Modern teachers find themselves integrating into a system outside of textbooks, in order to stay cheaper for students. Teachers at Elgin Community College want control of the information inside their classes; and have fashioned together their own learning material to do so.

According to a 2011-2012 survey conducted by the National Association of College Stores, each college student spent an annual average of $420 on required course texts, including $296 on new textbooks and $124 on used ones.

Some listed prices of newly published books at ECC’s bookstore include, “Survey of Economics,” a required Economics 101 text that costs $198. Chemistry 112, an introductory class, requires students to own a lab book and a sixth edition of “General Chemistry Custom,” which together totals to $285. A Nursing 120 print, packaged with an eBook, costs $619.90.

Teachers are unaware of the prices that these books entail. Investigating a textbook’s price before adopting it into a curriculum is unforeseen, and can be worrisome for educators.

“We honestly don’t know how much our textbooks are gonna cost students,” Alison Douglas, an associate professor of English, said. “We can ask the publisher ‘What’s the cost to this book?’ but the publisher can only tell us what the cost is, of the book, to the bookstore. And then the bookstore has markup.”

Douglas and Bill Demaree II, a professor of English composition, both agree to use a variety of media sources as educational substance to replace textbooks.

“I give my students published things that I find in magazines,” Demaree said. “So I’m not limited to some editor. I want things that are matching my assignments. I’ve gotten very good about writing essays that are specifically in alignment with my assignments.”

Several teachers at ECC, responding to the upward cost of college, have created their own textbooks and manuals. Self-made material better fit their courses, and can be tossed around the curriculum. They are referred to as open educational resources (OER).

Online versions are available for free, on ECC’s library site. Or a printed copy can be bought for a smaller fraction of the price offered by outside-published textbooks, according to ECC’s Senior Director of Retail Operations, Kelly Strossner.

The file is shipped to the copy center at ECC, and printed. There are about twenty-four different teacher-made textbooks. And the teachers make no profit, said Strossner.

For example, Joseph Rosenfeld, professor of human services, created a course pack compiled of state documents; to make information easily accessible for students. The printed text is $46.55, which only covers printing and copyright costs.

“A Guide to Writing at ECC,” a composition manual by Professor of English, Michele Noel, is only $2.10. And is one of the earliest forms of teacher-made textbooks that Strossner has seen.

Noel spent a semester completing research to design the content for faculty who are not experts in writing, but understand and desire its values for students. She uses her expertise to provide other educators a guide for students in different fields to have the ability to write appropriately.

“The real intent of it was to provide a resource, brief, cheap, easily accessible for faculty who want to include writing in their classes but really don’t know what that means,” Noel said. “It sort of would be the equivalent of me trying to teach psychology.”

Some faculty members have used it on D2L. Others have taken pages and projected it to their own classes.

David LoBue, an instructor of Geology, constructed a lab manual for all instructors of Earth Science APS 101. The ECC owned and distributed manual provides students with pre-made domain labs, images and figures. It was a cost-efficient approach that is sold at the bookstore for $22. This is much cheaper compared to the lab manual that is published with the course’s text that totals between $80 and $120, said LoBue.

ECC’s movement of integrating a shared system of information between educators is not alone. U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin has sponsored a proposed bill titled “Affordable College Textbook Act.” This program, if approved, will make competitive grants to higher educational institutions to support the expansion of open textbooks. This mandate will help college student’s savings. He introduced the bill to the U.S. Senate and expressed that OERs respect academic freedom, and establish the right for faculty to select the most appropriate course material.

The encouragement of OERs will create competition in the textbook industry. Strossner has analyzed that total costs for students in course materials per year, has actually began to decrease, because of the lower-cost alternatives.

“Like before textbook rental really was not available and now almost every college bookstore offers a textbook rental program,” Strossner said. “There used to not be as much digital available, and there’s more digital available now. So there are more lower cost options available to students, so they actually see the total prices dropping.”