What is automatic textbook billing? Winni Zhang from SPARC explained that automatic textbook billing is usually through the bookstore or publishers and charge students automatically for use of textbooks. The SPARC Inclusive Access Working Group helped create the contract library that this Open Ed 2021 session described “A Look at the Fine Print Behind Automatic Textbook Billing.” The spreadsheet they showed was built by community members and the Inclusive Access Group. The spreadsheet now includes 70+ contracts and summarizes access restrictions, quotas, and other “fine print” information. The four types of contracts are bookstores, content delivery systems, consortiums, and publishers. Quotas refer to provisions in the contract for a minimum number of users, for example. The example Zhang showed was a 90% of users. There are print restrictions on the number of times a student can print, for example. Access restrictions, Zhang explained, can refer to the number of devices used to access per user. The discount structures in the contract are the fees per number of purchases. The example Zhang showed was a table provided by Cengage for inclusive access at Missouri State University. Zhang asked about whether institutions make a profit and if this is explained somewhere in the contracts. SPARC will continue requesting input and updating the resource they created.
A second ten-minute session I watched from Open Ed 2021 was entitled “What do Students Think? Student Perceptions of Open Textbooks at Private Institutions” and presented by Amanda Hurford and Erin Milanese from PALNI. The program is a consortium now funded by the Lilly Endowment to support faculty workshops and reviews, course redesign grants, and collect & analyze data. Their course redesign grants build on the workshops they offer. One of the requirements for the awardees of this grant is to deploy the Student Perception Survey. They use the LibWizard and have over 1300 responses from 17 institutions. Milanese explained that the survey focuses on the perception of quality from students. Overall, most students surveyed (91%) reported being satisfied with the quality of the zero-cost text. The highest rating was for text is understandable and the lowest was the visual appearance of the book. I found this intriguing. Most students reported that the zero-cost text made a positive difference to their grades. Milanese did mention that the survey did not collect demographic data, focusing only on age range. Hurford concluded that most students seemed happy with the OER. The survey is available and can be adapted. These two lighting talks were quick and intriguing. I want to continue learning about zero-cost textbooks and programs and work on a strategic plan with RLOE.
