Due to both the increasing shift towards campus-wide contrasts for automatic billing by publishers and the growth of OER, higher education administrators are increasingly drawn into discussions of textbook strategy. What do provosts/chief academic officers value when it comes to textbooks? Much OER survey work so far has focused on faculty. The United States Public Interest Research Group (USPIRG) has put together the first large national survey of provosts about their views of textbook affordability, OER, and automatic billing.
Our session will have a presentation of the survey results. We will break data down by type of higher education institution (such as urban vs. rural, and two-year vs. four year) and highlight any meaningful differences. We will also provide a synthesis of how we think these results can help inform the open community’s approach to scaling OER. We will leave a few minutes at the end for questions and follow-up.
Learning Outcomes: * Understand what provosts value in textbooks (commercial and open) * Formulate patterns of outreach and marketing to provosts from off-campus commercial vendors, on-campus actors, and open advocates * Understand which stakeholders are perceived as the most influential in textbook decisions * Develop talking points and messaging tips to engage higher education leaders
Kaitlyn serves as the Student PIRGs' lobbyist on Capitol Hill, working on campaigns to make college more affordable and protect student loan borrowers. She has been a leading voice for students in opposition to access codes, the Cengage-McGraw Hill merger, and automatic textbook billing... Read More →
