DeKALB – What originally began as a group of faculty providing high-demand textbooks has expanded into a task force of librarians and staff working with professors to replace course materials with more affordable and accessible sources.

Dee Anna Phares is an assistant professor, librarian and original member of the Textbook Affordability Task Force when its main mission was to supply open textbooks for the student body in 2017.

“What we were doing was buying a print textbook from the highest enrollment and highest textbook cost courses and putting those on to our reserve at the library,” Phares said. “Certainly one of the things that we discovered is the kind of trade-offs that students are having to make – having to decide if they’re going to pay their rent or buy their course materials.”

The committee has since expanded to a second group launched in Spring 2021 called the Course Materials Affordability Task Force. A collaboration between the Center of Innovative Teaching and Learning and University Libraries, the group offers resource guides for professors and students to find free and inexpensive course resources.

The task force’s efforts have launched the “Affordable Course Designator” on MyNIU, a program that allows students to search and filter courses by materials, from zero cost to less than $40, before registration.

The Course Materials Task Force meets with different departments, discussing cheaper alternatives for required materials. Choices such as e-books and educational streaming sites are offered in a guide by Phares on the University Library page with unlimited access for use in classrooms.

Conversations with the English department have allowed Mark Van Wienen, an English professor, to offer his American poetry course as a “no-cost” text course because a majority of the poems have already been made freely available by the NIU library.

“We can copy up to 10% of the pages in each book and still fulfill our financial obligations to authors and editors, as defined by copyright law,” Van Weinen said. “So within this framework, it’s really about the individual professors – in collaboration with the librarians – figuring out how to get our students the readings.”

Similarly, Elyzia Powers, an educational psychology instructor, incorporates freely available texts for his EPS 406 development course due to the uniqueness of his topics and in consideration of his students.

“When it comes to talking about adolescent development, there may be some examples and excerpts from actual teens, but generally that perspective is lost,” Powers said. “Meanwhile, a podcast about teens being interviewed on their views about a variety of topics is a lot more informative and happens to be free.”