After 10 years, the Libraries’ Alt-Textbook program is about more than just massive savings

The Libraries now offers faculty the future of textbooks through Pressbooks.

Everything is more expensive now.

The rising costs of groceries, health care, and housing have become a major driver of national politics. Today’s college students bear an additional expense—textbooks and course materials for their classes. Nationally, about 65% of students simply don’t buy their required textbooks because of that cost. And textbook costs have risen even faster in recent years than food, medicine, and real estate.

Nonetheless, student financial aid tends to focus on tuition, so the idea of saving students money on course materials has been on the Libraries’ mind for a while. In 2009, the Libraries worked with the University Bookstores to provide access to at least one copy of every required textbook for each class at NC State. The following year, the Libraries partnered with the Physics Department to provide free, online access to the required textbook for introductory courses, saving the 1,300 enrolled students tens of thousands of dollars.

These and other initiatives formed a proof-of-concept for the Libraries’ Alt-Textbook Program, which debuted in 2014 with initial funding from the NC State University Foundation. Alt-Textbook offered small grants to faculty to create free alternatives to traditional commercial textbooks. Inspired by open textbook projects at Temple University and UMass-Amherst, the Libraries developed a mini-grant approach to encourage faculty to adopt or create open educational resources (OERs).

In its first year, Alt-Textbook funded 13 projects in eight departments, saving students almost $250,000 on textbooks. In year two, the program doubled that savings. For the current academic year, Alt-Textbook is funding and supporting 19 projects that affect 11,551 students at a total cost savings of $968,000.

Now a decade old, the program has become essential to faculty across the university. To date, 110 grants have impacted approximately 125,000 students through the switch to OERs, resulting in a cost savings of over $14 million. That’s a whole lot of instant ramen.

While most faculty applicants cite concerns over student costs as their primary reason for applying, the program has come to be about much more than simple cost savings. Through the Libraries’ funding of OERs, some NC State instructors have found that they teach better in a post-textbook world.

OER and OER again

Okay, so Alt-Textbook underwrites a faculty member’s creation of a free OER to replace an expensive textbook—got it. But just what is an OER anyway?

For each faculty member, there can be a different answer to that question.

Sometimes an OER looks a lot like a textbook. Instead of a bound collection of numbered chapters from a publisher, it’s an online collection of texts about that same content selected from magazines, newspapers, and academic journals, or created from scratch by the instructor themselves, or adapted from another OER created elsewhere and remixed just for the instructor’s class.

College of Textiles professor Martin W. King, who authored a comprehensive biotextiles textbook that retailed for a whopping $330, decided to help his students design their own instructional materials to replace it. Students researched and wrote an encyclopedia-like entry on many medical textile products, working with a Libraries staff member to cite manufacturer websites, journal articles, regulatory information, and more. Not only did they save $330, but they were already deeply engaged with the content since they created it.

Advanced Analytics assistant professor Sarah Egan Warren also involved her students in an open pedagogy project called the Data Ethics Repository. Because the field of Data Ethics changes quickly, a printed textbook could become obsolete almost immediately. She works with her master’s in analytics students to curate a collection of readings, videos, podcasts, and other resources about data ethics specifically related to their fields of interest. Not a textbook but an accumulating archive, the repository keeps up with the dynamic field and will be publicly available to other instructors at other universities under a Creative Commons license.

Other Alt-Textbook projects bear no relationship to a traditional textbook. For Maria Gallardo-Williams, Chemistry professor and Director of Undergraduate Organic Laboratories, an OER took the form of nearly 30 short videos that she and her organic chemistry students wrote, shot, and produced. Under the title “Student-Made Audiovisuals Reinforcing Techniques” (S.M.A.R.T.), the videos teach proper lab practices from a student perspective. And they’re not solely accessible to the over 3,000 organic chem students at NC State. Hosted on YouTube, the videos are free for students anywhere in the world to use. Gallardo-Williams has since developed chemistry labs in VR and is exploring using XR (extended reality) as well.

College of Veterinary Medicine assistant professor Chris Walker worked with the Libraries’ Live Capture Studio to 3D-scan dog and cat bones. This allows his vet students to study them online, manipulating them onscreen—or even to 3D-print them for personal use. Imagine having a life-size cat skeleton instead of a diagram of one in a textbook!

Through Alt-Textbook, the Libraries supports each OER’s development from start to finish. Libraries staff helps to research topics, select relevant materials and publications, and give invaluable copyright support. Faculty can leverage Libraries resources like the Makerspace and the Digital Media Lab to produce a wide variety of instructional materials. And Libraries staff can deploy those materials on platforms that are designed well for instructors and their students.

Despite this Libraries support through the entire process, and despite the benefits for students that go well beyond mere cost savings, some faculty still haven’t warmed to OERs. The challenge of assembling materials into an accessible resource might be more than many faculty members think they have time or skills for, so they just stick with the standard textbook.

As Alt-Textbook enters its second decade, the Libraries is doing something about that.

Pressbooks opens OERs to all

More faculty are submitting more Alt-Textbook grant requests for larger-impact projects. That’s a good thing. But how can the Libraries scale up its support of their development while lowering the faculty’s barrier for entry to OERs?

The Libraries’ recent subscription to Pressbooks—a versatile, user-friendly publishing platform for accessible, interactive, web-first books—has made it faster and easier for faculty to adapt existing texts and to create new ones. Currently the gold standard platform for OER authoring, Pressbooks is free to NC State faculty through the Libraries.

“We chose to partner with Pressbooks because their interface is very user-friendly, allowing new authors to quickly create, import, and disseminate content which looks eye-catching, professional and optimized for learning,” says David Tully, Principal Librarian for Student Affordability. “In past Alt-Textbook projects, faculty would usually be starting from scratch, often spending significant time working on the technical aspects of their projects; now they can focus more on the development of the content itself.”

Erin McKenney, an assistant professor in Applied Ecology and the director of undergraduate programs, has become the first NC State instructor to publish a textbook using the new Pressbooks license. She worked with her AEC 400 students over multiple assignments to create the content. The textbook, Applied Ecology, is now available in the Pressbooks directory, and will also have a home in other open repositories, such as the Open Textbook Library.

McKenney began the Alt-Textbook project after participating in the Open Pedagogy Incubator hosted by the Libraries in 2020, with the goal of making her course materials, and the subject matter itself, more broadly accessible to students, educators, and the general public.

“Rather than impose my sole voice, perspective, and biases, I restructured my course assignments to enable student creation of the content you will encounter in this book,” McKenney writes in the introduction. “The assignments are open-ended and open-world, motivating students to collaborate with each other and to seek knowledge beyond the classroom, and thus embody core characteristics of the discipline of Applied Ecology as well as Open Education and Universal Design for Learning.”

To McKenney, the Libraries’ partnership with Pressbooks opens the door for other instructors to follow her.

“I can have a lot of ideas, but if I had to teach myself how to use Pressbooks from scratch—just that mental barrier of ‘Oh God, I have to learn this now?’—that might keep me from actually doing it,” she says. “And so not only does the Libraries provide the funding, it provides the expertise, it provides that time either on Zoom or in person so that we can actually go over the things that I need to understand.”

Pressbooks removes the technical challenge of embedding videos, podcasts, and other multimedia within a project. It also offers students free, perpetual access to all content, ensuring that all students have the same level of access to their course materials. Additionally, the Pressbooks directory is freely available to educators and students across the globe, opening up the potential for impact which would otherwise not be found elsewhere.

“If I can remove the cost for one class, I can actually really help a lot of students,” McKenney says. “And if I can engage students in highlighting diverse ecologists who they identify with or who they want to have in their textbook? That’s how I framed our featured ecologist assignment: Who do you want to have in your textbook? That inspires and empowers students to go explore the wide world of ecology and to find people who they may or may not identify with.”