On Mission: Open Educational Resources

TCC works to offer free and low-cost textbooks

A foundational belief of TCC is that quality education is affordable, but the word affordable is subjective. So many different things can be affordable to one student, and unobtainable to another.

Open Educational Resources have a huge impact on affordability. OERs are educational materials – books, labs, articles and more – that are freely available and accessible without any fees. Free textbooks. That is definitely on Mission.

Spearheaded by Jennifer Kneafsey, TCC faculty department chair for life sciences, and Lisa Haldeman, TCC library director at the Northeast Campus, the OER program at TCC has grown rapidly.

“During the 2017-18 school year, we estimate TCC students saved almost $1.2 million through OpenStax and OER,” says Kneafsey. “It’s probably my favorite thing I’ve done at TCC. You know how much it helps a student. If you save that student $75 or $80, that’s tanks of gas, bags of groceries, or part of an electric bill. It’s reducing our students’ debt load, and it helps in the short term by reducing barriers to their being successful at TCC.”

“It’s very easy to say that almost every single student in the College will be impacted by OER,” says Haldeman.

At TCC, it began with an ad in an academic journal.

“It advertised free peer-reviewed books for your college,” says Kneafsey. “I investigated it, and decided to give the biology book a try. Our students loved free books. Then colleagues began using the books.”

The process rolled from there. The College applied to be an institutional partner with OpenStax, a nonprofit ed-tech initiative based at Rice University. Since 2012, OpenStax has created peer-reviewed, openly licensed textbooks, which are available in free digital formats and for a low cost in print. The most expensive printed versions are no more than $60 at the bookstore. The non-majors Biology textbook in use at TCC costs just $28, should a student want or need a printed copy. According to Kneafsey, approximately 85 percent of students using OpenStax access free online versions of textbooks.

Next, the TCC Foundation awarded a $10,000 grant to support faculty adoption of OpenStax books as part of the institutional partnership, which turned out to be a gateway for other subjects to begin using the books. The grant was a one-time part of launching our institutional partnership with OpenStax, and was modeled after programs at peer institutions. According to Kneafsey,

OpenStax textbooks are used in over half of U.S. colleges and universities.

that included history, physics, American Federal Government and a many sciences.

During the institutional partnership, Kneafsey reached out to TCC Librarians for assistance.

“I created a textbook for one faculty member, which is still in use, and it took off from there,” says Haldeman. “We started to see more and more people interested in it.”

“At that same time, the College Success Course instructors developed their own OER, so students had no cost for that, and it helped them get used to OERs and how they worked,” says Kneafsey.

Haldeman assembled an OER team, with librarian liaisons for all seven academic schools at TCC. The librarians reach out to faculty to see if there are questions and what their needs are. They help find research materials, and sometimes, they create (or compile) entire textbooks and manuals.

“We’re not curriculum experts,” says Haldeman, “but we can find information anywhere. We’re the research people.”

As work progressed, the OER team saw the need to become licensed through Creative Commons, a nonprofit “dedicated to building a globally-accessible public commons of knowledge and culture.” Licenses through the organization “give every person and organization in the world a free, simple, and standardized way to grant copyright permissions for creative

“When living paycheck to paycheck, $200 might as well have been $2 million,” Jimmieka Mills

and academic works; ensure proper attribution; and allow others to copy, distribute, and make use of those works.”

“The Creative Commons license helps the whole OER community because we don’t have to recreate the wheel,” says Kneafsey. “It saves you starting from scratch. It’s simpler and less intimidating.”

The whole TCC staff of librarians are now certified in Creative Commons.

“We’re the residential experts,” says Haldeman. “We can use that certification to inform faculty for pulling OER and adding it to their curriculum. If a faculty member asks us for assistance, we have a pretty good idea where to find the OER source they need. We’ve actually pulled full textbooks for sources. We reassure our faculty they are not doing this by themselves. The library can find information anywhere it might exist.”

Faculty are coming on board. Students are embracing the low-cost advantages of OER. So what’s next for the College? Continued expansion of the number of courses using OER materials, and a small pilot allowing students to search for courses that use no cost/low cost materials.

“The potential exists that in the future, a student can navigate an entire associate degree without ever buying a textbook,” says Kneafsey.