Oshkosh recently received a $300,000 federal grant to help fund the proposed e-textbook program that will significantly lower the costs of academic materials.
The grant was created in response to the Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE) that announced this summer that it would be awarding 30 to 40 universities with the necessary funds to implement an alternative to buying textbooks.
FIPSE offered grants for $150,000 for a one-year program and $300,000 for a two-year program. Oshkosh received the two-year program grant in which the funds would only be given to schools that did not use the money in the purchase of textbooks.
“The scope of the project is fairly narrow right now – it’s just being piloted – so hopefully faculty and staff will latch onto the concept and make this a permanent alternative to buying textbooks,” Reeve Union Board President Shane Arman said.
Traditional textbook rental programs result in professors sharing a single academic source. Instead of creating a strictly rental textbook program, Oshkosh took the initiative to go beyond that by creating a solution that allows professors to create a textbook: an electronic core concepts textbook with written and edited content from the professors.
Stated in a press release that came out on Monday, Chancellor Richard Wells said, “This highly innovative model has the potential to revolutionize how textbooks are delivered to students and could serve as a blueprint for the rest of the state and country.”
The grant proposal, written by M. Ryan Haley, associate professor of economics at Oshkosh, with technical writing by Linda Freed and OSA Vice President Alex Abendschein supplying background information, outlined eight major project goals: to save students money, to avoid the difficulties of choosing and using a common text, to preserve professor control over course content, to tighten the connection between lower- and upper-level courses, to improve curricular uniformity, to encourage faculty collaboration, to make the university more attractive to potential students and to create a disseminable rental model for other colleges.
Abendschein felt that the three main goals critical to students’ academic well being were to improve student learning outcomes, provide low cost options and improve faculty development.
The idea for e-textbooks came from the overlap taught in classes. Quoted in the same press release, Haley said, “There is roughly 80 percent overlap in concept coverage.
Professors can customize their e-texts by incorporating other ideas and examples in the form of appendices written by themselves and their colleagues.”
E-texts will give students the opportunity to have, on hand, their professors’ viewpoints and notes within the content.
“For me, I am a visual learner,” Abendschein said. “If I see something over and over again, it helps me. With this, I’ll be able to go back to my texts and do that.”
Oshkosh’s proposed e-texts will not require a publisher since that type of service will not meet the required goals within the proposal.
Due to the in-house nature of the future e-texts, it has the potential of savings students hundreds of dollars each semester.
“I think the program is definitely a step in the right direction and it’ll be exciting for future students who will have the opportunity to benefit from the program,” Arman said.
According to the grant proposal, major advantages to e-texts also include that they do not physically degrade, are easily updated and edited, are customized and they offer superior cost savings.
“Textbook costs are a leading concern among students,” Haley said. “Faculty, by way of the method outlined in the grant proposal, have the ability and incentive to alleviate this concern while improving the learning process.”
In the process of producing a proposal, a budget was devised as to how the money will be used.
A portion of the grant will be set aside for student and faculty evaluation. Since the program will first be implemented in Haley’s classroom, his future students will have the opportunity to participate in focus and evaluation groups.
These roles are highly important to the success of the project so those students will be paid for their efforts.
The University’s staff will conduct similar evaluations.
The prospective timeline for the new e-text program begins in January 2010. During this time, Haley will meet with professors Chad Cotti and Kevin McGee of Introductory Business and Economic Statistics (IBES).
They will detail the logistics of the core concepts for the prospective e-text. Afterwards they will recruit other College of Business (COB) professors to provide examples for an e-text.
The remainder of next semester requires further meetings between the COB and IBES professors along with refining the e-text and its exercises. The primary goal for spring 2010 semester is to finalize a rough draft of the first core-concepts e-text.
“Despite the recent budgetary difficulties impacting both students and faculty, there are professors aggressively seeking ways to preserve and improve the student experience,” Haley said.
Haley will begin using the e-text in his classroom and perform pre- and post-text assessments.
The next stages will begin in the 2011 spring semester, with continued evaluation followed by more classroom use.
If all goes well, the University will begin seeing a wider use of e-texts beginning the fall 2011 semester.
In regards to the timeline, Haley said, “It will be a large, cross-discipline effort to complete all the necessary tasks, but this grant offers all the needed contributors the opportunity and incentive to achieve the aforementioned student benefits.”
The concept of an alternative to textbook purchases came to the forefront last spring semester when Abendschein headed up committees to research rental programs.
Be the first to comment on this article!