Maryland University eliminates textbook costs for students
This academic year marked the start of a program whereby an undergraduate education at the University of Maryland University College no longer comes with any textbook costs for students, and by next year, the program will also be offered at graduate level. Campus Technology reports the shift to free course materials began in 2013, when faculty members and librarians looked at learning objectives for each course and how they could be met using open source materials, later uploading the content to a database and linking to it from the school’s learning management system for easy student access. The university has absorbed some costs necessitated by gaps in open educational resources and has found improved learning opportunities through the new model as content can be updated from one course to another, based on student feedback.

Open Educational Resources

How to Go Textbook Free

The University of Maryland University College is the largest institution in the country to go "commando" on textbooks. As of this academic year undergraduates don't have to lug them around or spend a dime on them — and the benefits don't end there. Here's how UMUC achieved an amazing goal.

If you're waiting for the day when open educational resources (OER) have truly arrived on campus in a big way, you're late to class. As of fall 2015, the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) no longer expects any undergraduate to spend money on textbooks. By next fall, the same will be true for its graduate students. The conservative estimate of savings for the university's 84,000 students is somewhere north of $10 million per year. And more importantly, the university has reason to believe that student learning is improving under the new strategy.

Figuring out how to develop the curriculum for use in more than 700 individual courses wasn't as simple as taking existing OER textbooks with Creative Commons licenses and "chopping" them into pieces, said Matt Prineas, vice provost and dean of the Undergraduate School. Because no model really existed for what the university was undertaking, it had to figure out its own process.

Course Outcomes and Objectives

Although the widespread shift to free curriculum officially started in 2013, the groundwork was laid three years earlier when the mostly online university revised its undergraduate programs to be "outcomes-based," according to Prineas. In all of its courses, the school first identified program-level outcomes and then the objectives that mapped to those outcomes.

As Prineas explained, that "curricular transformation" encompassed not just the curriculum but also the length of the term, which shrank from 16 weeks to eight weeks. As a result faculty couldn't think about this shift as taking a "certain body of content" and "jamming it into eight weeks." They had to reconsider their courses in terms of the learning objectives for each. A natural outcome was a re-examination of the content, projects and assessments would best allow them to teach the learning objectives.

What the university didn't realize at the time was that the work begun in 2010 "set us up perfectly for our task in 2013," noted Prineas. "When you don't have a textbook, what do you do? If you have defined learning objectives for every course, that gives you a framework for making choices about materials."

The Work Team Approach

The faculty model at UMUC is to maintain a very small full-time faculty ("a little over a hundred," Prineas said) and a sizable group of adjunct faculty ("several thousand"), people with both academic backgrounds and experience in the fields they're teaching — "scholar practitioners" in UMUC parlance. While individual courses are sometimes taught by the full-timers, for the most part their responsibility is to "manage and design and do quality control" of the programs.

The curriculum transition exploited that model. To find and prepare digital content that would mesh with learning objectives for each course, UMUC typically used a team approach with four roles: instructional designers, librarians, a subject-matter expert (one of those scholar-practitioners) and a program chair or full-time faculty member who understood how the course fit into the program as a whole.

Prepping the Curriculum

The content development process would begin with a discovery phase, wherein librarians helped identify "a whole suite of possible materials" for each learning objective. "That was challenge at the beginning," noted Prineas. "In some disciplines it's a natural fit because there are so many resources out there and it's dynamic. In others there was a sense of, where do you even begin?"

Then the subject-matter expert would work with the materials and make decisions about what was appropriate for the course.