Incorporating Affordable Learning Solutions

From my experience as an undergraduate, I was unable to afford college textbooks.  I had to hope I could get access to textbooks in the university library, but that was not always possible as other students may have already borrowed the books.  Not to mention the additional time and effort it would take to simply go to the library, and yet you could still come back empty-handed.  As a result, a major part of my success in some college courses was dependent on how well the instructor covered the required material, the resources that the instructor provided, and how much the instructor aligned their instructional materials with their assessments.  It was not an ideal learning situation, but my finances dictated such an approach for several of my college classes.

As part the DISCOVERe tablet initiative at Fresno State, I have learned about California State University (CSU)'s Affordable Learning Solutions (AL$) program.  The purpose of CSU's AL$ is to reduce course costs through a variety of Open Educational Resources (OERs), so that more students can access the materials they need to be successful in their college courses.  Given my experience as an undergraduate, I knew AL$ was something I definitely wanted to take advantage of for the college courses I currently teach.

I was initially apprehensive about finding anything relevant for my courses, but I have been pleasantly surprised by the open-source, freely available resources for science courses.  For example, in my initial searches I found an Introductory Chemistry text that covers all the material in my General Chemistry course.  For my Physical Science class, I also found two Introductory Physics texts.  More recently, I was directed to the OER commons website that also includes many terrific resources for introductory science courses.

Now that I have found such resources, the question is how to incorporate them into my courses?  It is not an automatic transition, because there are already prescribed texts for the larger science courses I teach. These prescribed texts have been agreed on through previous instructor and department meetings, and book orders have already been placed for the academic year.  As a starter, I have provided the aforementioned OER resources to my students, but I have still noted the department prescribed text in my syllabus.  I have also moved my homework activities from a publisher website that comes with the prescribed text to Blackboard instead, which is free for students.  As such, students are not tied to the prescribed text unless they prefer to buy it. Therefore, each of my 200+ students can now save themselves $100-250 each semester.  As for the long-term, broader discussions are needed across instructors and the department to see how AL$ can be embedded more so that all students can benefit.