E-books gain popularity at Florida colleges

TALLAHASSEE — Florida universities are taking the first steps toward expanding the use of electronic textbooks and other material, hoping to bring significant savings to students who spend hundreds of dollars each semester on traditional textbooks.

The Florida Board of Governors, which oversees the university system, approved a 2018-19 budget request last week that includes a $656,000 program to encourage the greater use of so-called “eTexts” and other open educational resources instead of standard textbooks.

It may take some time to replicate the experience of the University of Indiana, a leader in the use of eTexts. That school reported last spring that its students saved an estimated $3.5 million in the 2016-17 academic year by using eTexts instead of textbooks.

But Joseph Glover, provost at the University of Florida, who is part of a group coordinating innovation and online programs among the universities, said the expanded use of eTexts and other open-source material “is a great opportunity for really substantial savings for our students.”

He said the Indiana experience “demonstrates that with a solid program and a sustained effort promoting the adoption, that over the course of a decade, you are going to end up saving the students literally millions of dollars per year.”

In a survey of 22,000 students at Florida’s 12 universities and 28 state colleges, the Florida Virtual Campus reported 53 percent of the students spent more than $300 in the spring 2016 semester on textbooks, with about 18 percent reporting they spent more than $500.

Faced with those costs, students have found other ways to deal with the financial burden, including buying used textbooks and renting textbooks.

And Jennifer Smith, director of the UF Office of Faculty Development and Teaching Excellence, said individual universities have already embarked on pilot programs intended to cut textbook costs.

At UF, she said the school negotiated a 43 percent discount off book publishers’ list prices for textbooks used in 79 freshman-level courses last fall. The discount saved the students an estimated $941,000, she said.

At Florida State University, an “alternative textbook” program will save students some $41,000 over the course of this academic year, Smith said.

“When we can populate this across the entire [system] and expand these programs, I think we will see significant savings with actually a relatively low outlay of costs,” she told the board’s Innovation and Online Committee.

The budget proposal would set aside $656,000 to create a “catalog” where professors and other instructors, as they are developing their courses, will find open-source material as well as eTexts where lower prices have been negotiated with the publishers, Glover said.

He also said a review process will be set up to assure the materials in the catalog are “high quality” and meet the universities’ educational standards.

“This is important because a problem in the past has been that resources available in the system repository have been of a mixed quality, which the faculty found frustrating and which caused them not to use it as much,” Glover said.