College is expensive!
At AU we provide excellent education, services, resources, and experience for our students, but that comes with a financial cost. The tuition and fees for a student to attend AU are a little over $33,000, including tuition, room and board, and textbooks. While we should continue to provide these services, we also should think of ways to reduce costs for our students.
One way to reduce costs for students is to transition your classes to zero textbook-cost courses. Studies show that students experience increased stress resulting from textbook costs, and since 2020 the costs of textbooks have increased by 7%.
College Textbook Fees from 2020 to 2023
This page will explore different methods of reducing textbook costs for your students. Questions or want to get started? Reach out to an AU librarian!
Affordable Education Resources are materials that are free for students to use to enhance their learning. The materials could be open access or OERs, but they also could be materials that departments or the library pay for instead of the students (library-licensed materials).
Affordable Education Resources are an umbrella term for the following two concepts: Open Access and Open Education Resources.
Talk with a librarian if you want to transition your class to using affordable education resources! We would be happy to explore eBook licensing for your class materials. (Note: Libraries and Library Vendors often don't provide traditional annual edition textbooks, but they do provide supplementary class materials including novels, historical studies, practical theology, etc).
See the boxes below to explore the difference between OA and OERs.
Open Access and Open Education Resources are very similar. They are both materials that are free to access. The big difference is who retains the copyright of the work and how it can be used.
Explore this chart to learn more about the differences.
Open Access materials are scholarly research articles that still follow all the standard rules of copyright, but are free for the user/researcher to access. Traditional journal publishing models pay for the cost of publishing by charging access to the materials, that's why the library holds paid subscriptions to the materials. It's to help cover that cost. Open Access shifts that cost from the researcher to the publisher, or more likely to a sponsoring corporation, the government entity, or a consortium. Therefore, allowing researchers to access materials free of charge. The library links lots of open-access journals into their discovery interface.
Open Education Resources (OERs) are free to access and distribute. They hold a particular form of copyright that allows users to revise, remix, redistribute, retain, and reuse the material's content.
Image Credit: "5Rs-7(transparent)", Making Open Educational Resources: A Guide for Students by Students is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
OERs include a wide range of materials: assessments, assignments, books, case studies, courses, journals, primary sources, reference materials, simulations, tutorials, texts, textbooks, and more.
This license enables reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use. CC BY includes the following elements:
BY: credit must be given to the creator.
This license enables reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use. If you remix, adapt, or build upon the material, you must license the modified material under identical terms. CC BY-SA includes the following elements:
BY: credit must be given to the creator.
SA: Adaptations must be shared under the same terms.
This license enables reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. CC BY-NC includes the following elements:
BY: credit must be given to the creator.
NC: Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted.
This license enables reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. If you remix, adapt, or build upon the material, you must license the modified material under identical terms. CC BY-NC-SA includes the following elements:
BY: credit must be given to the creator.
NC: Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted.
SA: Adaptations must be shared under the same terms.
This license enables reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use. CC BY-ND includes the following elements:
BY: credit must be given to the creator.
ND: No derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted.
This license enables reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. CC BY-NC-ND includes the following elements:
BY: credit must be given to the creator.
NC: Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted.
ND: No derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted.
Did you know that there are already ZTC Courses on campus?
Between Fall 2019 and Spring 2022, AU students have reported positive experiences using a zero text cost in their classes. Here are some of the notable results from 156 surveyed students.
Ultimately, 97% of students reported that their overall experience with ZTC texts was positive or neutral.
Explore the other tabs in this box to learn about ZTC initiatives on campus through our consortium PALNI.
About PALSave
PALSave is an initiative within the consortium, PALNI (Private Academic Libraries of Indiana), of which Anderson University is a part of. Supported by a Lilly Endowment Inc. grant, PALSave supports student success and retention by fostering the use of Open Educational Resources (OER). It provides collaborative resources and a framework for OER awareness, education, and engagement. In addition, it funds and supports faculty adoptions of affordable learning materials to enhance the teaching and learning missions of private higher education in Indiana.
PALSave is offering faculty three different stipends to promote OERs and affordable education on campus.
OER Review Stipend
You can get $200 for exploring open textbook solutions and contributing to the Open Textbook Library with an OER review. The review will help other faculty better understand the quality of the textbook, and it may also help you better understand if an open textbook would be a good fit for your classes. Click here to request an invitation to review.
Course Redesign Grants
PALNI invites you to participate in the PALSave Course Redesign Program. As the recent recipient of a five-year Lilly Endowment, Inc. grant to support our affordable learning initiative, PALSave will be offering $500 stipends to faculty as an incentive to adopt zero-cost textbooks.
If selected, PALNI will provide you:
In order to receive the stipend, participants will be expected to provide (by the start of the course):
To apply, please fill out the application at this link, and include a short personal statement addressing these questions: Why are you interested in adopting a zero-cost textbook? What are your barriers? What do you hope to learn by participating in this program?
Textbook Creation Grant
With support from Lilly Endowment Inc., PALNI's PALSave Textbook Creation Grant Program awards funding (up to a maximum of $5,000 with a cap of $6,500 per proposal) to faculty members from PALNI-supported institutions to create open textbooks.
Faculty are periodically invited to submit creation grant proposals for the courses they teach. Textbooks may cover any discipline at the undergraduate or postgraduate level. PALNI seeks proposals for textbooks geared toward specific fields of study that meet the inclusion criteria for the Open Textbook Library.
The PALNI Open Educational Resource (OER) Publishing Task Force selects projects for funding based on proposal quality, clearly defined goals, need within the current open access body of work, and adoption potential within PALNI schools and beyond.
PALNI coordinates peer review, copyediting, layout, and hosting services to assist grant recipients in their textbook creation. Each textbook is also supported by a local project manager to monitor progress and answer questions throughout development. The open textbooks are published on the PALNI Press-supported Pressbooks platform alongside other faculty-contributed works and are ultimately submitted to the Open Textbook Library and OER repositories.
Watch this page for the next round of proposals to open.
