010: Text Book Costs & Open Texts

Solutions for Higher Education with Southern Utah University President Scott L Wyatt

Quotes:

"about 70% choose not to buy a textbook or textbooks in at least one of their classes each term. Now that’s huge. That means they’re adopting a cost saving measure that they know is going to cost them in grades"

"the average cost for a textbook in the state of Utah is $105 dollars. Now, that’s all the way from entering freshman to seniors"

"We do these surveys all the time here about, “Why did you leave? Why did you drop out or why haven’t you completed?” And we always get the same leading answer, which is, finances. It’s cost. "

"open texts have a way of mitigating the cost without sacrificing either the quality or the content."

"you can get as on-demand print copies. So rather than having to print 50,000 copies and then recoup the cost that way, you can simply print the number of copies you need"

"we’re looking course-by-course to see what we can replace, what commercial texts we can replace with an open text"

"Our goal is always to help students learn... And in order to do that, we need to make the experience better, reduce the cost, get more materials in front of students instead of less."

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