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
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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)