This op-ed was written by Linn-Benton Community College’s Civil Discourse Program. To learn more about the program, you can visit its website here and its guidebook here.
College students don’t want to buy textbooks.
The data backs it up, showing that the cost of learning materials affects how over half of college students pick their courses. If you’re already paying thousands of dollars for tuition – plus living expenses – per term, do you really want to drop an extra few hundred dollars on textbooks?
Go to just about any classroom on the first day of the term. No one has bought the textbook yet; students are waiting for confirmation that they absolutely have to make the purchase.
These worries have caught the eye of higher education, especially community colleges, with an emphasis on using open educational resources (OERs) in the classroom. OERs are free, openly-licensed learning materials that can cut or eliminate textbook costs for students.
It sounds too good to be true, and critics of OERs argue that’s exactly the case, pointing to concerns about the quality of these free resources.
Are OERs really making higher education better?
YES
By Norah Steed, Garrett Merchant, and the LBCC Civil Discourse Program.
Higher education should be accessible to as many people as want to pursue it, but rising tuition costs and the general cost of living make education a difficult investment for many. Open educational resources are a step towards lowering the sticker price of higher education, which we can’t afford to neglect.
Anyone who’s had to buy textbooks or other class materials knows the feeling of dread that comes from forcing a surprise mandatory cost into an already tight budget. The average college student pays about $1,200 per year for educational materials. That increase in education costs can significantly impact students’ budgets, disproportionately affecting students with lower financial security and potentially driving students to take out additional student loans to cover the cost of materials.
When instructors use OERs, they signal to their students that they understand the financial burden of college and are doing what they can to lessen that load. For students who are already trying to cut corners and save money wherever they can, this makes them feel respected and safe. When Garrett uses a free textbook resource in class, he is more engaged in learning and appreciates the recognition of the financial burden posed by course materials. Instructors also signal to students that they are keeping up with current pedagogical practices and are willing to engage their students with the interactive and up-to-date learning experiences that OERs can provide.
Opponents of OERs argue they may provide lower-quality information or are less frequently updated. However, many OERs actually have robust review processes, including OpenStax, a leading OER publisher. To further enhance OER quality in the face of growing demand, universities like Oregon State are providing grants to support professors in adapting or creating OERs.
Closed-source, expensive textbooks often fail to provide adequate information for students. Garrett has experienced buying a $100 textbook that only covered only a fraction of the required material for his class. Making it worse, the courses that followed it in the series required the purchase of different books. It’s no wonder students resort to using borrowed or outdated books.
Norah is a student who is always looking for creative ways to save some extra money. When one of her classes required a textbook purchase, she naturally turned to an online reseller and found a used, older edition for a fraction of the price of the new edition at the student store. She was happy to save the money, but it caused issues for her throughout the term. The course relied heavily on the textbook, but the edition she bought online had different information from the teacher’s copy. Norah might have done better in the class if her instructor had used an OER.
Higher education is expensive enough without the additional cost of required books and other materials. OERs present an opportunity to shrink that cost. Speaking as students who feel the effect of every additional expense and don’t feel like they’re getting their money’s worth out of conventional textbooks, we appreciate instructors who’ve adopted OERs, and encourage others to do the same.
NO
By Ryland Bickley, Mark Nusom, and the LBCC Civil Discourse Program.
College is expensive – there’s no arguing that. Textbook prices are a part of that problem, but open educational resources aren’t always the easy fix they’re touted to be. As the adage goes, you get what you pay for. Free OERs, while some are undoubtedly useful, don’t provide a clear path forward for a better education.
OERs can be anything from OpenStax textbooks to YouTube videos. There’s a wide range of options available with a varying range of quality, and only some OERs are peer-reviewed. If we continue to push instructors to use OERs in their classes, it places a greater burden on them to thoroughly vet and find these resources – which requires time they don’t always have.
Psychology professor Russell T. Warne did take the time in 2021 to review an OER, finding a laundry list of “basic errors” in Lumen Learning’s “Introduction to Psychology” resource, which is based on OpenStax’s Psychology 2e textbook.
OpenStax, a popular publisher for peer-reviewed OERs, has just 70 textbooks in its library. That’s an impressive number, but compared to the massive scope of higher education, that collection of books doesn’t come close to covering all that students are studying. While these popular OERs can be reasonable to use in lower-level, general education classes, high-level classes have a much smaller number of quality OERs available – if any.
Cost does matter, but so does quality. Ryland has taken classes in both high school and college where the curriculum was heavily composed of free material such as YouTube videos and articles. It was affordable, but the curriculum lacked cohesion and was difficult to learn from. Those types of resources can be great for cramming ahead of a test, but lack the depth to truly understand the “why” behind the subject.
On the other hand, some of the best classes Ryland has ever taken required reading from resources that he did have to pay for – often books that the instructor was particularly passionate about. When the instructor is invested in the reading, that shows in the curriculum, and the class becomes more engaging and worth the cost of tuition. A bigger push to use OERs detracts from instructors’ abilities to pick the learning materials they teach best from.
This situation is one that Mark is very familiar with. One of his instructors on the first day of class said that because the college is pushing for OERs, that is what they would use. However, the instructor added that he disliked the OER textbook available for that course, and he made many edits to it as a result.
Although he spent time improving the resource, the professor stated that he was still not completely satisfied with the end product, but that it “will work.” The students in the class then had to use a subpar resource; many complained about confusing and inconsistent parts of the textbook.
Simply asking instructors to put together OERs with grant money isn’t currently a sustainable solution, either. Paid textbooks often take several years and multiple sources and reviews to complete – the types of grants currently available for OERs don’t have the funding to support the actual cost it would take to match that level of time commitment and quality.
Resources such as books are the backbone of most college classes. While working towards lowering the cost of higher education is a goal worth pursuing, we can’t achieve it at the cost of losing what makes college worthwhile in the first place: accurate, quality information. OERs haven’t consistently met that standard yet, meaning that we shouldn’t be pushing teachers to use them.