Open source program to save U of R students $1.5M

As university students head back to class, they’ll be shelling out big bucks for textbooks — sometimes costing hundreds of dollars each — but a program funded by the provincial government is aiming to get that number lower.

For the past five years, the Government of Saskatchewan has given grants to the universities of Regina and Saskatchewan as well as Sask Polytechnic to develop open education resources.

Those are textbooks and support materials like workbooks and labs that are created by professors and researchers at the schools for use in classes by their students, for free.

Each school has received about $83,000 a year since 2015.

In the first three years of the program, there were six major projects developed at the U of R including a Cree textbook that was supplemented with a workbook and audio labs, a financial empowerment textbook, and a nursing textbook.

Nilgun Onder of the U of R said because the textbooks are open, they can also be used by others.

“Some other institutions have also adapted these textbooks and they are using them in their programs, especially the nursing textbook, for example. It is being used by some instructors at SaskPoly, at the U of S, and … there is interest from universities (in) other countries as well,” explained Onder.

Onder said the work is open and that means, as long as they give credit to the original authors, others can change and adapt the textbooks to fit their needs.

“That’s the beauty of these open education resources: They can be revised to better suit an instructor’s teaching and also the needs of their students,” Onder said.

Onder said the U of R, for example, is paying significant attention to Indigenous content in its work, making a point of including Indigenous perspectives and examples in the textbooks.

The point of the projects is to help make education more affordable for students. The textbooks are provided free for them and they can be printed off or used as e-books.

Onder said the U of R has a rough estimate that, over the next five years, the program will save students at that school about $1.5 million. A news release from the provincial government said, with the resources developed so far in the program, it’s expected to save current and future students about $6.4 million.

And Onder said the resources being developed are quality.

“Although these resources are free of charge, you don’t pay for them, these are peer-reviewed textbooks. The textbooks and other open education resources the university published are all peer-reviewed resources. In other words, they are reliable and credible,” said Onder.

On Tuesday, the provincial government announced the continuation of the funding for the 2019-20 school year.

The U of R has more projects in the works with the continued funding, including a qualitative research methodology textbook, and an introductory physics textbook.

“These will be major textbooks, especially the physics one, because many students are enrolled in first-year physics courses at the university, so we expect that they will save a significant amount of money for students,” said Onder.