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According to The College Board, textbooks and materials cost students an average of $1,240 per school year. Students without the financial resources for these materials risk falling behind in classes or being forced to drop out. Open Education Resources at ATU hope to alleviate this burden for students by offering open-source materials for professors to use in their classes.
Most college professors use materials from big publishers like McGraw Hill, Pearson and Cengage Learning. Sherry Tinerella, public services librarian at Ross Pendergraft Library, explains educators’ loyalty to these companies keeps them in control of prices.
“There’s only three publishing companies that are responsible for like 80 percent of all the textbooks. And so they have no price moderation. They just do what they want, and the prices for textbooks have increased more than the cost of living, more than inflation,” Tinerella said.
“So that’s why this open educational resources idea has been a movement, say, for the last 20 years or so. And it’s just finally getting to be more common.”
Open Education Resources cut the “middleman” between educators and students by essentially taking the place of the publishers. Professors create their own textbook materials with the purpose of making it freely available. These types of materials are marked with a “creative commons” symbol.
“If you have this creative commons symbol, you use it, anyone can use it, you’re saying you have permission to use this. You can do what you want with it as long as you say it’s by me, or there are different versions of it,” Tinerella said.
In order to encourage participation from professors, grants are offered for reviewing or writing open education resources. Five ATU faculty members have created open-source textbooks, and many have participated in reviews. To find classes that use Open Education Resources at ATU, go to the course schedule module in Blackboard and select the “Zero Textbook Cost” attribute. To learn more about Open Education Resources, go to libguides.atu.edu/OER.
