Internet Learning Volume 6, Number 2, Fall 2017/Winter 2018 | Page 42

Access to Information Doesn’t Have to Come with a Pretty Cover and a Price Tag
Over the last few years, we undertook
a project to transition
from textbooks to open educational
resources (OERs) in all of the
international relations and intelligence
studies courses in our programs. Across
the academy, there are increasing calls
for greater use of OERs (Cox & Trotter,
2017; Jhangiani, 2017; Tuomi, 2013).
One place that this can be seen is the
numerous web pages posted by universities
to highlight their OER initiatives. 1
According to the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO):
Open Educational Resources
(OERs) are any type of educational
materials that are in the
public domain or introduced
with an open license. The nature
of many of these open materials
is such that anyone can legally
and freely copy, use, adapt and
re-share them. OERs range from
textbooks to curricula, syllabi,
lecture notes, assignments, tests,
projects, audio, video and animation.
(2017)
When conversations about OERs
arise, the discussion frequently centers
on monetary savings for students and/
or universities, as expensive books are
replaced with free materials. While
many of the instructors we work with
have been excited to move to OERs,
others have demonstrated reluctance to
embrace this trend even when it is feasible.
One reason was because they believed
that educational decisions should
not be made based solely on financial
imperatives. However, they may be
missing the broader picture; for many
of us, providing open educational resources
is a matter of social justice. We
want to make materials affordable now,
and also want to model for students
how to access information throughout
their lives whatever their financial situation
may be. The skill to find and draw
from appropriate materials empowers
people not only in their careers but also
as citizens and leaders.
Textbook Costs
The focus of the academic discussions
on OERs is frequently
on the cost of textbooks and
rightly so, given that it has skyrocketed
(Jhangiani, 2017). A recent Government
Accountability Office report
(2013) demonstrated that while overall
consumer prices had grown by 28% between
2002 and 2012, the cost of college
textbooks had grown a staggering 82%.
According to one account, the cost of
college textbooks has risen 1,041% from
January 1977 to June 2015 (Popken,
2015). With some books costing students
as much as $400 each, it is not uncommon
for many students to expect an
annual $1,200 textbook bill (Weisbaum,
2016). Book costs are also largely dependent
on one’s area of study; so, $1,200
is only an average across majors. Perry
(2015) lists some of the most expensive
textbooks according to discipline: “for
business students taking five classes per
semester and paying an average of $250
per textbook, their textbook bill would
1 For more information on Intellus Learning, see: http://www.intelluslearning.com/
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