Imagine you had a
student whose accommodation needs made it impossible for her to access the textbook for
your class. Never mind why, and leave aside your confidence that technology can
make any textbook accessible to anyone with any accommodation need. Those fixes won’t
work in this case. What would you do? Would you tell the student she simply cannot take your class? Would you try to find an alternative text that was accessible to her?
This might sound like an unlikely scenario, but most higher ed instructors have students like this is in our classes right now. This student's disability is commonly invisible and more often not addressed: she can't afford the text. This will prevent her from reading the course material just as surely as if she had a vision impairment and there was no accommodation for it. We are ethically and legally bound to provide accommodations for students with various disabilities. Why do we not see the affordability of our course materials as an accessibility barrier like we do it's physical or electronic format?
The good news is that it's never been easier to select free course materials instead of ones that come with the barrier of a price tag. Open Educational Resources (OER) now exist for many subjects and courses, especially general education courses. The quality of these OER texts have steadily improved, and many come with ancillaries equivalent to publisher offerings.
Even better, using OER can free up instructors and students to correctly recognize the overwhelming availability of information these days. Combining OER with other sources of information that our students might be more familiar with (and more likely to access after they leave our classes and campuses) like Wikipedia, YouTube, and even Google, can help develop our students' information literacy skills.
So accept the reality that you have or will have students in your courses that simply will not read the sources that come with a financial cost, and that this will selectively impact the students that are the most vulnerable. If the ethics of the situation do not motivate you sufficiently to switch to OER and other free resources when you can, realize that these same students stop out more often than other students, and often for financial reasons. So think of OER as retention strategies. And get off your butt and check out the OER in your discipline. You could try Googling it.
The advancement of OER texts and ancillaries are going to be revolutionary! At minimum, we'll continue to see large book publishers focusing on cutting costs via mergers as we saw with McGraw-Hill + Cengage as is outlined in the link I'll share below. Will said savings be enough to drive costs down, or will the exponential growth continue YoY while focusing on building technology that makes teaching more hands off? (I.E. Kinect, Cengage and other comprehension checkers)
ReplyDeleteAs OER tech/texts continue to be built and refined, I feel the freedom offered will be a fantastic way for professors to build a course to meet specific learning objectives. My question, however, is how accessible would this be for grad-students teaching courses for the first time or an Assistant Professors heading out on their own trying to juggle high research demands and a new course? Love to hear your thoughts!
Merger link - https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-05-01-cengage-mcgraw-hill-agree-to-merge-to-become-2nd-biggest-us-textbook-publisher
Nick, your question about grad student or other new instructors is a good one. Traditional publishers have fleets of reps that fan out to every campus to assist instructors in adopting their book, and OER lacks this resource. Growing the OER ancillaries will help. It can be a kind of unbundling or cutting-the-cord: there are tons of stand-alone services that accomplish the same functions that ancillaries/add-ons from trad. publishers (I am starting with Perusall this term -- looks great, and free to students and instructors). But cobbling these together to make a complete course takes time and exposure, just the things that grad students and new instructors have in short supply. Professional Developers need to do a better job assisting these new instructors.
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