Students at all ten campuses of the University of Hawaii system will soon be able to make more informed decisions about the courses they take than ever before. Beginning in Spring 2019 semester for some campuses, and Fall 2019 for all campuses, instructors will now easily be able to give their courses a “TXT0” attribute to indicate that the course has adopted an Open Educational Resource textbook or moved to using only free resources. Marking of courses to indicate their being textbook-free or OER based has been an ad-hoc effort at various campuses for the last couple of years, but now a standardized technical implementation will be available to all instructors in all sections of a course.
In an age where OER textbooks are available for most high-enrollment undergraduate courses, students will now be able to identify the instructors and departments shifting toward cost-free resources. A 2017 survey on the impact of textbook costs for students at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM) campus was consistent with the findings of similar regional and national surveys: students make poor academic decisions based on the cost of textbooks. According to the survey, more than eighty percent of students have skipped buying a required textbook for a course, with nearly two thirds of those students acknowledging it would affect their performance in the course. Additionally, nearly seventy percent of students indicated that the cost of textbooks for a course would determine their taking that course, with more than twenty percent of students reporting having withdrawn from a course due to the cost of textbooks and materials. Both on its face and in the long-term, this new ability to mark courses as having no textbook cost will surely allow students to make better decisions about the courses they take.
Class Availability with TXT0 marking at Honolulu Community College / Carol Hasegawa
Hawaii joins Texas, Washington, and a growing list of states that have enabled zero-textbook cost marking in course listings, many of them having done so in a response to legislation that required such action.
This move will also enable institutional research to understand how lowering barriers to instructional materials affects student success more broadly. A growing body of research is seeking to answer this question, and early signals suggest that student success is generally noted to be at same level or higher level when OER and/or zero-cost materials are used in instruction as opposed to traditional costly materials. How this shift towards students making enrollment decisions based on marking for OER and zero textbook-cost courses is yet to be seen, but we are optimistic about students making better-informed enrollment decisions.
Contact oer@hawaii.edu with questions.