One of the main things you know about colleges is the staggering prices of some textbooks. As someone who has taught grad school for more than a decade, I always try to be very thoughtful about the books I require. I usually encourage students to buy the last edition of the books, to save money. (And not just students! I’ve been required to buy the text for most of the classes I’ve been teaching. Bleh.)

But not every instructor does this, or even can do this. And those textbook costs really drive up the cost of higher ed.

So it has been great to see the rise of Open Educational Resources (OER)! The Minnesota state colleges are working on a new program called a Z-degree, where students will be able to go through their whole degree without buying books, just using OER resources.

Check out this article about the recent rapid rise of OER! We give an excerpt below, and you can read the whole thing here.

No one wants to pay $200 for a textbook

“No one wants to pay $200 for a textbook, and soon no one will have to, because the $200 textbook may be disappearing.

Like other technological trends that were plodding along before COVID-19, the use of digital resources and freely licensed learning materials — known as open educational resources, or OER — exploded in 2020. And that growth comes with an added bonus for students: For the first time in decades, textbook prices are dropping.

According to Mark Perry, an economics professor at the University of Michigan-Flint, OER can be credited with the downturn. A widely circulated 2019 chart designed by Perry showed that while the cost consumer goods like TVs and toys has dropped over the past two decades, lines on the graph for essential goods and services — including food, housing, medical care, child care, education and textbooks — have continued to arch upward.

But recently, the textbook line has started sagging, which Perry attributes to an “open textbook effect” that’s taken off during the pandemic. The trend can be seen in the subscription rates of OER publishers like Rice University’s OpenStax, which saw a doubling during the health crisis in the number of students using its materials to 4 million. The nonprofit publisher is branching out beyond books, too, with a new courseware platform enjoying 300% annual growth.

Daniel Williamson, OpenStax’s managing director, told EdScoop that more professors are finding OER while seeking out new ways to make their pandemic-era online classrooms more engaging. And while OER once had more of a bootleg vibe, it’s become more polished and increasingly offers compatibility with major learning management systems.”

“But if the traditional textbook market was grifting students, it wasn’t great for publishers either. They don’t get a taste of textbook resales, which prompted them to constantly release new versions of their books, even in academic fields — like basic mathematics — where new developments are seldom made.

Major academic publishers also aren’t publishing as many physical books these days. Executives from two of the major higher education textbook publishers — Cengage and McGraw-Hill Education — told EdScoop that about 80% of their revenue now comes from digital sales. Pearson, the largest higher education textbook publisher, announced in 2019 it would prioritize digital over print in its higher education business. (Pearson, the only major publisher that hasn’t partnered with OpenStax, declined to be interviewed for this story.)

“There’s always been a cohort of instructors that would prefer to use their own content or their peers’ course materials,” said Kent Peterson, McGraw-Hill’s chief marketing officer for higher education. “So over the years, we have both competed and collaborated with OER.”

Peterson said OER contains a different value proposition for instructors than what publishers like his offer. When McGraw-Hill has worked with OER publishers like OpenStax, he said, it was because faculty said they wanted McGraw-Hill’s feature-rich platform, but liked the OER content.”

You can read the whole article here!