Librarians Transforming Textbooks: The Past, Present, and Future of the Affordable Learning Georgia Initiative

Georgia Library Quarterly, Apr 2015

Affordable Learning Georgia (ALG) is an initiative of the University System of Georgia (USG) to reduce the cost of textbooks for USG students. This article outlines current problems with textbook pricing, the origins of ALG within USG Library Services, current efforts and future plans for ALG, and the role of USG librarians in making required textbooks more affordable.

A PDF file should load here. If you do not see its contents the file may be temporarily unavailable at the journal website or you do not have a PDF plug-in installed and enabled in your browser.

Alternatively, you can download the file locally and open with any standalone PDF reader:

https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1863&context=glq

Librarians Transforming Textbooks: The Past, Present, and Future of the Affordable Learning Georgia Initiative

Librarians Transforming Textbooks: The Past, Present, and Future of the Affordable Learning Georgia Initiative Jeff Gallant 0 USG/Af ordable Learning Georgia 0 0 0 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/glq Part of the Library and Information Science Commons Recommended Citation - Article 8 Librarians Transforming Textbooks: The Past, Present, and Future of the Affordable Learning Georgia Initiative In July 2014, Affordable Learning Georgia (ALG) began its first year as a funded initiative of the University System of Georgia (USG) as a part of its parent GALILEO program. The initiative has focused on providing USG faculty with the support to make textbooks more affordable for their students while encouraging analysis of the effects of affordable learning projects on student retention and progression. Through a new grant program and supporting a zero-cost option for all eCore (Georgia’s online college core-curriculum) courses, ALG will save students over an estimated $9 million in course materials costs in fiscal years 2015 and 2016, and librarians play a crucial role in many of these ALG projects. Background For the 2014–2015 academic year, the College Board (2015 ) estimates that the average cost of books and supplies per year for a college student is over $1,200. The Government Accountability Office (2013) estimates that over four years, students will pay 26 percent of the average accrued student loan debt on textbooks, while textbooks have increased in price from 2002 to 2012 at a rate of over three times the increase of the Consumer Price Index. In a Florida Virtual Campus study (2012 ), more than half of the students surveyed did not purchase the required textbook for a course due to the high cost. The cost of textbooks caused thirty-one percent of respondents to decline registering for a course, thirty-five percent of respondents to register for fewer classes, fourteen percent of respondents to drop a course, and ten percent of respondents to withdraw from a course. Going even further into students’ higher education decisions, a study by the college bookstore supplier By Jeff Gallant Nebraska Book Company/Neebo (2014 ) found that nearly half of students surveyed would choose one university over another if they offered free textbooks for all four years of undergraduate college. History of Affordable Learning Georgia The USG has been exploring open educational resources (OER) for over ten years, including the creation of the USG SHARE learning objects repository and an early partnership with a digital learning object initiative, California State University’s MERLOT. In support of open scholarship, the Regents’ Advisory Committee on Libraries (RACL) created a plan for a systemwide approach to connected open-access institutional repositories, which led to the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant-funded creation of the Georgia Knowledge Repository (GKR). Because libraries are at the core of GKR, the discoverability of open resources has been at the forefront of that service, produced through common metadata element definitions, cross-mapping of collections, and harvesting and norming metadata for inclusion in a discovery tool. Because of these early open-learning efforts in the USG, many innovative instructors adopted or created OER for their courses, either alongside or in cooperation with these USG projects. When the USG joined Complete College America to create the Complete College Georgia initiative, which focuses on retention, progression, and graduation, the barriers that textbook costs present to students became clear. A USG whitepaper analysis of the textbook market and OER alternatives identified many factors and strategies for consideration (Lasseter 2011) . The USG began a project to produce an open United States history textbook in collaboration with the University Press of North Georgia. That effort not only produced an open textbook, History in the Making: A History of the People of the United States of America to 1877, now available to all USG students and the world, but it also created a development model that leverages the editorial and peer-review processes already in place with the university system presses to ensure a high-quality product. In June 2013, the USG began to formalize its efforts to address issues surrounding textbook affordability. The libraries were asked to lead this effort through the GALILEO initiative, due not only to the licensed content GALILEO provides that could be leveraged to reduce the costs of learning materials, but also because of GALILEO’s technical and administrative infrastructure for managing content and its history of effective stewardship and collaboration within the USG. A pilot team of USG librarians set the strategy and goals of the initiative and identified the stakeholders who needed to be engaged. Team members then talk (...truncated)


This is a preview of a remote PDF: https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1863&context=glq

Jeff Gallant. Librarians Transforming Textbooks: The Past, Present, and Future of the Affordable Learning Georgia Initiative, Georgia Library Quarterly, 2015, Volume 52, Issue 2,