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After paying a couple grand for course enrollment per year, students have to dole out another hefty sum to purchase courseware. Many classes require textbooks, with midterm and exam questions being drawn from their pages. Reluctant to spend what is often upwards of $100 on a textbook that is likely to be only opened once or twice, students are forced to either forego the textbook marks or pay the cost and walk out of the campus store textbook in hand.
MSU President Ehima Osazuwa has been very vocal about his hope to reduce tuition, and now he turns his attention to the other major absorber of student funds: courseware.
“We tried to see if we can tackle the issue by having more courseware printed at Underground, because right now the majority of courseware is printed by the University and it is significantly more expensive than printing through Underground,” Osazuwa explained.
Printing through Underground, a full service media and design center located in the Student Center, would reduce costs per textbook by around $20 according to Osazuwa.
Ultimately, however, it is at the discretion of professors to decide to make the switch. The biggest challenge lies in incentivizing professors to print through Underground.
“We are trying to tackle the issue as a one-on-one relationship with the professors, especially those who teach big classes and have a lot of students.”
Implementing this philosophy is up to the President of VP Finance Daniel D’Angela as well as Underground employee Justin Barnes, whose goal has long been to increase courseware printing.
“Last year we ended up with $19,000 in sales from courseware, with the first semester making up only $3,000 of that portion,” said Osazuwa. He hopes that the increase will continue in the years to come.
Yet Osazuwa does not want to stop there. “The second thing was to make a Materials/Textbook Committee, because in my opinion the future of textbooks is online.”
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An agreement is in the works that would likely see an increase in student fees for Access Copyright, which licenses universities for copyrighted works, including course materials.
Although McMaster faculty and staff would also fall under the agreement, students would likely be absorbing the cost.
The agreement might also be redundant, given that court case precedent and the new federal Copyright Bill (Bill C-11) already offer similar protections.
“It is the University’s responsibility to provide academic materials,” said Huzaifa Saeed, McMaster Students Union’s VP (Education). He has been challenging University administration on the deal.
Under the previous agreement with Access Copyright, which expired in December of 2010, students were charged $3.80 each, plus $0.10 per courseware page. The new agreement would charge $26 a student and no per-page fee.
The elimination of the $0.10 per-page fee, though, does not necessarily mean a decrease in courseware prices, as the University could continue charging the same amount for course materials.
The agreement would also add restrictions on how students can save and share academic materials.
It appears clear at this point that the University intends to sign the deal, but the details are unclear.
Other universities have chosen different options. Some are choosing not to download the extra cost onto students, while others have refused an agreement altogether, setting up individual agreements with publishers directly, which has been much cheaper for them.
Peter Smith, McMaster’s Vice-President (Academic) and acting Provost, was unavailable for comment.
