to specify
in the syllabus in addition that was out of date so that students could go get it
used because the changes from the current edition to
previous edition tiny little things that really didn't
impact the course so i said all right they just use one
edition over unfortunately the bookstore
zest for scholarship money uh that's i think that's what the purpose is still
price the book at 10 and 15 even though you could find it on
half.com
anywhere from 18 to 40 bucks yeah and so i actually left the class
and i told the students if you bought the book at the bookstore to take it
back here's the cheaper source and buy it
here because this is outrageous but they're
what they're charging for this book and so even
trying to intentionally use an older book
didn't because there's there's some parents who are just going to send their
kids to the bookstore yeah this is you know what you're going
to do is that i know you're doing the right thing
and and those people get suffered into the higher person
yeah and i know i just didn't make any friends at the bookstore
yeah i'm pretty sure their whole business is just funding scholarships
so everything goes back to the school or to the students that work there
so so we're not priced at a reasonable purpose yeah
um i've personally tried buying used books or renting books to
set can be significantly cheaper
and one particular instance i bought the biology book
used from another student and then i was planning on selling it back but at the
end of the semester they have people come and they buy back books at
the bookstore and so i out of curiosity i went and asked them
how much my book would be worth um if i sold it back to them
and they were like yeah this would be worth like two dollars because it's an
old edition and they were like the materials
completely changed and i just was like it's biology
it's a science it doesn't isn't like rapidly evolving or anything
so i don't understand why it was worth less than it was
i'm sure there was like minuscule differences because in the biology
classes they tell you you can have the new edition the old one
or you can use this online version which so
i don't think it was realistic
uh a few of you have mentioned having to drop or withdraw from horses
do if any of you have any other
i had a kid in my class sorry student in my class about four years ago
he told me he was going to have to drop the class because he couldn't afford the
books
he said i'm going to the food pantry to eat
i can't afford the book
there's just just a part of my career again
as many as i want from the publisher but i'm
looking in the eyes i'm gonna have to drop the class because i can't before
um i had a friend who was doing i don't know class it was a class where
you had to buy the book and had to buy an additional um online
software um that was a part of the class it
wasn't like pre-polling or anything um and she found that out and she had
already ordered the book from check and so she returned the book
and dropped the class because she didn't want to pay the additional funds to see
textbook itself it's like 70 to rent and then the
online software was like eighty dollars
do you believe that some of those i think they are um and i know that we
you know have a perception that students might be able to afford things
um and maybe they are affording them but my question always is
are they affording them with the money they have in their pocket today
and is that money coming from student loans which means they're going to be
paying exponentially more for the books that
they need for these classes um in the future if you know it's taking
them 15 10 years whatever to pay a student loan
back um yes they are you know they're they're
paying much much more and they already expensive costs of
books so that's a problem
it has been said that many students here at virginia tech
are privileged as there is a state council
and some students drive luxury vehicles so textbook and homework access point is
your concern do you believe that this is an accurate
presumption i don't mean to be rude but sometimes i
can't stand that um virginia tech is in the appalachian
region that speaks for a lot um
like i said i am in a scholarship uh that is a heavenly program but
the first meeting we had the one thing that everybody was talking about
was how am i gonna be like how am i gonna buy books
they know i'm here on nothing um i don't know if they could get a loan or
if they're doing a work study but even with work study you have to
earn that money to spend it um they say go talk to financial aid
but the thing with financial aid is if your parents make a certain amount of
money then they're like oh you can afford
this but depending on the family that you're coming from and you're living
paycheck to paycheck there's no way you can afford books um
and even if you're like not here on a scholarship
everybody has a different story and like depending on it we're all here um
on like circumstance so uh just things that are overpriced
i find ridiculous because working and like trying to afford books
things pop up along the way say you get sick you're gonna have to pay for
medical costs but if you like spend too much on books
then you're just gonna have to like deal with it
but a lot of people can't and that's just like
awful you know i have to say that philosophy they need this statement it
just sort of defends my sensibilities it's
kind of like looking at somebody who lives on something like new
york and saying all new yorkers are rich it just paints everybody with the same
brush and you know and maybe it's somebody's way
of justifying charging ridiculous prices or making
money on their own textbook that they spent through their course or whatever
it is but the fact is that there's a lot of
students here who do struggle to afford it the tuition
has gone up significantly year after year after
year as the state's cut back funding and we've expanded
offices on campus for supporting all of the prices keeps going up and up and up
and you know as a as a student many years ago you know i was first
generation my family didn't have anybody my father
called me in before i left and said i can't pay this you know you're gonna
have to pay this yourself and so every dollar matters
you know and i know there's lots of students who are in the same boat now
you if you happen to look at the kid who's got the a7 that's driving around
campus because you know dad just wanted a brand new one
the next year that that's not representative of the
typical student on campus and if you think that
i honestly would not be here if i would have had like the resources
if i wouldn't have had the resources i have
um to know that as a first generation college student like i can actually go
to the financial aid office and talk to them about like my situation and um
get help needed for me um financial wise and
whatnot but um i honestly would not be here for the price of like textbooks and
like tuition and everything um because even though i work two jobs
like it's very difficult to struggle even like 12 credit hours
um and two jobs because it's um like working two full-time jobs
i have no time like for social life um or anything like for that matter
so it's a struggle to hear um people being painted with the same brush
because like i am not wealthy i'm not rich i am very low income um
so to like paint people with the same brush like
really really aggravates me um and the fact that it is like 2017 like
you just can't you can't do that um so
one other thing too i um i work with a student who is first gen and
she drives a luxury vehicle um but yet at the same time she has that
vehicle because that was the one thing that her
father decided to give her and education is not so therefore even
though she drives this car and there's the perception that she is a
certain type of person or comes from a certain type of
background she's paying for her education by herself
no one else is helping her do that so you know we have to be really careful
about perception um and taking labels and placing them on
people because of the things that we see or
don't see manifest their lives um i'd look at students and
just assume that that um they might
have something today that they may not have tomorrow we can't assume that
they're going to have that or have that access
or or have that um you know availability for money or
support so you know i just think that we need to
consider students in every decision that we make
especially where cost is a concern because someone is paying that and i
think many times it is a student and we just don't really realize that
that's the case because of other perceptions that we have
i just want to say that i'm also working two jobs one is work study the other one
is because work study wasn't enough yeah um sorry beginner school
that i got for work study and financial aid in general um
and i am on a scholarship program as well but it doesn't also doesn't give
enough it gets like a 1 000 a year a stipend that isn't very
much either because it's a small program um so i'm
paying for rent on my own books on my own
and tuition on my own and it's pretty difficult to manage two jobs
in social life and coursework at the same time
and i find that like very degrading to like mental health um i've been in
positions um throughout my like two years yeah two
years at college um where i find days like i just don't
want to get out of bed of the more in the morning um because it
is such a struggle to like try hard every single day and like it
may not pay off like i don't know what next year is
going to be like it's it's very like very mentally deteriorating
knowing that all of this hard work like might not be
enough next year um because tuition rates may go up you know books and
supplies like their rates may go up so it's a very
difficult like um state of mind to be in because
there's just no certainty yeah also from working at the bookstore
i get like a 10 discount which is like yeah
and virginia tech does offer many opportunities but
basing it on like a steakhouse yeah that that means absolutely nothing even
is the steakhouse
a lot of people here they do struggle to make ends meet and then it becomes a
problem because at the end of the semester you
have to pay if you have any cost and if you don't
then your accounts are on hold your classes are dropped
and it's a struggle yeah it's happened to me a few times and
i just it's a lot to handle being first-gen and like being an
independent like person it like financially and whatnot like it
is very difficult to have to deal with that
because you don't know like where you're gonna be you know the next month or such
so that's very difficult yeah and like you don't realize the
resources that you have available um there's not much i have found about
being like a first generation other than some people who actually know
what's going on exactly um but like coming in you have no idea
what you're getting yourself into nothing especially as a first-gen
student and that's why i'm like really really concerned like with the
university because there is no particular like
specific resource for first-gen students and if i would not have had the work
study i do now and they work with potential first
generation high school students who aren't yet even in college but um if
i would not have that work study now i i really would not be here because um
the like faculty and staff i work with um
they helped me tremendously
and i feel like that's something that we need to improve on
because i mean like the goal of college is to get a higher education and you're
here to improve your future or the
like main goal is to improve like our nation
our like state our county but when it gets to the point of where
you can't afford education because of books there's something that
needs to change yeah i also feel like there's like the
argument that oh why don't you just apply for more scholarships but applying
for scholarships requires like time yes time especially you have
to make connections with people you know about the scholarships who can
write your recommendations you have to sometimes be a fee to enter
in it you have to write an essay and like do all this other stuff
on top of doing school work and having two jobs and all that that's
what i'm struggling with now because december 7th is like the
scholarship deadline and i'm struggling to find time for that so i
agree yeah and you're not even guaranteed the scholarship
money so that's time wasted yeah like it's such a big school
according to the us bureau of labor
statistics was 3 935
according to the national association of college stores
students should budget roughly 200 on educational materials per year
i think it hurts my soul
people are already paying so much to get an
education and it doesn't factor anything because like i said there's like medical
costs you need to be able to buy personal items um
there's just so many things that they don't factor in you're gonna need
clothes you're gonna need winter clothes you're gonna need new
shoes um there are resources
to help you but you don't know where the resources are like you can
yeah they're i um it gets frustrating because you have to buy a coat if not
you're going to be freezing i shouldn't have to budget that much for
like educational resources and if it gets to
the point of where i can't like buy shampoo then
i would rather buy shampoo than buy a book
and like take care of myself for a class that probably won't count towards my
major i do agree with the um like one twelve
hundred dollars um a year because that's what i had said
um earlier i believe i had spent 600 this
semester and 600 last semester um for everything but now um i'm having
to do uh spend like 35 um
for like a homework assignment um it's for a foreign language class just to
speak like uh abroad with a uh international or
national national speaker or whatnot um but i do
have to pay for that um and it's 35 and already like i
am down to a budget of like 15 a week um for everything uh for this month because
i'm like really struggling to pay rent and everything so
it's going to be a difficult uh thing to pay for
my class
and with having to make a budget like that you're gonna have to sacrifice
things that you shouldn't like people are like oh they're probably spending
their money going out and everything buying food really you're buying ramen
yes and having to like make ends meet with
money that you don't have um having to spend that much
just a lot of people try to get around it like
they're like buy a top hat and you're over here like uh because sooner or
later it all adds up and then you realize how
much money you spent just on like books access codes
calculators and i do know of a few students who like
um for my class last year we had to buy top hat and it was like around 15
of our grade two they couldn't afford it so instead of paying for that they
like uh that 15 of their grade they got zeros for everything so they risked
like maybe possibly failing um because it was
so expensive for top hat just i had a teacher i had two teachers
actually started using one of them was top hat he
started using it and then a program didn't work the way you wanted
to so we stopped using it completely and i was like i just wasted oh
my gosh and then like the same thing happened my teacher tried to use
re-pulling she didn't hook up the eye clickers right like through the school
or something and then she stopped using it wow
yeah i think it says something when um we have things like food pantries
that serve our students or we have a clothes closet where students can go
and get clothing or we have faculty members who will
bring items to my office to leave them so that
students can come and get the resources they need just for their daily
living so you know there's a real disconnect here
um as to what we're asking students to pay just to get educated
when we have kids and i'm sorry i'm gonna call you all kids
we have we have kids who cannot afford basic living necessities in order to be
educated on this campus we have some priorities that need to be
realigned um thank goodness for people who have
kind hearts and don't mind should go the extra mile
to provide students what we need for what they need
but um you know we all need to look a little deeper and figure out
what each of us can do to make things more affordable for our students and if
you know if books is what it is or materials is what it is
then we need to come together and figure out ways to make that happen
um we can't keep holding back education for people
and and using um money and lack of money as as the mechanism
through which we do that it's just it's not right
do you all believe that professors understand the struggles of acquiring
um some i feel like some professors do understand if you sit down and you have
to talk and you'll be like i'm struggling financially and i mean
that so much but um some of them i feel would be like
why are you taking this class if you can't afford it
and that's just an injustice to you and your learning
and that would need to change if they're not understanding because i feel like to
be a professor you should be prepared to understand that not every student is
the same nobody has the same background and
nobody has the same opportunities
i do think faculty members
the ones who really are aware of the students setting out in their classrooms
um will do what they can to to make things accessible to students
i've seen that um many many times i don't know though that
everyone is aware of who's standing out in the classroom and so maybe that's the
problem it's just that you know we we don't know who's in the
classroom we're not getting to know our students and i know
it's hard when you have a classroom full of hundreds of students how are you
possibly um going to get to know everyone on the level that you need to
to understand how difficult things might be for them
but you know maybe if you work from the perspective of
that every student is needy in some way and you don't know what that
is but you just try to accommodate them in
in a way that that makes their learning possible
in in the least
i guess in in ways that that take the least from them
um that you're probably going to be coming from it
from a good starting point um but i do think you know
if people are aware of what the um of what students are dealing with that
they're more inclined to be supportive um so but i haven't been in the
classroom in a really long time so there's a whole lot of faculty members
with parents and i think if they flipped a
perspective to the bills that we have to pay for the
materials for our kids who are students and use that
same mindset when we're specifying materials rolling forces
that we would be a lot more careful about what we
require and i think that's something every faculty member should
try to do is think about being on the other side of this yeah
um for me specifically um i've had for my personal finance class
um he was rather understanding and like in the class like he
understands that you know not everyone has enough money to buy books and
supplies and that's why he said at the beginning of the classes
you know you don't have to purchase the book
if you like don't have the money for it it's not critical
to your learning for the class but as far as my
freshman first semester or second semester
um where i didn't have enough money to purchase the iclicker
um i reached out to the professor and he didn't really seem understanding um and
so i've gotten mixed signals from my
professors some are understanding and some aren't
so i don't think faculty realize that fifty dollars thirty five dollars
fifteen dollars is a lot of money for someone
um i've had teachers well this was like a liberal arts class for
organ gender studies where my teacher would instead
like post pdfs and stuff that's everything she wants to do
instead of giving us a giant textbook which i appreciated
yeah um and i feel like that's pretty easy too i don't understand why more
teachers don't do that um because you're not using it for like
commercial purposes you're just giving it to your students to learn
right so i don't think it's breaking any laws um another
teacher um for my neuroscience lab they put the lab
materials in a word document online instead of having us buy a lab animal
from the bookstore um and
for a class on in for human development we have to do this online program
my virtual child where we like raise a virtual child and so he split us into
groups and so um groups of three and the software is like 70 yards like
49 and so um we are each paying like a
fraction of the cost and splitting it which i think is really
smart of him yeah my sociology professor
actually uh uploaded pdfs as well instead of making us buy the book
so that was really helpful
um
you can i just wrote a chapter on this and i'm not entirely certain that i
understand it still after doing a whole bunch of research so
i can tell you what i saw but i'd love to hear from you
from from my perspective it depends on the course and whether you teach it by
yourself or whether there's a big class divided in lots of sections
when you're on a team if you're if you're teaching a course
that's the core course where you have 15 or something sections
of the course there are eight different instructors you have to select the
materials together and so the evaluation process can be
long or rather painful where you request a bunch of different sample
copies from different publishers and you read
through them you read the table of contents you scan the chapters you look
through how updated the examples are at the end
of the day you have some discussions and writing
books and then you go in deeper on the top
top two or three choices and you pick something that
ends up being what we consider the best fit for the course never in
the times i've been through that process has cost actually
been a factor we're looking for the best material for the course if
you're if you're fortunate enough
to be teaching the course by yourself and you can do what you want
and you have a lot more latitude and i'm going to guess that when you're a
sociology professor the pdf said that was probably of course
that he or she talked by themselves and have the latitude to do that kind of
thing so it really depends on the nature of the
course and how many faculty members have their hands in it
because as a as a department you want the experience
in a course to be the same irrespective of what faculty member is teaching you
so you want them using as much common material as possible so that
if you're taking course a with you know professor jones that picks an awful lot
like first edward professor smith
that's consistent with what i learned that the
lower divisional courses the first two years of college
tend to be chosen by committee and then if
a faculty member is the only one who teaches something or if it's an upper
divisional course or a graduate level course
they have the full academic freedom to choose what they want to use
i think that there's a lot of um
there's a definitely a lack of awareness regarding what
all of the options might be some of you have mentioned
that your teachers have used articles and library resources
and i don't think we look at those kinds of things enough um
i run a program to raise awareness about open textbooks
and there are hundreds i think the open textbook
library has over 400 books in it right now and
people are actively authoring and so the options are increasing
but getting the word out is is challenging because it's not we don't
have a sales force in the way that that a lot of the commercial publishers
do and then the last piece not related to
course material selection but just what the library is doing i noticed
i was looking around in our library reserves and
there's one particular course where the faculty member has
put eight copies of the book on reserve and that made me really happy to see
that someone is paying attention to the student needs and that those those
resources are
you know at least available somewhat so
i agree with you on cost that it's not the primary motivator it's the
the instructional fit i have heard some departments say that
they talk about cost and they have sort of a ceiling
of how much is too much but i don't know that it matches the ceiling that
students have of how much is too much
this question again is what struggles the students
might not be able to see would be helping my family members
trying to make educational experience
tough question um
we i think most of us want to do right by the students
and maybe i'm getting into the question i'll let you know uh one of the things
that after the episode with the used textbook
at the bookstore where i got basically an attitude from them when i
pointed out that this book was very overpriced i started
looking for up for options that led me to
amina and that was when we decided to take an open source
book and update updater i had no idea what i was
getting them i thought this was going to be you know
a few tweaks here and there it will be all set to go
i i i'm just going to guess like somewhere in the neighborhood thousand
hours into this book and i don't i don't think anybody
should cheer for me for that but it is a struggle
to find the time when you're doing other things
lots of other things to to to really invest in creating materials
that can be free we we pdf the entire book
chapter by chapter and every canvas lesson
has a chapter attached right out to the course cycling when you're doing chapter
day and i i hope that students are reading
and i'm sure that none of them sit there and ponder you know script
that must have put a lot of time i don't think that's never crossed
anyone's mind and i don't care because the yeah i didn't do it for sex
i did it because a little bit because books
because when you take something and you use
very similar that that really offended me it gave me a sense of motivation that
there's got to be a better way and in addition to all of the
cost value associated with doing this book
we got to kind of customize it to the way we wanted it
the chapters of the original book are way too long there are way too many
examples we use student reviewers to look at the
chapters and say nobody's going to read that it's too
long shrink it and you need to get this more debate this is an out-of-date
example and by the time we were done i felt like
we had a pretty decent product that the chapters were shorter more
conversational and tied in more with what i wanted the
course to be about so we serve two masters we've got a
better book and more targeted for the course and
it's free and so we we have two things in my
course that cost money one of which i'm going to eliminate next year
i think the entire course is 29 for all the materials in the course
and i think i'm going to make it a little cheaper next year
i should say that the book is free to the world
then it has an open license on it and that there are over 41 000 downloads of
of the book in 18 months so i regularly get emails from
other schools from professors at other schools asking
for slides and powerpoints and test banks and um people
people are seeing this and they're using it
and um that's really exciting to me we this was the first project that we
did so i didn't know how much work it would be either
and we have greatly adjusted our process
a lot of a lot of learning involved in that
i'm i'm really grateful that we were able to complete it and that you
continue to use it and that it fits once we started i felt like there was no
turning back because i didn't really have an
alternative the used book backfired when they
overpriced it i had to do something i had to have
something ready for the class and so once we started the process even even
though by about chapter 7 out of 17 or
something chapters i was
yeah well i'll say thank you
yeah that's awesome
um so that actually was the book i was
talking about so the process was essentially we
went through all of the different open source books that were out there
found the one that was closest to what i was looking for
and then began the process of updating it because a lot of the examples
and graphs it was just very dated i think it was in 2011 was the addition
we worked for so we had to bring it forward in 2015 or
16 and you know things that weren't
prevalent in 2011 like spotify as a business when we talked
about the music industry all of a sudden you can't really talk
about that without spotify so you have to kind of bring
things like that into play where else students will say you know
yesterday
so having student reviewers was a really really
important process because everywhere where i was
pretty often
the whole and not not just because of costs
but in large part because of cost because
if as i look back on the process that wasn't primarily the the fact that
the book matches the course really well was kind of a nice outcome but cost was
the primary motivation and i can't go back there's no other
option to go back to that's not going to cost students i
think the new book from my course would be
someone on the order of 300 bucks it's not worth it
i look at that book and i'm like this book is not like
i'm not even sure if you saved a zero off of it would be worth 30 bucks it's
just the book of my fundamental business it hasn't doesn't change that
much so no i remember that
going back to all of the students um what do you all wish that professors
knew about students experiences
to everyone has a story and we don't have the same opportunities as everyone
else we all come in
to get a higher education to make the world better to better ourselves and our
community and to look
and think do i really need this to teach my course is it necessary
will it help them along in the future and just take price and consideration
um many in this day and age many um students
are providing for themselves times are different and
to like find money to use for books or just educational resources isn't
there
i agree i also wish they think about like what the bookstore is doing because
i'm sure a lot of teachers don't realize that it's
like a musician in the bookstore it's going to be sometimes as expensive
um and then also like looking at the online option what you
said before about like putting their quizzes on canvas instead of putting you
know access code or something um and then also like
people learn in different ways so some people would rather have
like more in-depth lectures rather than reading a textbook
um so i wish they had thought about that i know i have one teacher who he picked
the specific access code he picked because it also had
a listing option and an app so people can just listen to the book if that's
how they prefer to learn um so i actually thought
more about like making more options available for
learning
um have any other professors ever had required branding resources that
were reasonably priced or free or
accommodate your needs in any other ways
i would say in my graduate program that most of the resources that have been
used have been either free or very inexpensive
or i can use an older version um i've even had professors give me books
say bring those brains back when you get a chance or
pass it on to someone else um so i think graduate school in my at
least in my program is is different than than what some of the
undergraduate students are experiencing um and so yeah i've had um
i would say probably 99 good um experience with with
getting materials but again i'm a graduate student and so that's
it's different i think some teachers um like he would do would tell kids
to not buy their book at the bookstore to just go out and buy it from like book
holders or something and then they're very
understanding about like shipping like if it takes a while to get here
so that was nice
yeah like i said most of them some teachers have like pdfs and stuff
like you said they will recommend going to vocal verbs or like one time my
teacher even gave me like an amazon link because he wanted us
to make sure that we got the right one and that it was an order edition
um
more in-depth lectures too like my personal finance instructor
where he doesn't require the textbook and like it's not necessarily
critical for us to have it um he uh just teaches more in depth um
and i think that's like really beneficial to do that
as well um also like my sociology professor he
like was really understanding and i would use pdfs
instead of like having an actual textbook
and if like we didn't have to have the textbook but we did use an access code
for top hat so i think like instead of like top hat
was beneficial like for my learning experience because
you you would you would ask questions in class and so
like really like motivate you to be in class and
kind of really pay attention so i think like not necessarily
prioritizing like the textbook over other things but the way he did it
um having the pdfs and the top hat i i think that's a good combination and
i think he was pretty mindful about costs
in that
i would like to open this up
i need a question
but it's um my understanding for a few years that it's actually like
a legal requirement to um list the cost of textbooks
in the syllabus before the class uh begins so that students can kind of
evaluate cost beforehand before the first week of classes however i've
never almost never seen the syllabus before
the first day of class professors so if this is true which
again i could be mistaken on that on that fact but um if
that's true then you know where's the accountability for
actually posting it two three weeks in advance a month in
advance over the summer everyone breaks so you know or even by the time
that i think it should be by the time um the course request comes out so that
yeah it's part of when you go on and you're looking at the class description
the times it needs it has a link to you know the pdf version
um of the syllabus so you can look in there and see the exact cost and you say
well i'm not gonna first request this and risk getting this and not that other
class i mean because i cannot afford this amount um or you
can start looking at that gives you that much more time to
you know look at what what um i guess choices you have so
price comparing because we all know that um textbooks like on
amazon for holders the sooner you can buy it the cheaper will be because the
man will jack up those prices um so i did probably professors might have
books so the higher education authorization
act is the one that requires the information about
required learning resource costs to be available at the time of registration
and there's no specific way that the law says that must be
implemented so the way the university has done that is to provide a link
to the bookstore from banner and faculty are required
and supposed to submit their orders to the bookstore
by a certain point so i think it's april 15th for the spring i don't know what
the or for fall courses um
and then i don't know what he does for spring
i don't know what the compliance level is um
i've had people say very hard we're supposed to do that yeah
it's by law yes though and so the costs is required on the syllabus like oh wait
well i i haven't heard that okay okay that's
what i'm saying like oh okay i think it should be more
accessible yeah information is required to be put
out there it should be a lot more accessible because i noticed
that that fact for years and never knew how this was figured out right i just
took my chances yeah it's not an easy thing to navigate
either i've seen that a few times on banner
um but again if you're especially if you're an incoming student
or
someone who does not have any kind of background or
information about education or how to navigate the system you're gonna have a
really hard time doing that yeah um yeah no go ahead
there are some schools that are are adding
that data to their registration systems so they're providing a more tight
integration so you could actually see this course is going to cost
you know 129 dollars or 2015 or this course is going to cost 10 or
nothing what will happen though is if that
becomes available people are going to start shopping yes
yes their education yeah and then we have a bigger debate on
our hands about about lots of things right i'm not
afraid of that fate um however it will you know
potential of um having to talk about some really hard issues
when we start when students start shopping due to cost
and planning their education like i did unbeknownst even that i was doing it
planning my education around what i can afford and what i can't afford
and that's a problem that's a big problem if we're going to have to go
down that road yeah and it is it's also disappointing
um because a lot of i have professors that don't use the bookstore
right so if they're not even thinking you know send that data by the
registration right there's absolutely no way of finding out
even if you were well-versed and how to kind of go through that process um i
also have students or professors that have added decide to add
i mean it's not even a textbook but i'll add like a novel with a global two
degree like two weeks of the semester cash yeah
there's a 49 novel that we want you to read so
there's there's lots of components
the primary way that the library gets our list
of textbooks that have been adopted for the semester which we have some funds to
purchase both in in ebook form or in print is from the
bookstore so if the bookstore list is missing things we are missing
information as well and you know the other thing to think about is financial
aid so when financial aid is set up for
students there's there's a line item in everyone's financial aid
that includes books when was the last time
that a survey was done to see what is the real cost
um for those books and supplies that that line item in our financial aid
that's supposed to provide for that i would be curious to know
when was the last time anyone looked into that really in depth and did
something about it so if you're looking for things yeah
i mean i've had issues at the bookstore where people come in and they
have to have a specific book by like the first day of class or whatever and
it hasn't come in yet or like the professor
put in the notice late and the bookstore didn't have time to order it for them
and like the professor was insistent like people came back like
for several days like where's the textbook and really
they your teacher didn't request one and so the professor was like a new ta like
a grad student or someone who like didn't know how to work them
didn't go through they weren't understanding for the students who were
frustrated because they couldn't get the book and the tv was
teaching without it it's very difficult
to this whole concern so there's one other
i think aspect of a research university that's
important to note is that faculty rewards for teaching are
less important less valued than research and
i think that there is a place for valuing teaching
and i think that plays into these issues as well
where faculty are not
they're they're not they don't receive awards for
for teaching well in the same way that they do
receive awards for research and that plays into
how much time they would like to invest in addressing these kinds of issues
thank you thank you
thank you very much you