There's "free" as in speech, and there's "free" as in beer. Or, according to Wikipedia, gratis versus libre. This post is about free as in beer. (Sorry, no free beer will actually be made available. 🍺)
You might be familiar with the UAlberta SU's Be Book Smart initiative; this grew out of a national campaign years ago, protesting the high prices of textbooks. ("Grew" is probably not the right word, as the current initiative is much smaller in scope than the ambitious national campaign that kind of sputtered out.) Be Book Smart helps students know their options when it comes to textbooks (e.g., sharing books with friends, or looking for textbooks in the library). But it also provides information to instructors to raise awareness about the high costs of learning materials, and suggests lower-cost alternatives (e.g., using coursepacks, putting textbooks on reserve in the library, etc.).
Textbooks, however, are only one cost borne by students. Other learning materials also have a price. For example, some instructors require students to use online homework systems hosted by a commercial publisher. Of course, students have to buy an access code--just to do required homework! This strikes me as a bit of an over-reach.
I am mindful of the high cost of education. For 20 years, I have been using low-cost or no-cost alternatives in many of my courses. For example, instead of for-pay publisher-hosted online experiment websites, I have managed to find free alternatives like the American Psychological Association's Open Psychology Laboratory, which lets students run experiments and gather data--completely free. In some of my other courses, there is no required textbook, just a collection of readings in a coursepack. Even better, due to recent changes in copyright, I can make pdfs of these readings available to students for free.
An idea in academia that's gaining traction is that of Open Education Resources (or OERs). According to Wikipedia, these are "freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes." OERs include things like, well, Wikipedia. Completely free and open, and you can learn things from it.
In educational circles, however, OERs are most frequently brought up in the context of textbooks. Some people, out of the goodness of their hearts, have written textbooks--and have given them away, free. I have used one of these, by OpenStax, in my introductory psychology course (PSYCO 104). Although students were very happy to have a free textbook, I was disappointed in its quality. Sure, under the terms of the Creative Commons licence it was published under, I could have rewritten it--if I had a spare year or three. And although there are OER textbooks for introductory psychology, developmental psychology/lifespan development, abnormal psychology, research methods, cognitive psychology, and social psychology, OER textbooks are not available for all courses and topics. An increasing number of my colleagues are adopting OERs instead of commercial textbooks, and I'm on the lookout for high quality OER alternatives in the courses I teach.
Recently, the Office of the Registrar contacted instructors about a pilot project for the 2021-2022 academic year. They want to indicate to students in Bear Tracks which courses offer Zero Textbook Cost. I went through all six of my upcoming courses, and surprised myself to find that all of them qualify as ZTC. I do not require any paid online homework systems. I have coursepacks instead of textbooks as much as possible. And any required commercial textbooks in my courses have print copies on reserve at the library, or have ebooks available via the library website.
My hope is that by working towards Zero Textbook Cost I can help make education more accessible, and decrease financial strain on students. Do you have any other ideas that I can implement to save students money?
Why aren't you studying?
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