LibGuides: Open News: October 2020

OpenStax at SVSU

This year, Saginaw Valley State University is participating in OpenStax’s Institutional Partner Program, joining a cohort of colleges and universities advocating for the use of affordable, open educational resources (or “OER”). SVSU was chosen to join the 2020-21 cohort of partner schools alongside eleven other colleges from around the country.

We’re excited to be able to bring our the SVSU community more information, support, and resources around OER use and adoption. If you are new to OER, check out OpenStax's information sheet that covers the basics of understanding and finding open resources. The partnership program also offers free access to OpenStax Tutor courseware for all students.

Let us know if you have any questions, and we look forward to sharing more OER training and resources with you throughout the year!

OpenStax Information Sheet

News

Three lessons COVID-19 has taught us about Open Access publishing

Robert Kiley, London School of Economics

Traditional publishing models – which lock content behind paywalls – are not fit for purpose.
Preprints and open publishing platforms have come of age
We can’t predict which research will be useful – so let’s make it all open access

Fixing the Broken Textbook Market, Second Edition

Cailyn Nagle and Kaitlyn Vitez, U.S. PIRG Education Fund

4,000 students across 80 institutions were surveyed in fall 2019 to see how high textbook costs affected them.

Key findings include:

63% of students have skipped buying or renting a book because of cost. (in 2014, it was 65%)
17% of students have skipped buying an access code because of cost.
90% of students were worried this would affect their grade.
Students are generally unaware of data collection and use by ed tech companies, ranking themselves a 2 on a scale of 1 to 10.