Abstract
Academic librarians increasingly adopt roles as campus leaders to promote the adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER) and other strategies to encourage making textbook affordability for students an institutional priority. When it comes to a statewide strategy to support academic library efforts for textbook affordability, Pennsylvania is lagging more progressive states such as Oregon, Georgia, Ohio, Virginia and Louisiana. This article makes a case for and lays out a strategy by which Pennsylvania’s academic librarians can develop a statewide initiative to tackle the challenge of textbook affordability together in order to achieve substantial progress.
Highlights
The direction academic librarians often take is to establish a textbook affordability initiative or extend their program to encompass affordable course content writ large. These programs organize and leverage institutional resources to offer financial-based incentives, non-financial support, or some combination, to enable instructors to more readily eliminate a commercially published textbook or course content in favor of Open Educational Resources (OER) or some combination of OER and other learning content that is available at no cost to learners. Both the Open and Affordable Course Content program at Penn State University and the Textbook Affordability Project (TAP) at Temple University recognize that there is a spectrum of options that contribute to student learning while providing financial relief
Pennsylvania higher education institutions can learn the lessons of these other statewide initiatives and borrow from their models to build a best of breed textbook affordability initiative in this state
While our own institutions are actively engaged with textbook affordability initiatives, we believe our work is enhanced when textbook affordability for college students becomes a priority for academic institutions statewide
Summary
The direction academic librarians often take is to establish a textbook affordability initiative or extend their program to encompass affordable course content writ large These programs organize and leverage institutional resources to offer financial-based incentives, non-financial support, or some combination, to enable instructors to more readily eliminate a commercially published textbook or course content in favor of OER or some combination of OER and other learning content that is available at no cost to learners. Both the Open and Affordable Course Content program at Penn State University and the Textbook Affordability Project (TAP) (guides.temple.edu/ textbookaffordability) at Temple University recognize that there is a spectrum of options that contribute to student learning while providing financial relief. Even knowing a textbook can present financial struggles for students, faculty find it difficult to sacrifice the slide decks, homework problems and test banks, that are supplemental to the textbooks
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