LCC takes aim at pricey textbooks, offers free course materials

LANSING - Hundreds of Lansing Community College students won't have to worry about selling plasma or their video game consoles to afford textbooks this fall.

For many of the college's biggest classes, the course materials will be free.

Instead of traditional textbooks, LCC students in courses ranging from Human Growth and Development to Introduction to Psychology will use what are called open educational resources — texts and lessons that are freely available online and openly licensed.

Sixty-one professors will teach 24 courses representing 127 sections using open educational resources this fall, according to Regina Gong, a librarian and open educational resources project manager at LCC. That's up from just five professors in 2015.

“It really is a grassroots initiative, and each semester our faculty adoption numbers keep on increasing," Gong said.

Assuming each student saves $100 when a class with an assigned textbook replaces it with free materials, Gong said the total savings for LCC students since 2015 will surpass $1 million by the end of the fall semester.

Paul Ospital, an LCC student studying radiation technology, welcomes more textbook-free options. He and his fellow Phi Theta Kappa members are will be talking to students and professors about open educational resources to raise awareness and hopefully increase the number of textbook-free classes. Phi Theta Kappa is an honors society for community college students.

Every textbook-free class reduces the financial barrier to education for community college students, Ospital said.

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“Things get piled up too much on students, especially with mandatory prerequisites,” Ospital said.

Ospital has previously bought books used only for a chapter or two during an entire semester. He's also bought books never used by the professor during lessons.

LCC’s curbing of traditional textbooks reduces the cost for incoming students who have to take introductory courses before moving on to higher end classes, Gong said.

“The success of our OER initiative depends on letting faculty adopt OER on their own,” Gong said, adding that the college isn’t forcing faculty to adopt free resources.

“We respect academic freedom and choice, but it’s still our hope to turn all sections of at least the top 10 high enrollment courses into using OER,” Gong said.

By next year, Gong hopes to have 70 professors using open educational resources in their classes.

Mang Sung, a business management student at LCC, said she’s looking forward to having more options for textbook-free classes. She took an economics class last year that used open educational resources rather than requiring a conventional textbook and said it was “perfectly fine.”

“All the pages line up with the professor’s copy making it easy to follow along,” Sung said.

Among the first professors at the college to adopt open educational resources was Mark Kelland, who now serves as the President of LCC’s Academic Senate.

Six years ago, Kelland was commissioned by a textbook publisher to write a personality psychology book. After that deal fell through, Kelland decided to make the textbook he’d written freely available online. He wrote a second free online psychology textbook while on sabbatical last year.

“More and more people are becoming intrigued now,” Kelland said of open educational resources. “There’s been a bit of a groundswell of people getting interested, and it’s easier now to find good material.”

In addition to more traditional textbook-free classes, Lansing Community College has made significant changes related to textbooks in recent years.

In December of 2015, LCC rolled out a new version of its popular Federal Aid Book Voucher Program. Students were no longer able to buy textbooks wherever they wanted with college money and get reimbursed once their loans came in. Instead, students were limited to buying new textbooks from LCC's chosen vendor - MBS Textbook Exchange Inc.

Gibson's University Bookstore, a longtime neighbor of LCC's, sued in January of 2016, arguing the policy would cost the locally owned bookstore $700,000 annually

The lawsuit was eventually dropped, and the book store closed for good in May.

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The two biggest hurdles for the adoption of free online material – a perceived lack of supplemental material such as PowerPoints and limited offerings for some subjects – are being lowered faster and faster each year, Kelland said.

“More and more people are able to say, 'Yes, that material is out there. You just need to keep looking,'” he said.

For an LCC student paying about $309 for a psychology class where the textbook new costs $150, open educational resources represent significant savings, Kelland said.

Moving forward, LCC is working to finalize its first Z degree in psychology – a degree obtainable with zero textbook costs. It’s just the start, according to Kelland.

“Five years from now I’d expect lots of Z degree options.”

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Contact RJ Wolcott at (517) 377-1026 or rwolcott@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @wolcottr.