International Journal of Open Educational Resources Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2019/Winter 2020 | Page 116

International Journal of Open Educational Resources
level when purchasing textbooks. 75.4%
(120 students) reported feeling stress
frequently or always; 18.2% experienced
it sometimes, and only 6.3% reported
feeling stress rarely or never. One student
told us that his mother worked for
a textbook company, so while he didn’t
have to worry about obtaining material,
he acknowledged that he was uncommonly
fortunate and understood the
advantage he had over his classmates in
that regard.
Figure 1. Stress.
One factor sometimes addressed
in the literature, which we felt was of
some importance, is the idea of student
preference regarding format of reading
materials. Brandle et al. (2019) reported
that 58% of students at City University
of New York (CUNY) printed all or
some of the online material. 353 CUNY
students did so because they wanted
to be able to annotate, and 322 simply
preferred paper for readings. Forty-four
CUNY students reported limited
or no access to either tech devices
or the Internet as the reason for their
preference (Brandle et al., 2019, p. 92).
Here again is a tragic example of the
“double-edged sword” nature of information
privilege: students have greater
access to information subscribed to
by the academic library, but without
computers, phones, tablets, or reliable
internet, information remains beyond
reach. Continuing Brandle et al.’s trend,
77% of students polled by Petrides et al.
(as reported by Cooney, 2017), prefer
print (p. 163). Library Journal’s (2019)
findings are slightly different, citing
that faculty perception is that “students
prefer print to digital texts” (p. 5, emphasis
added).
Our own findings show that
79.9% of students prefer print; 51.6%
prefer video/visual, with 47.8% desiring
graphic/pictorial form, and the
least preferred format is sound/audio
at 28.9% (multiple answers were permitted).
For textual material, we asked
our students to rate their paper/screen
preference (screens include computers,
tablets, phones, etc.). A total of 7.5%
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