Jenna Heath, UNLV College of Liberal Arts director of student and community engagement, left, and Denise Tillery, UNLV College of Liberal Arts associate dean for students and professor of English, pose for a photo at Lied Library at UNLV Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022.
Saturday, Jan. 22, 2022 | 2 a.m.
Mania Young, a first-generation student at UNLV from Germany, was nervous about the unknown expense last fall for the textbook required in the first-year seminar course.
But the nearly 400 UNLV freshmen in the College of Liberal Arts who were enrolled the course — an introductory class to ease their academic and social transition to college life — received a free online textbook thanks to a new program within the college.
The textbook, “College Success,” was offered through OpenStax, a website through Rice University that houses online resources for faculty and students.
The book, which details evolving challenges and responsibilities for students, typically runs between $78 and $85. The university estimates students saved approximately $36,000 total in textbook costs.
“I was relieved, first of all,” Young said. “I was glad I could save that and use it for other things, and hopefully that might be a thing in the future for more books and classes.”
Young prefers a physical copy of a textbook because she annotates and highlights the text to organize her notes. But the OpenStax version of “College Success” allowed digital note-taking and highlighting, an aspect of the textbook Young said she enjoyed most.
The program is continuing this spring and, hopefully, in the future for other courses in the liberal arts college, said Denise Tillery, associate dean at the College of Liberal Arts who helped organize the program. She worked on the project with Jenna Heath, the college’s director of student and community engagement.
“Publishers of textbooks often produce new editions about every three years, and they will often increase the price every time that new edition comes out,” Tillery said. “The last increase in price, it was just kind of at our limit. That’s just too much to ask students to pay for this book when we know that a lot of that content is freely available, so we just took that opportunity to get out of that whole for-profit textbook market for this particular class.”
The textbook program is part of an initiative dubbed the Open Educational Resources Task Force, a group with representation from the Office of Information Technology, Office of Online Education, Faculty Center, University Libraries and the UNLV Bookstore.
Immediate access to the textbook was crucial because often students will delay buying their books before financial aid comes in, typically after the semester starts, said Melissa Bowles-Terry, director of the Faculty Center.
This puts them, particularly low-income students, at a disadvantage, she said.
“They’ll prioritize which books they’ll buy first, and that’s a barrier to their learning,” Bowles-Terry said. “Anything we can do to make those textbooks more affordable, whether that’s using library resources or using freely available online resources, directing students towards other options besides expensive textbooks, that all just make it easier for students to get started with the semester and then complete the semester and move towards that degree.”
If students wanted to buy the physical copy, used versions were available in the university’s bookstore for about $20, though they were encouraged to use the online version, Heath said.
Heath said students in the seminar expressed worries each year overpaying for the textbook. These qualms were the spark for the task force to seek out the free version, targeting freshmen in particular to ease the transition to college classes, she said.
“Especially for freshmen, they’re still getting used to college,” she said. “They have really no idea what they’re getting themselves into a lot of times. Especially at UNLV, it’s a lot of first-generation students, and so, you know, an $80-plus textbook, … that’s a lot for a first-year seminar.”
Tillery and Heath hope they have a model that can be duplicated in other colleges across the university.
“We do hope that other first-year seminars across UNLV will look at what we’ve done and adopt some of our content for sure,” Tillery said. “We’re hoping to go back and talk to those first-year coordinators and really encourage them to consider using our materials and adopting whatever they want from them.”
