Cheap textbooks from Rice’s Open Stax bring students $8.2 million in savings
Nonprofit goes beyond Houston in encouraging use of resources
Pricey college textbooks add hundreds of dollars to hefty higher education costs each semester.
But a Rice University initiative, now in its fifth year, is chipping away at those expenses — and its reach has extended far beyond Houston.
Eleven colleges and universities said their students would save more than $8 million in the coming academic year shortly after partnering with OpenStax, the Rice-based nonprofit that publishes reducedprice textbooks, according to a Rice news release.
OpenStax publishes textbooks for popular introductory college courses, including American government, biology, microeconomics and sociology. Nearly 2 million students at 3,800 colleges, universities and high schools use these books, according to the university.
The nonprofit joined with 11 institutions last summer — including the Alamo Colleges district based in San Antonio — and projected the partnership would save students $4.2 million in the 2017-18 academic year. The campuses nearly doubled that estimate, reporting $8.2 million in savings.
Nicole Finkbeiner, OpenStax’s associate director for institutional relations, said participating campuses regularly talked on conference calls, working through questions of implementation at their schools.
One question several schools faced, she said, was how to encourage open educational resources like OpenStax and Creative Commons among faculty while preserving academic freedom, the concept faculty members can control what’s in their classrooms.
“(Professors) are the experts on what is going to work best for their teaching style and what is going to work best for their students,” Finkbeiner said. “We never mandate, we never say you have to, we ask them to consider it.”
Rice said last fall that more than 1.5 million college students had used an OpenStax textbook since 2012.
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