Affordable Textbooks
National landscape
The costs of college are going up every year, and it's not just tuition that weighs on student's minds and bank accounts. According to the College Board, undergraduates spend an average of $1,200 on textbooks annually. Faced with these costs, the academic impact is seen in classrooms across the country--many students choose to not buy a required text, take fewer courses, and some even drop or fail a course completely.
Local landscape
Rod Library’s Textbook Equity Librarian, Anne Marie Gruber, has been leading the conversation on UNI Campus for the last several years. In 2015 the Managing Director of the Open Education Network (OEN), Sarah Cohen, visited UNI to discuss the benefits of the OEN. In August of 2016, Rod Library joined the OEN on behalf of UNI and has since begun adopting the concept across campus. One of the major benefits of adopting this concept is the savings UNI is able to pass along to the students. Beginning in Fall 2020 UNI and other higher education institutions (community colleges, private colleges and universities, and the three Iowa Regent institutions) within Iowa now participate in a statewide membership to the OEN.
A video was created of UNI Students' Perspectives on Textbook Costs.
2018/2019 - University of Northern Iowa students saved $421,452 in textbook costs from open textbook adoptions. Some of the open textbooks were required and others were supplemental for courses. UNI students saved $342,517 for required textbooks and $78,935 for supplemental textbooks by the adoption of open textbooks at the University of Northern Iowa. Departments which used open textbooks included Biology, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Communication Studies, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Geography, History, Languages & Literatures Mathematics, Physics, Teaching, and Technology.
2017/2018 - University of Northern Iowa students saved $220,388 in textbook costs from open textbook adoptions. The UNI cost saving number was based on the local figure, $900 per year, reported on UNI’s Admissions website. These cost savings in 2017-2018 came from twenty eight classes with a total enrollment of 1,959 students. Some of the UNI departments using open textbooks were Biology, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Communication Studies, Geography, Languages and Literatures, Mathematics, Teaching, and Technology.
2016/2017 - University of Northern Iowa students saved $129,715 in textbook costs from open textbook adoptions. The cost savings came from thirteen classes with a total enrollment of 1,153 students. Some of the first UNI departments to take advantage of open textbooks were Biology, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Languages and Literatures, Mathematics, and Technology.
These textbooks were one less book students had to purchase for their classes. Instead, students were able to access these textbooks for free online.
What are open textbooks?
Open textbooks are typically authored by faculty or staff in their area of expertise and are sometimes designed specially for specific courses they teach. These textbooks usually use Creative Commons licenses, which enable users to download, customize or print the textbook without expressed written consent of the author while allowing the author to maintain copyright of the item.
How do I find quality open textbooks?
Search the Open Textbook Library to find open textbooks which have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization.
Services performed by the Digital Scholarship unit
If you plan to use an open textbook, please let us know. At the end of the academic year, we will be reaching out to the campus community to identify all textbooks used during the academic year. Once we identify the instructor and course, we will look up course enrollment numbers to calculate the cost savings to students. The savings figure will be added to the Open Textbook Network cost saving number.
We will separate your open textbook into sections/chapters so you can place links to individual chapters in your eLearning module or email chapters/sections to your students.
Iowa Open Educational Resources (OER) Initiatives
"Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning, and research resources that are free of cost and access barriers, and which also carry legal permission for open use. Generally, this permission is granted by the use of an open license (for example, Creative Commons licenses) which allows anyone to freely use, adapt and share the resource—anytime, anywhere." (SPARC)
UNI has been active in the Iowa OER Action Team statewide initiatives. See the Iowa OER website for information and resources regarding OER initiatives within Iowa. Iowa OER is working to make higher education more affordable for students in Iowa by advocating for the use of open educational resources.
