From Divided to United: Creating A Campus Partnership for Student Success

On campuses across the country there are two entities that are quite similar in services offered, but whose goals are often miles apart. Their names are interchangeable in the student vernacular, but their objectives regularly compete against each other. If you haven’t guessed by now, we’re referring to the campus Bookstore and the Library. When these two cornerstones of the campus community are divided and left to their own devices, the non-ideal status quo continues to prevail. The Library: championing Open Educational Resources (OER) and providing print & digital resources as well as course reserves for students. The Bookstore: one stop shop for all paid course materials; the intermediary between professor adoptions & student acquisition and the official retailer of the campus. Both entities are frequently distrustful of each other’s competing interests and students get stuck in the middle.

However, a campus does not have to remain divided. There is another way forward that uses a student-centric approach that is full of collaboration, shared goals, and a lasting partnership that will benefit all parties involved. A meaningful relationship between a campus Bookstore and Library can be a game changer for everyone. At San Diego State University, the SDSU Bookstore has an extremely strong relationship with the SDSU Library founded on the shared goals of removing barriers to student access to course materials and improving academic success.

Surfacing Library Materials

The Library is responsible for curating materials that will benefit campus stakeholders. Unfortunately, faculty and students are not always aware that needed resources are available through the Library. This is where the Bookstore can step in to assist. As the repository for all course materials related information, the Bookstore is in a unique position to help bring course materials available through the Library to the surface.

At San Diego State we accomplish this during the requisition process. After a professor informs the Bookstore what materials will be used for a course, the SDSU Bookstore Course Materials staff searches the SDSU Library’s catalog to see if there is an unlimited user license eBook available.

If an unlimited user license eBook is available, the book’s specific Library permalink is provided to the faculty member with instructions on how to embed the link within the campus Learning Management System course shell. The permalink is also added to the student’s personalized booklist. Obviously, the Library doesn’t always have what professors are looking for, but there is a way to improve the odds of finding material through the Library, which we will touch on later.

Campus Advocacy

The SDSU Bookstore and Library collaborate on campus advocacy programs, participate on advisory committees together, and cooperate on the State of California Affordable Learning Solutions initiative grants. Bookstore and Library information is often packaged together, even presenting in tandem on course materials to departmental leaders and in webinars directly to faculty. Another example of the Bookstore and Library collaboration is the Course Materials Canvas Homeroom, a convenient place for faculty to see all their options for providing course materials.

Financial Partnership/Collection Building

Prior to piloting Equitable Access for undergraduate course materials, the Bookstore and Library shared information and advocacy efforts, but not finances. As part of the Equitable Access pilot, the Bookstore signed an agreement with the Library to fulfill course materials via Library-hosted unlimited user license eBooks whenever possible. Within the agreement, the Bookstore committed to investing a lump sum of money into the Library ($10,000 in year one and $15,000 in year two) for the express purpose of purchasing unlimited user license eBooks for the curriculum. The initial $10,000 investment to the Library would have provided an additional $110,000 in delivery costs savings for the Equitable Access program in the first year. However, due to the delayed availability of the Library-provided eBooks in Fall 2022, we only realized an additional delivery cost savings of just over $50,000. At the conclusion of the first academic year, using existing and newly acquired materials, we were able to deliver over 14,500 Library-provided eBooks to students. This resulted in delivery cost savings to the Equitable Access program of over $1 million. The delivery cost savings helped us save students over $7 million in the first year. (Editor Note: Current Fall 2023 savings are around $3.9 million).

Common Goals/Leveraging Unique Skills

The Library and Bookstore are aligned under the common goals of student success, retention, and affordability. We can use our unique skillsets to advance these goals. The Bookstore develops and implements course materials solutions that provide access and cost savings to students as well as peace of mind for faculty knowing their students are day-one-ready. The Library uses their vast subject matter knowledge and wide range of materials to both foster the development of faculty courses and to provide support for students. We work in tandem to support our campus stakeholders, no matter if the materials are commercial publisher content, Open Educational Resources, or Library resources. A campus no longer divided, but united, can focus its time and energy towards collaboration and reaching its shared goals.

Wrap Up

The partnership between Kate and Ben was not developed overnight. I think anyone working in and around course materials can attest to the often contentious or distrustful ‘relationship” that exists between the Bookstore and the Library. We have seen others develop relationships like this before (see UC Davis). However, this relationship is not a standard practice; it is unique. In a world where our competing interests are not so easily set aside to unite under a common goal or objective, these types of partnerships are very important. They are important because what we are trying to accomplish in serving students is much, much greater than our individual or departmental wants. Thank you, Kate and Ben, for the incredible work you do serving the students of SDSU and for helping share how your important relationship can serve as an example for others.

As always, thanks for checking in and I’ll see you next time.

-MM

*Kate Holvoet, MLIS, is an Associate Librarian with 25 years of academic library experience. She is the Scholarly Communication and Open Initiatives Librarian at San Diego State University, and liaison for Government Publications, Open Access, and Open Education Resources (OER).  She co-chairs the campus committee for Affordable Learning Solutions, part of a CSU-wide initiative to encourage faculty use of OER.

**Ben Compton is the General Manager, Course Materials with 22 years of collegiate retail experience.  For the last 17 years he has specialized in course materials and course materials management.  He is also a graduate of the National Association of College Stores Leadership Institute, sits on the CSU Bookstore Advisory committee, Campus eBookstore Board, Cengage Advisors Network and is co-chair of the Affordable Learning Solutions committee at SDSU.

How did the process for providing required textbooks/course materials to college students get to be such a mess? Even in the relatively simple landscape of 25 years ago when books were either new or used, and students might have a choice of 2 or 3 physical locations to shop at, the path from a professor deciding to adopt a text and all students in that professor’s class actually having it had many points along the way where students or books or both could lose their way. Now, any given adoption may have more than a dozen format/price options, each offered by a myriad of different stores or platforms. Enter the course materials paradox.

My Perspective

For most of my years in the course materials/collegiate retail world, textbook managers like me believed we couldn’t do much to change the fundamentals of the market – publishers set the prices, and faculty chose the materials. We knew that textbook prices were a burden for many students, but all we could do was offer alternatives to the list price of a new book – by buying and selling used copies, and stocking different formats when available. Then came rentals, then e-books. But all those prices were all derived from that new list price – which we had zero influence on. [Editor’s Note: College bookstores receive textbooks from publishers at net price or list price which impacts retail pricing]

Starting in the mid-2000s, thanks to Amazon and the rapid growth of tertiary used book marketplaces, the choice matrix for students expanded further. On top of that, the 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act required that when faculty adopted books bundled with supplements or access codes, campus stores had to list ISBN and price information for every component, each of which could also have multiple prices and potential sources.

Real World Example

This is what an algebra student at my university currently sees when they look up their course materials:

There’s a required bundle, the hardback and loose-leaf versions of the book in the bundle, the courseware access code either as a printed code or a virtual online code, and a VitalSource e-book of the required book. Every single listed item in the left-hand column in turn branches out a scrolling list of purchase and rental options on the right.

Real World Challenges

It’s no wonder so many students – nearly 27% according to the most recent National Association of College Stores’ Student Watch survey – end up choosing ‘none of the above’ for at least one course.  It’s not just about whether the material is affordable, although that is definitely important.  But in the face of too many choices there may not even be a conscious decision to skip a given book, rather a failure to decide anything at all and therefore take no action. It’s what behavioral economics refer to as ‘the paradox of choice’.  Another related concept is the concept of “friction” – that the more decisions one must navigate to accomplish a given task or reach a given outcome, the more likely failure is.

More Options ≠ Better

Unsurprisingly, even as campus stores added all these options in the name of affordability and transparency, they lost market share and revenue while their staff were working harder to manage all these options. More campuses leased out stores, or just their textbook operations. Some even contracted textbook provision out to Amazon.  Some institutions experimented with bulk site-license deals with publishers that bypassed the bookstore altogether. For stores, it didn’t seem there was any way out of the paradox we’d helped create

Game Changer

Enter…Inclusive Access, or IA (or Day One or First Day Access). Automating delivery of materials and requiring students to opt OUT rather than actively choose to purchase de-fragments the market. That leverages the total enrollment potential for each class to finally give stores bargaining power to lower publisher pricing, and to do it for all enrolled students, not just those lucky enough to find a cheap copy on Amazon.

When UC Davis first proposed this model one of the biggest criticisms leveled against it was that it took choices away from students and ‘forced’ them into using digital. When you think about it though, that’s not true at all – what it actually did was reduce a dizzyingly branched decision tree down to two primary options: 1) Stay opted in and the materials are provided to you automatically 2) Opt-out and navigate the decision tree to find the materials on your own.  Students still have a choice – it’s just that option #1 has the least friction.

And it turns out, students have enough other friction points in their academic and personal lives most of them don’t miss having to figure out multiple format and price point options and navigate multiple e-commerce and publisher sites just to be able to get started with their course materials. Who knew?

Well, most of us in the course materials world probably did know that intuitively, we just didn’t have the tools and technology or business processes available to us to reduce that friction and lower costs at the same time – and now we do.

Game Changer Evolution

What’s the next step out of the course materials maze? Taking the IA concept of automated delivery on an opt-out basis to the institution level, Equitable Access or EA once again simplifies the decision tree for students. No longer do they have to decide “In” or “Out” for each adopted item for each class participating in an IA program, it’s “In” to get all required course materials automatically, or “Out” to figure it out on your own. Again, there’s still a choice, and it’s simple to understand – certainly simpler than that picture from our website. We’re hoping to launch our version of EA soon.

Wrap Up

Acquiring required textbooks has long been one of the first and hardest unofficial tests in the “hidden curriculum”, that unspoken and unwritten assumed bank of institutional know-how that keeps so many students from non-privileged backgrounds from succeeding in college. I’ve even heard certain professors over the years say things like “well if they can’t figure out how to find the book they shouldn’t be in college”. But it shouldn’t be that way, and now thanks in large part to the advent of digital materials we have the tools to make this particular part of college an ‘open book’ test for everyone.

Bio

Suzanne Donnelly started working in the higher education course materials industry in 1994, at the University Bookstore for Idaho State University. Since then she has worked for both leased and self-operated stores serving institutions ranging from small community colleges to large public universities. She has served as the Senior Associate Director of Bronco Bookstore at Cal Poly Pomona since 2010. Additionally she has volunteered for the National Association of College Stores (NACS), the Independent College Bookstore Association (ICBA) and served as President of the California Association of College Stores (CACS). When she’s not obsessing over course materials affordability she relaxes via Doctor Who fandom, baking and hiking. Pronouns: she/her, opinions her own.”

Learning from Other Forms of Intellectual Property Distribution

Music and movies are examples of intellectual property that have moved to a digital distribution model.  15 years ago, many of us rented or purchased our movies at Blockbuster Video, Hollywood Video and other brick and mortar retailers.  We bought or rented physical copies of movies and when finished, we often returned them to the store.  Similarly, with music, we used to travel to a brick and mortar store, such as Tower Records, and we purchased physical copies of our music at individual retail prices.

Today, the vast majority of consumers have rejected that intellectual property distribution model and moved to digital distribution subscription models, often at a flat rate, regardless of how much they consume.  We use services like Spotify, Netflix and Hulu.  While brick and mortar music and video stores still exist, they are few and far between and digital distribution of music and movies is the overwhelming standard.

When thinking about how our campus sold textbooks, we wanted to look more like Spotify and Netflix, and less like Blockbuster and Tower.  This was the thinking that lead us to a digital-first Equitable Access program at UC Davis. It was our feeling that an Equitable Access program that was not digital-first was similar to the original Netflix model, where they mailed DVD’s to their customers and their customers mailed them back.  If we were going to evolve our business model, we wanted to emulate the flat rate model of digital delivery versus a flat rate model requiring students to pick up and return their books.

Increasing Access to Content

When our campus decided to disrupt our traditional method of selling, buying back, and renting print textbooks, our number one goal was to increase student access to faculty-chosen required content.  As we developed our Equitable Access program, we understood that we would need to clearly define the problem we were trying to solve and be able to measure our impact.  Before the launch of Equitable Access, a survey of UC Davis students found 78% self-reporting that they did not have access to all of their required content in the prior 12 months.  After the launch of Equitable Access, only 27% of UC Davis students self-reported not having access to all their required textbooks.  Moving to a digital-first flat-rate model dramatically increased our student access to content compared to where it was when we were a print centric campus.

Convenience of Digital Delivery

When faculty-chosen content is available digitally, it can be delivered to all students in a course through the Learning Management System (LMS).  When digital is not available, and our campus supplies print, a student needs to pick up the print copy or have it shipped to them.

Each term, thousands of students add and drop courses during the add/drop period, when their textbook is print, the student is inconvenienced and must return or ship back their print book for their dropped course and obtain a new print book for their added course.  With digital, no effort on the part of the student is needed. The student loses access to the dropped digital content in the Learning Management System and they gain access to the digital content of the course they added.  Lots of effort with print, almost no effort with digital.  How many of us would prefer to go back to a Blockbuster Video model versus just have the show we want available at any time digitally?  I suspect not many of us.

Student Acceptance of Digital First

Prior to moving to a digital-first Equitable Access textbook model, we often sold print textbooks to about 30% of the enrolled students in a course.  After the first two years of our digital first program, we are selling digital textbooks to nearly 80% of the enrolled students.  That dramatic increase in the percentage of students obtaining their textbooks through our campus store is the greatest measurement of student acceptance.  It relies on what students are doing versus what students are saying.  Many suggest that students prefer print, and perhaps that might be the case if everything were equal.  But the price and convenience that comes with digital is something students are seeing value in, and they are choosing the Equitable Access option, versus opting out and obtaining print textbooks on their own.

Over 80% of the units our program delivers are digital versions.  We expect this number to grow over time.  For the student that still has to visit the store to pick up a print copy, we have at least eliminated the need for a student to return their print copy when they are finished.  While many other Equitable Access programs require students to return their print copies for re-use, our program does not require students to return their physical copies.  So, for those students that still have a print book, we have at least eliminated the trip they need to make to return their book

Carbon Impact of Going Digital First

Recent reports have noted that the carbon footprint of producing a single printed paper back book is 3 kg CO2.  Hard copies of textbooks are reported to produce 9 kg CO2 per copy.  Our campus distributed 192,000 units of digital materials last year.  Using the conservative paper back estimate, using digital instead of producing print copies saved 576,000 kg of CO2 on the low end.  Converted to pounds, this equates to a savings of 1,269,862 pounds of carbon in a single year.  This number does not account for the environmental impacts of shipping and transportation of all those print books that would have been happened were we not digital-first.

The Student and Faculty Service Advantage

For decades, many college students and faculty faced stressful situations at the start of a term when their textbooks were not in stock.  This happened for a variety of reasons, such as the publisher being out of stock, the freight shipment got lost or delayed, the bookstore ordered too few, a section was added, among others.  These problems don’t exist with digital.  We can’t run out or under order and the shipment cannot get delayed or lost.  The lack of stress for students, faculty and college stores that exist with a digital-first program is transformative and a truly welcome change.

For more information on the UC Davis digital-first Equitable Access program, please visit equitableaccess.ucdavis.edu