Photos by Kyle West

With tuition and living costs on the rise, obtaining a post-secondary education can be extremely costly. One of the higher costs of education are textbook fees; a first year life sciences student can expect to pay $825.15 in new textbooks.

To reduce the overall cost and increase the accessibility of post-secondary education, open educational resources were created.

OERs are any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license. They can be freely used, shared or adapted by anyone.

There are many benefits of open education. For students, the use of OERs can alleviate the stresses associated with exorbitant textbook costs.

In addition to cost-saving benefits, there are correlations between the use of OERs and higher grades, and the use of OERS and lower course withdrawal rates. Even more, accessible OERs can remove barriers for students with print disabilities.

The use of OERs also avoids the problems characteristic of traditional textbooks. Problems such as bundled content, use of access codes that control and limit access to material and the assignment of “updated” textbook editions made for the sole purpose of profit generation are resolved by the use of OERs.

With all the benefits, it begs the question why hasn’t McMaster University done more to push for OERs?

Recently, McMaster professor Catherine Anderson created the first open-access linguistics textbook with support from the university and a $15,000 grant from eCampusOntario’s open textbook initiative. While this is a great accomplishment, Anderson’s textbook is not enough to create open education on campus.

The McMaster Students Union has advocated for OERs in the past. Last year, they ran the #TextbookBroke campaign with the support of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance. This campaign aimed to encourage instructors to adopt OERs in efforts to address textbook affordability.

The 2018 McMaster University budget submission form also recommends that the university invest $50,000 to support professors in adopting or creating OERs that are specific to McMaster courses.

The document contains many suggestions for the university, moved forward by the MSU. However, in light of the recent changes to post-secondary education funding made by the Ford government, it is unclear if any of the MSU’s recommendations, let alone a $50,000 fund for OERs, will materialize.

But beyond advocacy efforts by the MSU, the university has yet to provide legitimate support for open education. According to Olga Perkovic, co-chair of the McMaster OER committee, the committee’s workings are not supported financially or with policy.

This is in contrast with Queen’s University, who are at the forefront of open education in Ontario. The OER committee at Queen’s is a top-down movement, that is, their provost specifically made open education a priority, which involved providing financial and infrastructural support.

According to the MSU budget submission, other Canadian universities including the University of Alberta, Simon Fraser University and the University of Calgary have thousands of dollars in funding allocated for OERs.  

McMaster ought to follow suit and prioritize open education for its students. To do so would mean to commit dedicated funds alongside time and efforts to ensure faculty members have the capacity to implement OERs in the classroom.

In the meantime, instructors can help support the open movement by using open materials in their courses whenever it is possible. There are many available collections of OERs for instructors to use. For example, the non-profit organization eCampusOntario hosts a provincially-funded open textbook library that carries hundreds of textbooks and other educational resources from a variety of disciplines.

Students can also support the open movement through discussing implementation of OERs with their instructors, uploading and encouraging their peers to upload their research onto McMaster’s institutional repository MacSphere and contacting the committee to recommend a president to ensure open education is a priority of the incoming president.

To stay up to date on the happenings of McMaster’s OER committee, the group’s meeting minutes are publicly available through McMaster LibGuides.   

 

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From Jan. 7 to 20, hundreds of McMaster students participated in #TextbookBroke, a campaign spearheaded by the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance aimed at addressing and opening dialogue about textbook affordability.

The McMaster Students Union ran the campaign alongside the McMaster University Campus Store, and asked students to tweet pictures of their textbook receipts using the hashtag, “#TextbookBroke”.

To address the rising costs of textbooks, OUSA proposes that faculty instructors adopt open educational resources, which are free, openly licensed or public domain online textbooks and course resources that they can develop, share and modify.

The #TextbookBroke campaign comes in the wake of a policy paper published by OUSA on Nov. 21, which was constructed following the provincial government’s increased funding for eCampusOntario, a non-profit organization which has pushed universities to adopt OERs.

The policy paper examines OERs and how the government should continue to work with eCampusOntario. It also proposes a number of recommendations for the Ontario government, such as the suggestion that university faculty members have the financial and infrastructural capacity to develop, use and review OERs.

At McMaster, Ryan Deshpande, MSU vice president (Education), aims to spark discussion about OERs amongst students and professors at the university.

“This is why we are holding events that explain OERs to students, and also provide them an opportunity to advocate to professors through letter-writing,” said Deshpande.

With MSU Advocacy, Deshpande organized an event called “Letters to Professors: OERs,” which was aimed at educating McMaster faculty members about OERs.

“I invited every instructor at McMaster to an event where the CEO of eCampusOntario, David Porter, delivered a presentation to educate instructors about the benefits of OERs,” said Deshpande, who is also interested in working with the McMaster University Faculty Association and the University Administration to incorporate OERs into McMaster’s Tenure Promotion Policy.

Yet advocating for the adoption of OERs is not the only effort the MSU is making to address textbook affordability.

According to Chukky Ibe, MSU president, the MSU is also working through the Undergraduate Council to make amendments to the Undergraduate Course Management Policy, which determines the structure course outlines and how instructors manage their classes.

As a result of these amendments, students will be able to see course outlines at least two weeks before classes begin.

“This will allow students to better select their courses, and understand what course materials we need before selecting our courses,” said Ibe. “Students will be able to see their course materials, and make better financial and academic choices based on

the timely release of the course outlines.”

The MSU has also been working to take control of “McMaster Used Textbook Sales [All Years]” a public Facebook group created by Rachelle Ireson, a McMaster alumna and Career Development Relationship Manager at the McMaster Faculty of Engineering.

Ireson created the group, which allows students to buy and sell used textbooks,

when she was in her second year at McMaster.

“The thing that was most frustrating for me was buying all these textbooks and then taking them back to the bookstore not being able to get anything for them really,” said Ireson. “I thought there must be a better way to recycle books between students.”

During Ireson’s undergraduate career, the Facebook group exploded in popularity.

Over the last few months, Ireson and Ibe have been working to transition the page to MSU Macademics, where monitoring the Facebook group will be built into the role of the Macademics Coordinator.

Overall, the MSU continues to work with community partners and administration to keep additional costs low for students.

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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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The consolidation of course materials into one sales location has caused long line-ups. Here students wait to check out after shopping at the Campus Store.

Eliza Pope/Assistant Photo Editor

Titles Bookstore is no more and the Tank is closed. The new incarnation is called the Campus Store, and it is being billed as the “one-stop shop for everything McMaster”. The new store is simultaneously consolidating and expanding.

Renovations this summer allowed for the expansion of the Campus Store to include an attached textbook selling location. In the process, the Tank was emptied and all course materials were moved to the main location.

While the changes are meant to improve both the variety in products and the efficiency of the operations, the new design is not without its drawbacks.

Students seeking textbooks must enter the store through a separate, tented entrance outside of Chester New Hall. Shoppers are not allowed to cross from the main store into the course materials store, but are permitted to go straight into the Campus Store after purchasing textbooks.

The lineup into the new textbook store has been long during the first week of classes, at times stretching from the tent outside of CNH to the University Hall arch. In past years, first year students bought their textbooks at Titles, while course materials for upper courses were sold at The Tank. Long lines are a mainstay for McMaster textbook seekers, but the new system creates a line that includes all students.

The Campus Store has now, more than Titles before it, increased its focus on McMaster-branded consumer goods and clothing.

Donna Shapiro, Director of the Campus Store said, “I think that the name, the Campus Store, can now appeal to more potential customers than Titles could”.

Shapiro says that the university marketplace has changed a lot in the past few years. Because of the introduction of eBooks and increased competition in book sales, Campus Store needed to alter its product offerings to meet the market demands of the McMaster community.

Less than six per cent of overall sales currently come from general books.

Clothes now occupy four separate sections of the store and will evidently be a sales focus for the store this year. The consolidated store offers an expanded selection of McMaster clothing and other merchandise.

“More students are purchasing McMaster crested merchandise than in the past. The profile of McMaster as well as the Marauders’ ongoing success has created an increased demand for the products being offered,” explained Shapiro.

In addition to McMaster wear, the store has expanded and updated its electronics section.

While expansion was a major focus of the store’s renovation, the Campus Store no longer has a post office. The continuing decline of the use of “snail-mail’, along with the changes in the OSAP process meant that a full-service postal operation became inefficient and obsolete.

Shapiro said that the post office lost money each year, citing an operation cost of over $90, 000 last year.

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