Publishers Share Views in CAMEX Panel

Executives from six of the largest college textbook publishers offered their thoughts in a panel discussion at NACS’ Campus Market Expo (CAMEX) 2018 in Dallas, TX.

Ashley Gordon, a digital content strategist and founder of Mockingbird Publishing, moderated the discussion, sponsored by Cengage.

On the future of academics and course materials:

“There will be continued movement to digital,” said Scott Virkler, chief product officer, McGraw-Hill Education, “and pressure on schools to show outcomes.”

“I believe print will be around for some time to come. For a lot of students, that still makes a lot of sense,” said Mike Wright, vice president and director of sales, W.W. Norton & Co.

“The student consumer will have more choice” but will expect materials to directly contribute to their personal and professional success, said Tim Stookesberry, senior vice president, education, Wiley.

On ways publishers can work with campus bookstores to build stronger relationships with faculty:

“Stores have so much knowledge about students, you could help faculty make the best decision about what materials to adopt” and which format options are available, said Cheryl Costantini, vice president, content strategy, Cengage.

“Help faculty in understanding affordability. Faculty don’t care where students get materials and sometimes think students are getting a better deal,” said Bill Franck, senior vice president of sales, nursing and allied health, Elsevier-Health Sciences.

On ways to sustain inclusive access (programs that provide digital materials as part of a course fee):

“Be willing to change and adapt,” said Nik Osborne, senior vice president, strategy and business, Pearson. “We’re looking for opportunities to grow. By starting early together we can build out roles for each to play.”

Pros and Cons of Inclusive Access

More colleges and universities are offering inclusive-access programs for course materials because they see the model as ensuring wins for many involved.

Students get their course materials at discounted prices on the first day of class, making instructors happy. Publishers are guaranteed 100% sell-through for offering significant discounts on the content, which provides institutions with a way to show they are keeping costs in check. There’s also a role for the campus store because they have established relationships with all the parties involved—faculty, publishers, and students—and have the means to handle the transactions.

However, not everyone sees it as the best or only option.

Proponents of open educational resources view inclusive access as a model that just replicates the same publishing structures that led to rising textbook prices in the first place. Some faculty members also see inclusive access as an academic-freedom issue, limiting their choices on content to just one publisher.

“I do think it is likely that traditionally published content will continue to be used at colleges and universities, although whether or not it is through inclusive access remains to be seen,” said Nicole Allen, director of open education for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. “Textbook publishers have been through many iterations of models for proprietary digital content—it is hard to know how long any one will last.”

The 2017 Textbook Affordability Conference is Nov. 10-12 at Georgia Tech. Updates from the conference will be posted on Twitter using the hashtag #TAC2017Ignite.

Where Course Materials Go from Here

Digital formats, adaptive learning, access codes, inclusive access, student user analytics, custom products—the world of higher-education course materials has changed a lot in recent years. What’s next?

A panel of publishing representatives will discuss their views on the evolution of course materials and what tomorrow’s textbook is likely to encompass during the Course Materials eXperience track as part of the 2017 Campus Market Expo (CAMEX) in Salt Lake City, UT, March 3-7. CAMEX is produced by NACS.

Just how course materials can best support student success is a critical component of the discussion, not just for colleges and universities, but also for academic publishers that are encountering dwindling revenues due to declining enrollments, faculty adopting open resources, piracy of textbook content, and other factors.

Moderated by Ashley Gordon, academic resource strategic for NACS, the panel will feature Robin Baliszewski, managing director, higher education sales in North America, Pearson Education; Peter Cohen, president, U.S. K-12 and higher education, McGraw-Hill; Scott Smith, president, Elsevier Education; Kevin Stone, chief sales and marketing officer, Cengage Learning; and Tim Stookesberry, senior vice president, education, Wiley.

Also during the Course Materials eXperience, a second panel will discuss the new role of course materials on campus from various perspectives. Moderated by Mark Palmore, senior vice president, sales, Nebraska Book Co., that panel will include Imelda May, digital and course materials manager, Simon Fraser University Bookstores, Burnaby, BC, Canada; Greg Fenton, CEO and co-founder, RedShelf; and Allyson Mower, head of scholarly communication and copyright, University of Utah Marriott Library, Salt Lake City, UT.

Lulu Dives into Academic Publishing

Self-publishing, print-on-demand, and distribution company Lulu Press Inc. recently entered the educational market with its launch of Glasstree, an online publishing platform for academic and scholarly works.

Characterizing current commercial academic publishing as a broken model, Lulu hopes Glasstree will address “critical pain points” in the market by fostering more transparent pricing, speeding up product time to market, and allowing authors to see up to 70% of the profit from sales of their works.

Glasstree offers a menu of services and tools for authors, including traditional peer review and support for open access to works through a partnership with Creative Commons.

Syllabus Databases Assist Course Creators

When faculty start developing new courses, they often want to know how other professors have structured similar courses and what textbooks they’re using. Likewise, textbook authors are keen to find out who has adopted their works for classes.

The Open Syllabus Project (OSP), a new database with three million course syllabuses, is designed to help both groups, and possibly also aid textbook publishers to better understand the ways in which faculty use course materials for teaching. OSP, set to open in January 2017, isn’t the first of its kind, according to an article in Nature, but it will be the largest to date.

Another database, Open Syllabus Explorer, launched in early 2016 with plans to expand its inventory next year to three million syllabuses cross-referenced with 150 million texts. Both databases can be searched in a number of ways: by academic field, textbook author, institution, and other criteria.

For now, there are limitations to these databases. They hold just a fraction of the estimated 80 million to 120 million syllabuses in the U.S. because at present they can only access syllabuses posted on public websites. Those stored in a school’s learning management system, for instance, aren’t accessible. Although a search can show which textbooks are most widely used in a particular field, the results can’t be filtered by subfields.

The team working on the OSP database also hope it will give faculty who write textbooks and other course materials a chance to promote themselves more by revealing the extent to which their published work is used in other classrooms.

Benefits of Digital Course Materials

A survey by publisher Pearson found that most faculty members view digital course materials as beneficial for their students. Nearly 80% of educators reported that students were helped by using more digital in the classroom, while 70% said the switch from print to digital was important or very important to them personally.

The report also noted that 87% of instructors and 86% of administrators said they believe digital learning is “important in resolving challenges facing the education system.” In the survey, 56% of educators said that more than half of the course materials they now use are digital and 82% have used at least one digital learning product in the past six months.

The majority of students (57%) continue to report they prefer using printed materials to study, but nearly the same amount said they would like to be able to access learning materials online. Most students (57%) said it’s the responsibility of the institution to help them make the shift to digital.

“There is growing recognition of the broad-range benefits—for students, faculty, and institutions—provided by digital learning,” Tom Malek, senior vice president of partnerships at Pearson, said in a news release. “Institutional leaders have an opportunity to further explore how digital can provide a rich, more personalized learning experience for students, while lowering the cost of course materials and providing new insights and data for faculty.”

Not All OA Publishers Are the Same

An avenue around traditional subscription-based publishing probably sounds like a good idea to many faculty members. The problem is that not all scholarly open-access (OA) publishing firms are equal.

That’s where Jeffrey Beall can help. Beall, academic librarian at Auraria Library, University of Colorado, Denver, has created a list of publishers that he feels do not meet sufficient standards and a blog to spread the word. The list is very long, with more than 120 companies listed as “questionable, scholarly open publishers” in the “A” section alone.

“Too many open-access advocates think that because OA is not a problem for them personally, they’re not a problem at all,” Beall told Inside Higher Education last October. “This is absolutely not true. Research published in predatory journals is polluting the entire scholarly publishing ecosystem.”

Beall’s list is updated regularly and the criteria for inclusion are about as long as the list of publishers.

“Unfortunately, the pressure to publish in the academic system is liable to keep scholars eagerly looking for outlets,” British poet Paul St. John Mackintosh wrote in a post for TeleRead. “Said scholars, however, would be well advised to look over the criteria for Beall’s list and the list itself. Clearly, not all open is good.”

UF Researcher Articles Easier to Access

The University of Florida, Gainesville, is working with publisher Elsevier to make it easier to find the research articles it produces every year. The institution recently launched a pilot that links its repository of scholarly works with ScienceDirect, the Elsevier online journal and e-book catalog.

The pilot allows the university to store journal article searches on ScienceDirect and make them available automatically. Users can now search the university repository and find links to more than 31,000 articles that have appeared in Elsevier journals, according to a report in Inside Higher Education.

“The nice thing about this pilot is it opens up the repository,” said Alicia Wise, director of access and policy for Elsevier. “Rather than being the end destination, it’s part of the fabric of interconnected platforms.”

The university is pursuing similar partnerships with other publishers and wants to expand the current pilot to increase access for users who aren’t subscribers. It would also like to be able to allow all users to view some text of published articles.

Not everyone is as excited about the pilot. A group of university librarians and press directors said the partnership essentially turns the institutional repository into “discovery layers for commercialized content,” according to another Insider Higher Ed report.

Digital Sales Are No. 1

Some of the largest education publishers say that most of their sales and revenues are from digital products. Both McGraw-Hill Education and Cengage Learning are releasing financial information for 2015 that backs up that claim.

This shift to digital would represent a major milestone for the industry, but there are questions about how publishers define “digital sales.”

According to Carl Straumsheim of Inside HigherEducation, digital sales at Cengage can mean selling access to a digital product, but also selling an e-book, a textbook bundled with online components, or digital supplementary material. McGraw-Hill also counts bundles, but only reports the portion of the sales value of the digital component. Pearson does not differentiate between digital and print sales.

Publishers have even started promoting themselves as providers of digital course material because it sounds better than saying the firms are still driven by print, according to management consultant Joseph J. Esposito. He added that digital course materials give publishers a way to sell directly to students, lowering their costs and subsequently textbook prices.

“No college publisher likes to talk about this because they don’t want to alienate the retail channel, which they need right now,” Esposito wrote in an email to Straumsheim.

NACSCORP, OpenStax Launch ACCES

NACSCORP, a subsidiary of the National Association of College Stores, and the Rice University-based publisher OpenStax has expanded their partnership by launching the Affordable Custom Content Enhancement System (ACCES) on the eve of CAMEX 2016 in Houston, TX. The online platform allows faculty to create open educational resources (OER) and offer them through their campus store.

OpenStax has released 16 college titles that are used by nearly 400,000 students this year. The number of instructors using OpenStax titles increased by more than 100% in 2015 because of its partnership with NACSCORP, which provides low-cost print versions of the textbooks.

With ACCES, faculty will be able to reorganize chapters and add their own content. In addition, educational publisher Dover Publications is making its catalog of anthologies of classic literature, poetry, plays, music scores, and other publications available for faculty to insert into ACCES content.

"The OpenStax-NACSCORP custom print partnership is a direct response to faculty requests for customized print versions of OpenStax textbooks that will provide students with useful and affordable course materials," David Harris, editor-in-chief of OpenStax, said in a press release. "Many faculty want to use technology to tailor materials for their students, but they don't want to sacrifice quality. They want to start with a rock-solid, peer-reviewed textbook--preferably one with full-color illustrations and a full suite of homework and testing modules--and they want to make only the changes that are relevant to their teaching."

To make it easier for faculty to track the cost of the books they are working on, ACCES will display associated print costs in real time. ACCES will also automatically format pages and create a new index.

"We are committed to providing our campus store partners with the textbooks their faculty demand, including OER titles and customized materials," said Kurt Schoen, president and chief operating officer of NACSCORP.

Liberal Arts Group Starts Academic Press

Faculty members from liberal arts schools now have a new and easier way to publish research material. Lever Press, an initiative from liberal arts colleges that make up the Oberlin Group, was launched to provide scholars who feel “disenfranchised” by large publishing firms with an outlet to make their work available.

“This is all about libraries thinking about scholarly communication in a new way and putting their money where their mouths are,” Charles T. Watkinson, director of the University of Michigan Press and associate university librarian for publishing, said in an article for Inside Higher Education.

The Lever Initiative conducted a faculty survey in 2013 that showed little satisfaction with options in the publishing market. That information led the Oberlin Group to begin work on establishing the publishing enterprise.

Amherst College Press was selected for the project because of its expertise as a digital-first, open-access publisher and will head the editorial side of the venture. Michigan Publishing, a division of the University of Michigan Library, was selected for its knowledge in distribution, publishing platforms, and other technical areas.

Nearly half of the 80 members that make up the Oberlin Group have pledged more than $1 million to fund the press, which plans to publish 60 titles over the next five years.

“Those of us who are supporting this would like to see a serious systemwide transformation of scholarly publishing,” said Bryn I. Geffert, librarian at Amherst College. “If liberal arts institutions are serious about that, they have to put some skin in the game.”

Students Do Just as Well Using OER

Studies continue to find students saying they prefer printed textbooks over online course materials. New research, though, has found the type of course material may not matter all that much.

The study by Brigham Young University and the Michigan State Department of Education reported students who used open educational resources (OER) online did just as well or better than those assigned commercial printed textbooks. The findings compared the success rates of 5,000 students using digital OER to a control group of 11,000 students using traditional textbooks enrolled in 15 undergraduate courses.

Researchers found no significant difference between the groups when it came to completing a course. In the area of passing with a grade of C- or better, both groups passed at the same rates in nine of the courses while digital OER students did better than the control group in five other courses. In the 15th course, students using printed textbooks did better than those using digital content.

The average credit load for the OER students was 13 in the fall and 11 for the winter, while commercial textbook users averaged 11 credit hours in the fall and nine for the winter. Students using OER enrolled in more credit courses the following semester as well, according to a report in Campus Technology.

“Hundreds of millions of dollars and person-hours have been invested in improving in-class instructional designs, intelligent tutoring systems, adaptive instructional systems, and other design-related innovations intended to improve student outcomes,” the researchers wrote. “The current study demonstrates that at least one noninstructional design option exists that can effectively improve student outcomes.”

Publishers Expands Marketing to Students

Since college students today have many more course materials options available, publishers are exploring direct-to-student online sales, along with using on-campus events and employing student ambassadors.

“It’s not in our best interest or the students’ to limit the access points or the purchase opportunities for our stuff,” Dawn Keller, senior vice president of consumer and digital marketing at Cengage, said in an article for Inside Higher Education. “Our hope is we can do some things on CengageBrain to … make it easier for students to find, buy, and register products.”

Joseph J. Esposito, a digital media and publishing consultant, said in the same article that college store professionals are right to be concerned. He said the direct-to-student marketing is part of a long-term strategy to control the textbook supply chain.

More direct sales to students will provide publishers with a way to increase adoption of digital course materials and cut out resellers. Publishers could also build bigger customer databases and turn those into more effective marketing to students.

“People keep talking about how digital textbooks will kill publishers, open educational resources will kill publishers,” Esposito said. “If you look at the publishers’ numbers, they’re pretty good. They have learned to adapt to a challenging marketplace.”

Study Finds Students Accept Digital

There have been plenty of studies that show students prefer printed text to digital when it comes to their course materials. The educational technology firm VitalSource Technologies thinks students are starting to appreciate digital more.

The company’s fifth-annual survey on the impact of technology in education reported that 78% of students use digital course materials, up 48% from 2011. Affordability was the greatest benefit to using digital textbooks, according to 34% of the responding college students, while 31% said digital was more convenient, and 20% said it was more engaging.

To 61% of the responding students, digital homework was more interactive and 48% felt their learning was enhanced by digital elements. A majority of the students (61%) thought the ability digital content provides to have instant feedback from professors improved their learning and 55% said the ability to personalize their education with digital was helpful.

“Technology continues to be of critical importance to students, especially in the classroom,” said Cindy Clarke, VitalSource vice president of marketing, in a release. “The research validates the degree to which students depend on technology to provide them with a competitive edge while they are in school and after graduation as they prepare to enter the workforce, which is increasingly digitally literate and globally connected.” 

Lynn Launching New iPad Programs

Lynn University has been a pioneer in the use of iPads in education. The Boca Raton, FL, institution is at it again, using the device to offer an online bachelor’s degree program that will cost students about the same as the average state university tuition.

The iLynn program, which will begin in the fall, is designed to provide personalized learning and unlimited access to its collaborative tools. The school is also launching the Lynn University Digital Press to publish scholarly works for its iPad and iTunes U academic content.

Lynn faculty members have already created 24 e-textbooks and are working on another dozen. Instructors receive a new laptop with iBooks Author software and a $2,000 stipend for participating in the program.

“We’ve felt we really needed infrastructure around our faculty so they could concentrate on the right content and not necessarily on being experts in being an author or editing or rights and permissions,” Chris Boniforti, chief information officer at Lynn, told Inside Higher Education.

OER, For-Profits Can Work Together

While open educational resources (OER) are sometimes free to the user, there are always costs involved in the production and delivery of the content. To cover those, many OER providers turn to for-profit companies to keep the content available to students.

That opens the door to criticism that nonprofits are selling out. Advocates counter that the for-profit world has a role in keeping OER in front of students.

“Yes, the corporations earn money,” wrote Barbara Illowsky, professor of mathematics and statistics at Foothill-De Anza Community College, Los Altos Hills, CA, District and co-author of a statistics textbook published by OpenStax College, in a column for eCampus News. “But the big ‘yes’ is that students increase their learning. These innovations offer immediate feedback and formative assessment 24/7, link to similar examples, and offer multiple attempts, which lead to increased student participation and success.”

The bottom line for Illowsky, also director of basic skills and OER for the California Community College Online Education Initiative, is student success and choice.

“Students have lifetime free access to open textbooks. Not just one term, not being a log-in site—OER are always available to everyone,” she wrote. “Students have a choice to use the online text only, to download the PDF, or to read the book on their mobile devices. None of these versions cost money. If students want hard copies, they may print parts or all of the text at home, or may purchase a bound low-cost copy from a for-profit company. The cost of printing the text is the student’s choice.”

Failing Grades For K-8 Math Content

A review of K-8 math instructional material gave most publishers failing grades. EdReports.org found that 17 of 20 math series evaluated failed to align with the Common Core State Standards.

“In general, the results are pretty bad for all publishers,” Morgan Polikoff, assistant professor of education, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, told Education Week. “I think people will really pay attention to this.”

Publishers have, and they are not happy. They are particularly concerned that the use of thresholds content needed to pass to continue through the EdReports.org review process led to an incomplete review, according to Jay A. Diskey, executive director of the Association of American Publishers’ P-12 learning.

The report used a three-tiered rating system that broke down each criterion into “meets,” “partially meets,” or “does not meet.” The group’s website provides a more detailed report for each textbook rated and documentation on how reviews came up with their scores.

“There can always be methodological quibbles,” Polikoff said. “It would be useful to look at all three gateways for all the books, but this seems to me a perfectly reasonable way to constrain the task.”

UC Irvine Offers Chemistry Curriculum

The University of California Irvine is making its university-level chemistry curriculum and educational resources available through a new partnership with the University of California (UC), California State University (CSU), and the California Community Colleges (CCC) systems. The partnership will make full-captioned lecture videos freely available to students and faculty around the world.

As part of the collaboration, UC Irvine’s Open Chemistry (OpenChem) curriculum will be offered to the CSU and CCC systems. OpenChem consists of 16 quarter-length undergraduate and select graduate lecture classes and is available at no cost.

UC Irvine is also collaborating with other providers of open educational resources, such as the UC Davis ChemWiki textbook.

“This partnership extends UC Irvine’s commitment to open education and its worldwide impact, with a focus on the needs of students in the California public education system,” said Gary W. Matkin, dean of continuing education, distance learning, and summer sessions at UC Irvine. “It advances our goal of a world where high-quality education is available to all for free.”

OpenStax Personalizing College Content

In August, OpenStax received a $9 million grant to develop personalized interactive textbooks for advance-placement biology and high school physics. Now, the nonprofit publisher based at Rice University is turning its attention to personalized courseware for college students as part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Next Generation Courseware Challenge.

OpenStax will use its portion of the $20 million Challenge fund to work on personalized learning technology that can deliver tailored lessons to help students learn at their own pace. It plans to use the new technology in some upcoming textbooks. The goal of the Challenge is to develop personalized digital courseware that will help low-income and disadvantaged student succeed in their college courses.

OpenStax was one of seven finalists named by the Gates Foundation at the Educause 2014 conference.  The other finalists are Acrobatiq, Cerego, CogBooks, Lumen Learning, Smart Sparrow, and the Open Learning Initiative at Stanford University.

“Students learn best when education is personalized to their needs and goals,” said Daniel Greenstein, director of postsecondary success at the foundation. “There is a growing body of evidence that courseware, when integrated effectively by faculty in instruction, can personalize learning at unprecedented scale, potentially enabling all students—not just those who are able to attend the most elite, expensive colleges—to get the best and most effective education at a reasonable price.”

OpenStax Working on Personalized Textbooks

OpenStax was founded to lower the cost of course materials through peer-reviewed open textbooks made available in print and digital formats. Now, it is trying to craft individualize textbooks for each student.

The nonprofit organization based at Rice University has received a $9 million grant to develop personalized, interactive textbooks for advance-placement Biology and high school physics. The new textbooks will be housed in the cloud and employ the same sort of algorithms Google and Amazon use to provide course materials that match the learning pace of individual students.

“Imagine a digital textbook where because I’m a different person and learn differently, my book is different than your book,” said OpenStax founder Richard Baraniuk. “Because I understand things in a different way from you, the book itself should change.”

Baraniuk envisions textbooks that will provide students with quizzes that pop up while they work through a topic to gauge their comprehension. Additional study material would also be available, depending on how the student does, and teachers could receive automatic email messages to track students’ progress.

“You know which page a student is on. You also know as they’re scrolling around where they might be within the page,” Baraniuk said. “You know when they’ve clicked on different simulations, practice problems, videos, etc. You have a sense of whether they’re playing those videos through to the end, going back to review material.”

OpenStax will spend the next two years working on these new textbooks, which will be viewable from a variety of digital devices and will go through the same sort of vetting process traditional textbooks go through to ensure quality.