Cost

• The first application of an open textbook in one of our courses was met with approval from students, as they voted with their feet in large numbers to follow the less expensive option
• Cost for starters.
• Yes. It reduces costs because they aren’t buying expensive course materials.
• There is the time needed to create/adapt/ maintain them.
• Cost of building the infrastructure to create and support them – e.g., software costs to create the OER; technical infrastructure to organize and store them.
• Yes. The time for the OER creators and organizers.
• Definitely…lower cost,
• Helping to make education affordable,
• Yes…your time to find and adapt OER. Time to plan and make OER. Time to revise OER based on feedback received. Consensus and open processes could take longer and one has to be willing to receive input from others.
• My two introductory on-line sociology courses have been recently rewritten to use a new OER Ontro to Sociology textbook. One of the original textbooks for these two courses was extremely expensive, about $150 for the whole book, although the publisher’s custom book for the course was probably somewhat cheaper. The book for the other course was reasonably priced, but still, the OER book is free to students removing one level of financial impediment to access to education. This was incredibly time consuming and not really properly paid work.
• The amount of work it took to revise the textbook to make it a suitable resource.
• It’s free.
• I rewrote the original American OER textbook, replacing the American information and perspective with Canadian material. Tried different methods, from complete revision to produce as close as possible the ideal introductory textbook chapter on a certain topic (very time consuming, exceeding budget by a large margin), to quick and dirty, holding nose, style of just changing the information and place references (faster but unsatisfactory product), to revising using a mini-crowd-sourcing, student-author, collective process to rewrite a chapter (see #3). The latter was more satisfying, produced better results than the quick and dirty approach, but was also involved an incredibly time consuming editorial process to plan, manage and work on revisions (not to mention the time put in by individual students).
• The hidden cost of the OER textbook that I worked on is the cost involved in the labour of revising and rewriting the material. In my case, there was a budget for the 1st Canadian edition, which seemed sufficient when I signed the contract, but was not when the work of making a quality textbook was tallied. Similarly for the 2nd edition, the cost of revision exceeded the budget allotted for the labour. The point is, that there are costs upfront for the writing and revision of these books. A model is needed to figure out how these initial costs can be covered adequately, as well as for the ongoing and future process of revision and improvement.
• free
• students love it. It’s free!
• more work than anticipated (exam banks, etc)
• FREE! … huge impact on students
• OTB allow us to respond to cost issues
• if students use OTB in 3 courses, then the 4th course is free (25% tuition reduction)
• students can focus more because they don’t have to work…1 course = 20 hours of work to pay for tuition
• not only cost, students spend time working rather than studying. If working hours are reduced, then students have more time to study and earn better grades. OTB are an opportunity to do reduce time spent doing other things
• ‘free’ represents many other things
• No. It’s more work for me.
• there is a cost for everything
• OER are not free, just a different payer
• BC Gov’t —$5million
• libraries have to do different work
• costs are absorbed elsewhere (librarians, instructional designers, instructional support)
• producers invest emotional capital in their work and that personal investment makes it difficult to release CC
• digital media are costly to produce
• love that its free! Great delight
• commercial materials more organized
• costs student effort to attend to being engaged