The title of this mini-conference session wasn’t as apt as its description, but it did give me a handful of ideas about how we need to reframe our approach to textbooks in higher education.

Institutions and individual departments need to better take on the work of creating and curating materials for their students. We have to stop relying on faculty, who are already overburdened with their own issues and troubles, from passing the textbook and learning materials burdens on to their students. By inter-mediating themselves into the natural market between publishers and the students who buy those materials, they’re allowing their laziness in requiring specific textbooks and supplementary materials, many of which either aren’t actively used in many courses or which students don’t/can’t use even when they’re assigned, to allow the publishers to dramatically overcharge for their services. 

By simply going from a required textbook(s) to a list of ten or more recommended resources with a variety of price points would completely obliterate the gouging we see in big publishing, particularly in the largest lecture classes. Layering OER efforts on top of this will help even further.