For a few years at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Melody Rood helped award faculty members small grants to create open educational resources — course materials that are openly licensed, available for anyone to modify and update, and often free to use.
But library administrators ended the program last year — a decision that Rood, the student-success and open-education librarian, directly attributes to having First Day Complete on the campus. That program charges participating students $19 per credit hour for access to all the materials they need, regardless of what’s required for each class.
“It just didn’t make sense” to continue allocating limited library resources to the grant initiative, Rood said, when “we can’t even guarantee that students are saving money anymore.”
Collegewide programs like First Day Complete are increasingly popular. They’re seen as a way for colleges to negotiate lower overall course-material costs with publishers and ensure that students are prepared for the first day of class. Nearly half of all degree-granting institutions have reportedly adopted some version of “inclusive access” or “equitable access” programs, according to the Association of American Publishers.
But a number of course-affordability advocates say these programs — especially those that are labeled “equitable access” and charge a flat rate by semester or by credit, rather than charging by course — risk devaluing and undermining open educational resources, or OER. Building awareness and interest in OER, they added, is already an uphill battle. (The data bear this out: A recent survey from Bay View Analytics reported that OER awareness among faculty members dropped eight percentage points in 2023-24 from the year prior, marking the first time in nearly a decade that awareness didn’t increase year over year.)
The fear is that equitable-access programs are “wiping out our OER programs, because there’s no incentive now,” said Jennifer Beamer, a scholarly-communications librarian at California State University at San Bernardino. Her college is piloting an equitable-access program nicknamed “Coyote Day One” for $21.50 per credit.
Is it possible, though, for both strategies to co-exist?
Course-affordability experts acknowledge that neither is a panacea. OER isn’t available for many courses, for example — especially upper-level and humanities courses. Equitable-access programs have their own drawbacks; in many cases, learners have access to their course materials for only a limited time. And the controversial registration model for these kinds of programs, which requires students to opt out rather than opt in, is under government review.
That’s why some experts The Chronicle spoke with would like to see colleges find ways to embrace both strategies. And that means recognizing benefits outside of cost, investing in campus initiatives, and being transparent with students.
“If all stakeholders are truly concerned about students,” said Mike Moore, a researcher and consultant who specializes in higher-education course materials, “why would we not try to use every single tool in our toolbox?”
Unclear savings
If you ask Dan Xie, the political director at Student PIRGs and an advocate for textbook affordability, “the entire textbook market is totally cooked.” (That’s slang for pretty messed up.) And one of the reasons why, she wrote in an email, is because students participating in equitable-access programs effectively pay for OER that might otherwise be free.
With equitable-access programs, faculty members have autonomy to select materials to use in their courses — including OER that they pull from online libraries like OpenStax or upload on their own. But students won’t see direct cost savings from those selections. If a student at a university with an equitable-access program has, say, two courses using OER and three courses using publishers’ materials, they’re paying the same price (if they remain opted in) as a peer who’s taking five courses that use only publishers’ materials.
Beamer, at CSU-San Bernardino, recalled emailing her college’s bookstore partner, Follett, before the Coyote Day One pilot began, writing that she was “having a hard time wrapping my head around” that very concept. Beamer was told that “it is up to the individual to weigh out all their required materials and decide if they would like to remain opted in or opt out.”
“It’s all or nothing” for the students in these cases, Beamer said. “That’s really irritating to me.”
Does using OER have any influence on savings at colleges with equitable-access programs, then? The Chronicle posed the question to administrators at the University of Houston, which currently charges $299 per semester through the Cougar Textbook Access Program.
Emily Messa, senior vice president for administration, said faculty members’ adoption of OER could, theoretically, help the college negotiate a lower flat-rate price with publishers — ultimately keeping the cost for students as low as possible. (This was the same logic a number of librarians told The Chronicle they’d heard from their respective institutions).
In that way, the programs “are complementary,” Messa said.
More than being ‘free’
That’s often not the tenor of public discourse, though.
David Wiley, one of the forbears of the OER movement, said much of the tension that pits OER against other programs stems from people’s association of OER with one word: free. If materials aren’t free, many people figure, they aren’t OER, and are therefore “a threat to OER.”
Cost is a common fixation when it comes to course materials, Moore noted — in large part because “it’s the easiest thing for a general audience to understand.”
But when it comes to open educational resources, it’s a focus that Wiley, now the chief academic officer at Lumen Learning, wants to broaden. For one, OER isn’t always free; print copies of OER, for example, may come at some cost, as does OER that is wrapped into courseware products, which include additional services like homework assignments and study materials. (Lumen Learning is, in fact, an OER courseware provider.)
It also doesn’t capture key benefits of OER that might encourage instructors to invest time and energy even without clear cost savings, Wiley said. He homed in on OER being openly licensed. Most OER falls under a Creative Commons license, allowing people to share, use, and modify existing works. This means faculty members can engage in “pedagogical innovation” and create or customize the resources however they’d like, he said.
For Cheryl Casey, the open-education librarian at the University of Arizona, customizing could mean adding current events; adding local images that students will recognize, like a mascot or landmark; or swapping generic names with those that better reflect the student population (the University of Arizona, for example, is a Hispanic-serving institution that also has a sizable Native American population).
The risk to students when instructors adopt one-stop learning platforms. Read more
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“It makes the course materials more relevant and timely and engaging,” she said.
Casey added that the long-term availability of OER is another plus. (One of the criticisms of digital products like courseware, for example, is that students often have access only for a short period of time — say, 180 days.) There are also no limits on how many times you can download and print OER materials.
Finding ways to co-exist
So what might it look like to support open educational resources on a campus that’s also embraced equitable-access programs?
Wiley, at Lumen Learning, said one possible option is to have a portion of the revenue generated by equitable-access programs go toward nurturing OER work on campus. The University of California at Davis, for example, has transfered nearly $300,000 since 2020 into initiatives like the AggieOpen project, which, among other things, provides honoraria to instructors who revise, create, use, or share OER. The University of Houston helps facilitate similar work through its Alternative Textbook Incentive Program, allocating between $25,000 and $50,000 a year.
Funding for OER is especially critical for sustainability and quality, Wiley noted. OER is often paid for by one-time grants, making high quality, up-to-date materials difficult to maintain without additional money for the faculty members who develop them.
Oftentimes, “nobody wants to fund the ongoing, unglamorous work of small maintenance and small improvements as much as they want to fund the creation of something new,” Wiley said. But that work “has to get done” for OER to succeed.
At the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, which has an equitable-access program that charges $25 per credit, administrators automatically opt-out students who are registered only for courses using OER, said Larry Lee, executive director of auxiliary services. Otherwise, students have to make the decision themselves. But Lee offers a resource to help: a “personalized value sheet” in the learning-management system.
The sheet shows students the number of materials required for the courses they’ve signed up for, the total cost, and how that compares to the price they’d pay through the equitable-access program. Lee added that the sheet is “dynamic” and updates whenever a student drops or adds courses.
“Our philosophy is we don’t want to just benefit the lucky few who happen to sign up for a class that has OER,” Lee said. “We want every student to benefit from better economics.”
(To note, the total cost presented to students is based on the retail prices of their course materials — the vast majority of them digital. This is a common calculation practice, and imperfect, given many students’ propensity to rent or buy used textbooks for less. Lee underscored that retail prices are used because they are the only consistent metric, and that students are encouraged to do their own research.)
In some cases, colleges have made exceptions for OER within equitable-access programs. Using SPARC’s Textbook Billing Contract Library, The Chronicle identified at least two contracts that stated students would not incur charges for credits tied to courses that used only OER. (The Chronicle asked those colleges — SUNY’s Nassau Community College and Onondaga Community College — whether the agreements are still in place, but did not hear back.)
Beamer and Mood, the open-education librarians, would prefer if courses with OER were left out of these programs. But like others, they hope there’s a collaborative path forward.
Finding a solution that works for everyone is “complex,” Beamer says, but “I think there’s a balance that could happen.”