Open Textbooks and Beyond: Access Affordability, and Academic Success

Student success depends in part on student access to learning materials. This presentation showed the impact of decreased state subsidization of tuition in higher education by the number of hours students would need to work to (on average) pay for tuition as well as the rise of student debt relative to credit card debt (consumer revolving credit). The cost, and in particular, the choice of college textbooks (as something faculty decide) as well as student practices and responses to textbook costs are also discussed. Current and alternative publishing models including open educational resources (OER), open licensing using Creative Commons, library resources, copyright exemptions and fair use, and open authorship are also discussed.