Danita Armstrong started community college so that she could compete for higher-paying jobs, but the former bus driver and mother of five found herself with a $1,300 textbook bill last fall.
Ms. Armstrong, a student at Bay College’s West Campus, in Iron Mountain, Mich., expected more of the same this semester, but instead she got a nice surprise — she learned that the textbook for her macroeconomics course would be free. The instructor assigned a textbook from OpenStax, a publisher at Rice University that uses what are commonly known as open educational resources, or OER, and makes online versions of its textbook available at no cost.
“I’m not looking for a free education,” says Ms. Armstrong. “But if I can save money on textbooks, it takes some of the stress away. I can focus on my courses and not worry about whether we’re going to be able to pay our bills at the end of the month.”
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The open-resources movement has come a long way since the Massachusetts Institute of Technology unveiled the OpenCourseWare project in 2001. Dozens of colleges now offer some courses featuring textbooks that are free or nearly so, and that rely on openly licensed materials. Grant programs in Virginia and California have supported the development of entire degree pathways that feature openly licensed textbooks at community colleges — and the reform organization Achieving the Dream is supporting a national effort to roll out more such degrees.
But growing pains are also emerging as the movement reaches adolescence.
Colleges are learning that creating openly licensed courses and degree plans costs real money and takes real time. Advocates say the movement frees faculty members from the prescribed path of a commercial textbook and allows them to patch together a more meaningful classroom experience through openly licensed reading materials, quizzes, and videos.
However, as the movement spreads beyond the early believers, more colleges have been forced to offer grants to encourage faculty to incorporate openly licensed materials. And the grants are often modest, raising the question of how many instructors will take the bait.
College leaders may ultimately offer richer incentives because the use of open resources eliminates multiple barriers to classroom success. When a textbook is free, every student has the required learning materials on the first day of class. A 2014 study by U.S. PIRG, a consumer advocacy group, found that 65 percent of students said they had decided against buying a textbook because it was too expensive. And the savings from not having to buy a textbook can be plowed back into more classes — improving the odds that a student will graduate.
The potential of open resources to help more students complete degrees means plenty of grant money is available from foundations and some state legislatures to support experimentation. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have supported both OpenStax and the nearly $10-million Achieving the Dream effort, which is providing grants to develop OER degrees at 38 community colleges in 13 states.
Proselytizers like David A. Wiley, a co-founder and the chief academic officer of Lumen Learning, a company that helps colleges assemble courses based on open resources, say it’s only a matter of time before openly licensed textbooks begin to crowd out more-expensive offerings from commercial publishers. “When the outcomes are the same or better, the cost to students is drastically reduced, and the pedagogical freedom for faculty is greatly increased, it’s hard to see how such a product doesn’t come out on top in a relatively short period,” Mr. Wiley says.
Commercial publishers say their products continue to be preferred in most classrooms because of the innovative online learning tools that are often included with a textbook purchase. Publishers also point out that course materials are more affordable for students than they were a decade ago. According to a survey by the National Association of College Stores, students spent an average of $602 on textbooks and other course materials last year, down 14 percent from 2007, not only thanks to open educational resources but also because options such as renting and buying used books have lowered the cost.
Last summer California’s Legislature appropriated $5 million to create zero-textbook-cost degrees (known as Z-degrees) at the state’s community colleges. All materials developed under both the California effort and the national Achieving the Dream grant program are required to hold a Creative Commons license, which allows others to freely use and adapt the resources, as long as attribution is given.
“We’re hoping to create a ripple effect among community colleges in the adoption of OER,” says Karen A. Stout, president of Achieving the Dream, which aspires to lift college completion rates for low-income and minority students.
In 2015 the Virginia Community College System, with support from the Hewlett Foundation, gave grants worth $15,000 apiece to help 15 colleges create new Z-degrees by June 2016. The system was looking to expand on Tidewater Community College’s successful creation of a Z-degree in business administration.
When the grant ended in June 2016, only two more colleges had neared completion of Z degrees. However, today 16 colleges in the system are working on Z-degrees, three Z-degrees are available, and four more will become available this fall, says Jenny Quarles, director of teaching and learning technology. “We were teaching large majorities of the faculty about what OER means,” she says.
The Achieving the Dream initiative offers more money and a longer timeline. Bay College, which currently has about 15 courses that use openly licensed materials, including the one taken by Ms. Armstrong, received a $100,000 grant last summer to create OER degrees in liberal arts, business administration, and robotics.
About $30,000 of the grant will go to faculty stipends. The largest stipend, $1,000, requires instructors to build their own content, rather than tap existing textbooks, such as those available from OpenStax.
“You’re going to have to take some OER from here, some from there, and write some of your own stuff,” says Joseph Mold, the college’s director of online learning and instructional design. “It’s a lot of work.”
Whether $1,000 will be enough is an open question; some other colleges have been forced to raise the amount they pay instructors to develop new open content.
Five years ago, Lane Community College, in Eugene, Ore., enticed faculty members to begin using openly licensed materials by offering free iPads. When that incentive no longer worked, Lane began offering a stipend that pays for 70 hours of curriculum development. The college now has more than 170 OER class sections available, saving students an estimated $460,000 per year, it says.
But some faculty members say the stipends still aren’t enough.
Berri Hsiao and Wendy Rawlinson, Lane math instructors, have been piloting open textbooks in a three-course algebra sequence. They hope the math department will consider adopting an OER textbook for the sequence when its existing contract with the publishing giant Pearson runs out in the spring of 2018.
“I have always thought, why am I assigning a textbook when I can literally write these homework problems myself?” Ms. Hsiao says.
The two instructors estimate that 1,700 Lane students a year buy a textbook for those courses. With average savings of $100 per textbook, a move to OER could save Lane students $170,000 per year.
But as they dove into the work, the instructors gained some respect for the time involved in creating a textbook. Simply finding open materials to use has been difficult; without a central repository, Ms. Rawlinson felt like she was searching in a “chaotic environment.” Some of the material they did find used computer programming languages they weren’t familiar with. And the open-resources textbook they ultimately chose for this year turned out be disappointing; the problem sets at the end of the chapters weren’t challenging enough.
“Wendy and I would meet at a coffee shop to talk about this,” Ms. Hsiao says. “We soon realized that we weren’t making enough money to pay for the coffee. I don’t think the people at higher levels who are promoting this have any idea how much work is involved.”
Paul Corey, Pearson’s managing director of higher-education courseware, says the Lane instructors’ frustrations illustrate the value provided by commercial materials. Many textbooks sold by Pearson include online tools — including animations, simulations, and tests — at no additional cost. And as more students purchase digital textbooks, he says, Pearson’s huge reach allows it to pinpoint exactly where students are struggling and revise and improve those portions of the textbook.
Mr. Corey says defections to open resources have been happening for years, but Pearson is now regaining one account that has experimented with open resources for every new one that is lost. “In all candor, it’s part of the conversation: ‘Tell me why you’re better than free?’” Mr. Corey says. “The onus is on us to demonstrate the value.”
Ms. Hsiao and Ms. Rawlinson say that the exploration of OER has been worthwhile because of what they’ve learned, and because of the impact an adoption of open resources may have on low-income students.
Jerric Arceo, a student in Ms. Hsiao’s beginning algebra class who is pursuing a degree in dental hygiene, says the open-resources textbook will allow him to graduate with less debt. “It’s just like any other textbook, except it’s online,” Mr. Arceo says. “I’m saving money, and that’s all that matters.”
Some open-resources advocates think the model of depending on grant money to roll out textbooks is doomed to fail. What happens when fickle philanthropists lose interest and move on to the next thing? And even OER textbooks need to be updated regularly — who’s going to pay for that?
Many colleges are exploring fees to maintain the textbooks — which suggests that the term “zero textbook cost” could soon be on the way out. Lane is considering a fee of $1 per credit hour, which, among other things, would pay the salary of a new full-time OER librarian whose job is currently supported by grants. Bay College is also considering a nominal fee for its OER courses.
Chemeketa Community College, in Salem, Ore., is taking a different path. It is competing with the big publishers by producing its own printed textbooks through what it calls Chemeketa Press. The books use original content from the college’s own faculty and openly licensed materials, and are sold for a fraction of the price of commercial textbooks.
The college’s art faculty came to Chemeketa Press and said they thought they could make a better textbook than the $210 book that they had been assigning, says Steve Richardson, the press’s managing editor. That experience was full of challenges — including when he realized that a draft of the art textbook had openly licensed photos of unlicensed art. Donations by local artists ultimately helped make the book, Art for Everyone, possible. It sells for $28, and the press’s math and writing textbooks cost even less.
Revenue is being used to recover the book’s development costs and eventually will be recycled into the creation of new books.
Mr. Richardson believes the college is more likely to succeed using that model than if it were to depend on grant dollars to pay for the adoption of open resources. “We sell our books at an affordable price, and students will save a ton of money,” he says. “But we’re not giving it away.”
Correction (4/18/2017, 2:25 p.m.): A passage in this article originally misstated the timing of progress made toward zero-textbook-cost degrees (Z-degrees) by the Virginia Community College System. Today 16 of its colleges, not two, are working on Z-degrees. The article has been updated accordingly.
