At the start of this semester, Library Student Council surveyed students in Shannon, Clemons and Brown libraries. We displayed posters welcoming students to share how much they paid for textbooks and how they felt about the amount they paid by placing stickers on a graph. The stickers were labeled for feelings about their textbook costs — either good, okay or bad. Most feelings, regardless of cost? “Bad.” But why?
At the beginning of each semester, students across Grounds receive emails from the UVA Bookstore, alerting them that one or more of their courses will be using an Inclusive Access model. The University Bookstore site describes the program as a collaborative effort between the UVA Bookstores, faculty and publishers to provide digital academic materials to students at a low cost. In practice, when professors use Inclusive Access materials in their courses, students are automatically opted in, which has been criticized by the Department of Education for lacking transparency. If the students do not opt out of the program before the add-drop deadline, the cost of the materials is charged to their account.
On the surface, this seems to be a fairly straightforward and helpful method for accessing educational materials. Students do not have to worry about searching for the least expensive textbook option, and they can access their textbook on any device, from anywhere. Professors can select textbooks which include pre-programmed coursework, or ancillaries, lightening their grading responsibilities. This appearance gives a fooling impression that Inclusive Access is the cheapest, best option for students, when in reality, the program is misleading in cost, accessibility and privacy.
But this representation of Inclusive Access is, unfortunately, not the full story. These materials are not “the lowest cost” for students. They are only lower than the price of newest textbooks sold directly from the publishing company. In fact, they are often more expensive than secondhand textbooks. As long as the price of Inclusive Access materials is less than the publisher-set price, booksellers can still claim the “lowest cost” label. Additionally, Inclusive Access includes a slightly less expensive “rent” option, where students can pay to rent electronic access to the textbook for the semester. In those cases, students lose access to the educational text they paid for and are unable to recoup any textbook cost through later sale. No longer can textbooks be passed on to their peers in the used textbook market.
Inclusive Access materials are not a clear-cut cheap option despite being advertised as such. Oftentimes, used textbooks are much cheaper than Inclusive Access texts. Additionally, the used textbook market benefits students by allowing us to make back some of the money spent on textbooks and providing other students with cheaper copies. It gives students greater choice in the textbook market and has historically functioned to make higher education more affordable. Inclusive Access texts — especially when they include mandatory pre-programmed coursework that cannot be reused — are wiping out the used textbook market by preventing students from reselling or passing along texts after a semester has ended.
There are other hidden costs to Inclusive Access. If students choose to “opt-out” during the privacy statement, they lose access to the content entirely. But not agreeing to the privacy statement leaves them vulnerable to data mining they might not be aware of. Each publisher can scrape reader usage data — things like frequency and time of textbook use, reading speed, screen clicks, annotations and quiz answers. Depending on the publisher and its privacy policy, this data can be provided to professors, used for product development and sold to other companies along with your identifying information. As students ourselves, we feel that most of our peers are not aware that they are signing away their rights to data privacy.
In response to Inclusive Textbook models, other universities have started to adopt Open Educational Resources, or OERs. The Open Education movement has been gaining steam since the early 2000s, and it is well positioned to take on predatory models of learning. An OER can be a number of things, like a textbook or collaborative project, typically published under an open copyright license. They are defined by the 5 R’s — retaining the right to make, own and control copies, reusing the content, revising the content, remixing the content and redistributing copies. OERs are an exciting, free option for professors and students.
Many OERs already exist for a variety of topics and more are being created, expanded upon and improved every day. Students can learn more about Inclusive Access, tell the University’s leadership their concerns and demand more answers about how their data is being used. Instructors can strive to be more open and decisive about how they are using the data collected from their students. If you are a professor using Inclusive Access materials in your courses who would like to be more transparent with your students about the data being collected during their textbook use, you can include statements such as these explaining your data viewing policy on your syllabi.
All of us can get involved in the OER movement, encouraging our university community to promote more open, accessible and affordable materials and suggesting our instructors be transparent about data collection. Everyone at the University has the power to advocate for a more effective and affordable education.
Susannah Baker, Chloe Fridley and Brighton Lieu are Chairs of the Library Student Council. They can be reached at opinion@cavalierdaily.com.
The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of The Cavalier Daily. Columns represent the views of the authors alone.
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