Join the Textbooks Team
The school year has barely begun, but we've already seen exciting breakthroughs in the movement to use open textbooks on campus.
The skyrocketing cost of textbooks is making it even harder to afford a college education. Fortunately, we have a solution to this problem in the form of “open textbooks” – high-quality books that the authors have decided to publish online for free or for a very low cost in print. With open textbooks, we can help make higher education more accessible to everyone.
Just in the past month, we've seen exciting changes on this issue:
- Thanks to hard work by students in California, the state legislature passed a bill this month that will expand the use of open textbooks at California's public universities. This comes just a few months after Oregon passed a similar law.
- Many schools are considering the creation of open textbook programs. Most notably, the University of Maryland University College announced a plan to eliminate the use of all paid textbooks.
- The open textbooks market keeps growing as new books are released, including new books on algebra, trigonometry, and chemistry from the popular OpenStax program.
With more and more of you working to make textbooks affordable, we're expanding our work to support open textbook programs. As part of this, we're creating a new campaign team around this issue.
And if you haven't done so yet, download our open textbooks toolkit to get resources on how to bring open textbooks to your campus.
For Your Reading List
For any student government leaders who have ever been frustrated by the challenge of mobilizing your fellow students (and we're betting that's all of you), we have a recommendation for your reading list: the new edition of "The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times" by Paul Loeb.
The book brings together the voices of eloquent writers to talk about how they replenish the wells of commitment, exploring what keeps them going in the face of constant challenges. Some essays address our current political time, from memoirs of the Arab Spring to dispatches from the environmental movement. Others examine how people persisted in past struggles that could easily have been deemed unwinnable: what it was like to confront South African apartheid, Eastern European dictatorships, Mississippi’s entrenched segregation, or the bigotry that kept gays silent and closeted.Read more