This Fall, SFU students returned to crowded morning buses, late nights of studying, and increasingly inflated textbook prices.
According to an estimation by the Simon Fraser Student Society (SFSS), students, especially science students, on average drop about $500 per semester for their lower-level courseware.
This figure comes out of the campaign work the society did at the beginning of the semester, where they asked students coming out of the SFU Bookstore to share how much they spent on their course materials through a social media campaign, using the hashtag #textbookbrokeBC.
The push for more open educational resources has been going strong since the post-secondary education innovation company BCcampus launched the BC Open Textbook Project in October 2012 with funding from the BC Ministry of Advanced Education. The project aims to make resources more widely available and to reduce costs for students with resources in the public domain on the Internet.
SFSS VP University Relations Brady Yano commented that the university has been very receptive to the idea of open textbooks. “SFU, as an institution right now, is definitely in support of greater adoption of open educational resources,” he said.
SFU has also announced plans for three $5,000 grants per semester that would allow professors to adapt current open educational resources from the BC Campus library to fit their courses.
The Harbour Centre campus recently hosted an event as a part of International Open Access Week 2015. The panel, “Open for Collaboration: Is it Time for Canada to Implement A Unified Open Strategy for Higher Education?,” was put on by the SFU and UBC libraries in conjunction with BCcampus.
Juan Pablo Alperin, an assistant professor in SFU’s publishing program, spoke at the event about how he encourages his students to publish their academic work online after submitting it. He even explored the idea of students submitting work by publishing it directly to the web, as opposed to uploading files to platforms like Canvas.
Although open educational resources have been gaining popularity, few professors have actually decided to adopt any open textbooks for their courses. Yano shared, “While administration has been vocal in their support, that hasn’t necessarily trickled down to the faculty, who are still relatively apprehensive about adopting the existing materials.”
He speculated a few reasons for this hesitation, suggesting that it could be hard for professors to adapt existing syllabi to make use of an open textbook and that big textbook publishing companies make it very easy and appealing for instructors to purchase and use their materials.
Yano specified that this applies largely to lower-level science and applied science courses, for which textbook costs can range in the hundreds. “A lot of first-year students are not aware that the high costs of textbooks are an issue,” he said.
Considering how many students enroll in these larger introductory courses, it adds up to a lot of student money being put towards courseware. Recently, a UBC professor adopted an open textbook for PHYS 100, saving students approximately $90,000 combined for just one year.
SFU advises prospective students to budget $1,000 per semester for textbooks and other educational resources. “SFU is already educating students to expect to pay, so when they do arrive at school they’re not surprised to be receiving bills that are around $600,” said Yano.
He went on to say that although it is good to be prepared for those prices, “it’s quite problematic, because it’s people are [. . .] accepting the norm of paying high costs [for] learning materials.”
