For This Campus, Choosing Textbooks Has Gotten a Lot More Complicated

The first in her family to attend college, Regina Seanez faced decisions she didn’t expect. One of them: what to do about textbooks.

In her first semester at Austin Community College last year, she spent hundreds of dollars renting them through the campus bookstore. It was almost as expensive as buying, and she had to keep the books in perfect condition.

She later learned from classmates that she could spend less money if she rented through Amazon or Barnes & Noble. And over the summer, she discovered an even cheaper route: Her history professor asked students to buy a $50 online textbook that included quizzes and other materials.

If students like Seanez are confused about textbook options, so, too, are colleges. They are wrestling with a host of issues as they seek to lower costs and widen access, allow professors to choose their own classroom materials, and maintain quality.

Meanwhile, the traditional textbook market is shifting under their feet. Digital-first approaches now include flat rates for unlimited digital access. Open-educational resources, or OER, are gaining traction, offering ever-more alternatives. And newer players, such as Amazon and Chegg, are changing the market through the textbook rental business.

Some of those changes are shifting decision-making authority from individual professors up the chain to administrators, particularly when colleges pursue partnerships with nonprofits disrupting traditional textbook models. In other instances, statewide or campuswide pushes toward zero-cost degrees are pressuring professors to comply.

How this all plays out varies by college. Brown University is buying textbooks for some low-income students. Textbook-exchange programs started by students have helped lower costs on some campuses. Deals between the University of California at Davis and publishers promote “equitable access” — in which all students pay the same book fee every term, no matter the course. California and New York have begun statewide initiatives to encourage colleges to increase the use of OER.

At Austin Community College the textbook of the future is a work in progress. The college has tried a range of new programs. But the path to find the right fit has been bumpy.

One arm of textbook reform at the institution has centered on OER efforts. Through a grant from the nonprofit Achieving the Dream to develop coursework using OER, the college asked several departments to evaluate such materials for inclusion on their approved-textbook lists, said Gaye Lynn Scott, associate vice president for academic programs.

The history department was one of them. And professors there had questions, according to the minutes from an August 2016 meeting.

Could they still use their preferred textbook, the faculty asked, if they didn’t like the OER options?

Yes, they were told: If professors preferred a proprietary textbook, they could use it. But the administrators warned that cost-conscious students would very likely demand courses with OER. In certain cases, administrators said, student needs would trump faculty priorities.

Another answer put it plainly: Would certain course sections be reserved just for OER use? “Yes.”

Like many colleges, Austin is concerned about affordability. About a fifth of the students attending its 11 campuses receive Pell Grants, according to Texas’ higher-education coordinating board. Students graduate with an average of $17,126 in debt. And about a fifth of the students in OER classes surveyed last year by the college said they hadn’t purchased a recent textbook because of costs. About a third said they planned to reallocate their savings from textbooks to cover tuition and fees.

Those challenges reflect national trends. According to a study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, textbook prices rose by three times the rate of inflation from 2002 to 2012. A survey by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group found that 65 percent of students had skipped buying a textbook because of costs.

Faculty are aware of the problem: More than 60 percent believe the costs are a serious concern for students, according to a 2018 survey by the Babson Survey Research Group. Some encourage students to buy used textbooks, assemble their own course materials, or find less expensive textbooks.

History professors at the college shared concerns about textbook affordability. But they were also concerned about maintaining department standards. As a faculty committee later evaluated an OER textbook for American history, factual inaccuracies troubled them. In one chapter on the American West, the materials said a key Cheyenne leader had died in a massacre years before the one in which he actually died.

And the problems didn’t stop there. A section on the Great Depression had no bibliography or citations, according to a department review written in 2017. “This OER is truly worthless as a scholarly resource,” the group wrote, later calling the chapter “wholly and completely unacceptable.”

The work required to get the material up to par would be overwhelming. “It is doubtful,” the group wrote, that “an instructor would want to spend all summer revising his/her basic teaching tool.” The committee rejected that textbook.

Saving students money is important, and open-educational resources have “a certain amount of trendiness” to them, said Angela Smith, an adjunct associate professor. But ensuring that content is “accurate, thorough, balanced” should be the priority, she said.

Scott, the academic program administrator, eased off for a while on the department, and the Achieving the Dream project ended in December, after providing some stipends for faculty to adopt OER.

But today, it’s hard to miss the college’s promotion of OER. Classes using free materials are tagged as such when students register. Austin publicizes how much money students save with OER classes. Every semester, chairs fill out a spreadsheet listing their OER sections.

The college recently announced that it is partnering with OpenStax, a nonprofit housed at Rice University that produces fully open textbooks. The plan is to target 50 high-enrollment courses in an effort to transition them to using OER, Scott said. Faculty who explore or adopt OER will get stipends — up to $1,000. And in late September, Provost Charles M. Cook wrote his colleagues with a clear request: “I’m writing to ask you to consider using Open Educational Resources (OER) for your courses.”

Data provided by the college indicate that reducing costs has academic benefits: Students in courses with OER textbooks had slightly higher grades and lower withdrawal rates between the fall of 2018 and the spring of 2019.

This semester, about a fifth of history courses use OER, Scott said, probably the most the department has ever offered.

As an administrator, Scott said, she knows that the line between promoting affordability and honoring academic freedom is tricky to navigate. But departments already have approved lists of textbooks, so professors cannot teach from whatever text they want, she said.

At the least, she aims to get open-educational resources on the radar of professors who are choosing new options, and said she hopes the movement “builds organically.”

Cameron Addis is one early adopter in the history department. He took a sabbatical to write his own digital textbook, in large part because he found traditional textbooks wanting.

Now his materials include links throughout the material. Animated maps illustrate content, like the evolution of non-Native American control over North America. He often includes local information, to personalize it for Austin readers.

He sees his colleagues’ attitudes shifting as they become more aware of student needs.

“I can’t believe that there’s anyone on our faculty, at this point, who’s saying, ‘No, I want them to get the brand-new, expensive version that’s costing $200,’” Addis said. “I seriously doubt that.”

Nicole Allen, director of open education at SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, said attitudes have changed as high-level campus support widens and the amount of free content increases.

The prevailing view once was “you get what you pay for” among many professors, said Allen. Today, the Babson survey found, more than 30 percent of instructors who have not yet tried open materials say they will at least consider them. And that survey found that more than a fifth of instructors of introductory courses nationally rely on OER.

OER isn’t the only option for campuses considering large-scale change. More than 900 course sections at the college this fall have added “first-day” access packages, in which a publisher includes reduced-rate textbooks as part of a student’s tuition and fee payments, Scott said. Materials are therefore already paid for and available at the beginning of the semester. (The program is known elsewhere as “inclusive access.”)

This unfolds through negotiations between the college’s bookstore and a textbook’s publisher, Scott said. Then, professors are told that their textbook is available for the program, and they can choose whether to sign up. Students who do not want the textbook opt out, and Scott said 1 percent to 3 percent of them do so. In fall 2018 courses, according to the college, students paid about $99 less each in first-day classes.

Publishers are paying attention to the demand for new approaches, rolling out new digital models to expand access and reduce costs. Pearson, North America’s largest textbook provider, said last summer it would move to a “digital first” model, in which prices would be lower and materials would be updated online continuously.

The company was increasingly competing against OER, said David Kokorowski, who leads product management for higher-education courseware at Pearson. Campuses would choose free textbooks “even when they preferred the Pearson material.” Pearson was also competing against companies like Amazon and Chegg, as rental textbooks became more popular.

That told Pearson two things about the state of the textbook, he said: First, cost is a crucial factor and can trump quality. Second, students don’t want to own textbooks longer than a semester.

As more publishers move to digital-first, some, including Pearson, are also encouraging colleges to consider inclusive-access packages, like the first-day model that Austin sections have adopted. Skeptics say that while some costs might drop as a result, publishers are effectively limiting students’ options by tying them to one model.

Kokorowski, however, said the model aligns with how students and professors want to think about materials. “We wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t feel like it was ultimately better for the customer.”

The college’s approach today is piecemeal, including OER, traditional textbooks, and the first-day model. The college also offers a “Z-degree": two general-studies associate degrees that can be completed without buying any textbooks. The caveat, of course, is that this path takes careful planning. Students must sign up for courses marked as having no textbook costs.

Scott said the college wants to develop more Z-degrees, and new questions arise constantly — how should the college support course updates? How often should materials get refreshed?

A scattershot approach means that professors carve out different places on the spectrum of textbook options. Kelly Stockstad, a professor of communication studies, decided to move to first-day access because many of her students waited to buy textbooks until partway through the semester, after they had saved enough money. She sees such a program as a happy medium between traditional textbooks and OER.

But she has noticed that the current environment, flooded with different options, has made it challenging for students to figure out what’s right.

“A student has so many choices that often they will show up with the wrong textbook because they’re not sure,” Stockstad said. “This is a complex issue. And I don’t really know what the future holds. But it certainly seems to be trending digital — like everything else.”

Correction (10/14/2019, 1:50 p.m.): This article originally said David Kokorowski leads digital product development for science and engineering at Pearson; he leads product management for higher-education courseware for the company.

Lindsay Ellis is a staff reporter. Follow her on Twitter @lindsayaellis, or email her at lindsay.ellis@chronicle.com.