The most important and effective way a faculty member can ensure textbook affordability is adopting on time. Beyond compliance with the Higher Education Opportunity Act, it's an equity issue.
Bowdoin requires students with financial aid packages to come to campus with the amount of money they need to purchase their textbooks. With accurate textbook costs provided during the registration process, students can have timely financial conversations with their families and begin earning or budgeting for the coming semester. Bowdoin partners with eCampus to make this disclosure convenient for faculty. Faculty adopt textbooks by the deadline, and academic staff liaise with eCampus, the Registrar's Office, and IT to ensure the information is publicly available to students during registration.
Declaring "No Textbooks" is as important as adopting books: Declaring through the Mini-COW or the course adoptions form that students will not need to purchase textbooks is equally important as adopting books on time. Courses stay in TBD status until faculty either adopt books or state that none will be adopted. A class in TBD status represents uncertainty and anxiety for students--they could discover from the syllabus on the first day of classes that they need a $10 novel, a $420 economics textbook, or everything is on Canvas and will cost them nothing. Course enrollments are inherently more stable in the first few weeks of classes when students know costs ahead of time.
Adopting books on time is challenging. There are many reasons why it's challenging to adopt books on time--your course design is dynamic and you use different books every semester, the course adoption cycle does not align with the course design cycle, you use the semester break right before the semester starts to finalize the syllabus, it's a new course, it's a high level course, it's a low level course, there's a new book being published, you're in the middle of teaching the current semester...the fact remains that not having access to the list of books at the time of registration disadvantages students--and disproportionately so. Library staff, along with colleagues in Academic Technology and BCLT, can help ease the pressure of some of these challenges.
Open Education Resources (OERs) are free resources that can be used in lieu of traditional textbooks. Many can be freely retained, reused, remixed, retained, revised, and redistributed. Some examples of OERs are OpenStax textbooks, such as John McMurry's well-known Organic Chemistry textbook, and Herramientas, a text for intermediate Spanish study written by a former Bowdoin professor.
A surprising number of oft-used course materials are available for free.
The Public Domain Slider, Section 108 Spinner, and the Fair Use Evaluator are all tools that can be used to determine what is available and/or can be used for free.
A few chapters, a journal article, "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "The Tell-Tale Heart", Pride and Prejudice--all of these can be linked to Canvas or scanned and posted to Canvas instead of asking students to purchase.
Click HERE for instructions on linking journal articles, ebooks, streaming films, and audio tracks to your Canvas course.
If you need help, please ask! Library staff are invested in course materials affordability and ready to help you decrease costs for students in your courses.
