As free Open Educational Resources become increasingly available, students question faculty members’ preference for paid textbooks
Laura Morales Padilla (she/her) // Co-EIC
Jasmin Linton (she/her) // Illustrator
Through the Student Experience Survey 2025 conducted in May, the Capilano Students’ Union (CSU) asked students if they had been “required to purchase access to an online platform, digital tool or e-resource for a course.” From the total 730 respondents, 60 per cent responded yes. The CSU collected this information as requested by student senator Priya McMurtrie, who had previously brought to the board’s attention that the expanded use of digital assessment tools was becoming a “major issue.”
Of the 410 students who responded the survey question regarding how much their instructors relied on the textbooks’ online platforms or digital tools, 85.6 per cent indicated that the platform was used for classwork and assignments, in 74 per cent of cases it was used for exams and quizzes and in 57 per cent for course instruction. In her January 18 report, the student senator stated, “This is a fracture of the standards of academia that we hold as a university and is not fair for students to have to pay extra fees to… not be taught.”
To complement students’ perspectives, The Courier interviewed Capilano University faculty members Laurie Prange and Joe Munsterman, active advocates of Open Educational Resources (OER), and reached out to 27 faculty members who are using paid textbooks with access codes to digital learning platforms for their Fall 2025 courses. The average cost of the textbooks used by these instructors is $165.31, with prices ranging from $99 to $274.15. From the 27, 10 instructors responded, five agreed to share their perspective anonymously and business instructor Anderson Lu clarified that the paid textbook listed for his course is optional and not used for assessment, but shared insights on his use of these tools at another institution.
Zero Textbook Cost Initiatives
In a retention project presented to the School of Business & Professional Studies on November 14, 2024, faculty member Laurie Prange stated, “When we average out the costs of all the textbooks that business instructors are choosing, it comes out to $125 per textbook. By the end of the BBA, our students will have spent at least $5, 000 on textbooks.” Considering that domestic tuition fees are $28, 568, this approximate cost for textbooks adds an extra 17.5 per cent to the advertised cost of the program. Furthermore, 78 per cent of respondents from the CSU survey indicated that the cost of textbooks created some degree of financial hardship, varying from minor to significant.
On the other hand, OER—as defined by the government-funded organization BCcampus—are “teaching, learning, and research resources that, through permissions granted by their creator, allow others to use, distribute, keep, or make changes to them.” According to Joe Munsterman, a sociology professor and member of the Regional Leaders of Open Education network, “the main barrier that OERs alleviate is access,” not only in terms of cost, he explained, but also in addressing the diversity of backgrounds in each classroom. In a previous interview with BC campus, Munsterman referred to the tailoring of examples and references to students’ backgrounds as “removing the barrier of cultural overtime.”
OERs are a primary driver of Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) initiatives, along with library resources, public domain works, and faculty-developed materials. Colleges and universities in B.C. such as Kwantlen Polytechnic, Douglas College and University Canada West have started implementing ZTC programs to help mitigate financial barriers in higher education. Aware of this, professor Prange included a list of OER textbooks that could replace paid textbooks currently used in mandatory 100 and 200-level courses in her retention project. “I chose ones already being used by our competitors,” she indicated. Still, many professors at CapU—especially in business courses—continue to use paid textbooks, showing that this choice has less to do with the availability of free alternatives, and more to do with their personal preference.
Textbooks with Access Codes and Digital Assessment Tools
From the six CapU faculty members who shared their insights about the benefits of using paid textbooks with access codes to publisher’s online learning platforms, the benefit that stood out is regular practice at students’ own pace, with methods varying from question banks to simulations.
When it comes to the right balance between classwork and assignments done via the publisher’s online learning platforms vs outside of these platforms, a full time regular faculty member at CapU’s School of Business (CSB) estimated “about 30–40% of course work, focusing on quizzes, practice exercises, and simulations that reinforce core knowledge.” A financial accounting instructor stressed that all topics are covered in class, and the online platform is for students to “practice the newly learned skills.” Similarly, an instructor from the School of Social Sciences (SSS) uses it “to test [students’] knowledge through a series of scaffolded questions with interactive animations that help with the visualization of processes discussed.” Moreover, faculty member Anderson Lu pointed out that class time is limited and often doesn’t allow him to provide enough examples. Lu says in those cases, “students will be able to experience more varieties of problems on the publisher’s website.”
In terms of assessment, half of the instructors found instant feedback to be one of the main benefits, along with automated grading. “If they need further assistance, they can take a screenshot, and contact me. I love it when students do this so I know exactly where they are getting stuck and I can explain the concept in another way,” shared the financial accounting instructor. “Students’ assignment marks are generally a bit higher than in-class exam results, so students like to have the online assignments pull up their overall grade,” observed Lu, also noting that publishers’ questions come with different numbers for each student to prevent cheating. In contrast, the financial accounting instructor assigns minimal marks to assignments done via digital platforms. “Who’s kidding who?” they pointed out, “It is easy to get the answers for these types of online assessments.”
The instructors who valued the instant feedback provided by online learning platforms also acknowledged that digital assessment tools are an important aid considering the absence of teaching assistants at CapU. “They reduce administrative workload and ensure students receive timely guidance. This allows me to devote more energy to higher-level teaching tasks like case analysis, applied projects, and mentoring, rather than routine assessment,” explained the full-time CSB faculty member. Lu also acknowledged that instructors at CapU are solely responsible for grading as well as other preparatory work. “It would take a lot of time to grade weekly assignments manually and take away the time for instructors to design better lessons,” he stated.
However, for the faculty member who teaches accounting courses, digital assessment tools can actually increase the marking workload as they still need to manually check for errors, and a lot of back and forth with concerned students ends up happening when an error occurs. “If instructors are not reviewing the output, I suspect it would cut down marking time immensely,” they observed. On the other hand, for the SSS instructor, the tools in online platforms are not a major component of the assessment; instead, they view them as a “supplementary activity that aids learning rather than as a digital replacement for TA or instructor tasks.”
When asked if learning outcomes and experience from students are overall positive with paid educational resources, a faculty member who teaches accounting courses answered, “The feedback I experienced when I did not use a common publisher textbook was that they found the open-source text lacking, students wanted better and more practice questions.” Similarly, the accounting instructor stated that in a perfect world, “open source text would include all that we require and instead, materials and questions could be done in-class or submitted via eLearn.”
In line with these observations, a 2017 study on learning outcomes using OERs at the University of British Columbia (UBC) highlighted that the positive results obtained from using these resources came from “not just adopting an open textbook, but also significantly adapting it to fit a particular course.” As Munsterman explained, “The first thing people think about open textbooks is that they’re free, which is true, but there’s more to it than that.” Creative Commons licenses standardized the different ways in which the public can use their work, and in Munsterman’s experience, many open books are editable, so “you can add examples and tailor it however you want.”
According to the Student Experience Survey 2025, only 18 per cent of 412 respondents found that the use of the paid platform was essential for their learning. Maximilliano Alserda, a fourth-year student at CSB, stated, “These digital assessment tools in e-books automate most of the questions and students’ answers are graded immediately after submitting, meaning half of the course was just the professors telling us to self-study without dedicating effort into teaching a specific topic.” Alserda’s observation reveals a double bind perception when it comes to textbooks with online learning platforms: either the online learning tools are not adding enough to their educational experience to justify the cost of the textbook, or the tools are satisfying most of their needs as learners, making it hard to justify the cost of the instructor and the university setting.
Furthermore, the personal learning experience from instructors grading and providing feedback themselves is an important selling point for a lot of students. As professor Prange pointed out, CapU announces “industry-leading experts, smaller class sizes” on their homepage, but this promise is not fulfilled when students receive a similar learning and evaluation experience as if they were in a classroom seating 200 or more at a larger university. She questioned, “Are we keeping our promise to CapU students when the course content, assignments, and tests are on third-party sites owned by textbook companies rather than created by the instructors themselves and hosted on CapU platforms? Are we keeping our promise when these same textbook companies are grading students’ tests and assignments instead of CapU instructors?”
Shared Goals and Potential solutions
The use of alternative educational resources can only be suggested but not enforced, because the Academic Freedom policy protects instructors’ right to choose what they consider to be the best resources for their pedagogical goals. However, the policy stresses that the freedom to teach “must be joined by a constant effort to distinguish between knowledge and belief. Freedom must be exercised in the context of a commitment to accuracy and integrity.” In other words, an instructor’s belief that paid textbooks and online platforms are superior to OERs is not enough; the policy suggests that a preference for paid materials must be based on evidence of superior learning outcomes, not just the convenience of automated grading and feedback.
Data from the CSU survey provides a tangible example for this principle. The 18 per cent of students who found the paid platform essential for their learning represent 73 individuals. Instructor Lu’s approach of making the textbook access code an optional resource caters to this group. “I don’t make it mandatory for students to buy the access code or the textbook, but I recommend they do, as there are additional practice problems,” he explained. When a grade isn’t tied to a digital access code, students can decide if the cost of the textbook is justified by the value of the additional practice problems, or vice-versa.
The SSS and CSB instructors agreed that the added cost is a concern, and both expressed interest in finding more affordable solutions. “The cost of textbooks continues to creep up each semester,” affirmed the SSS instructor, and explained that developing “a set of online interactive activities” is their goal in the future, “but this will take some time and requires coordination with other instructors.” According to Munsterman, there are a lot of resources already available at CapU’s library, and further support on campus is available via the Centre for Teaching Excellence; “The CTE or the library can walk any instructor through adopting or learning about OERs,” he affirmed. Moreover, BC Open Education Librarians, Open Education Global, SPARC and BCcampus are some external options also suggested by Munsterman, with the last one being “one of if not the biggest leaders in open education in North America with hundreds of textbooks ready to go!”
Finally, a key finding from the UBC study on OER points out that “taking advantage of the open license of open textbooks to make significant revisions can be pedagogically useful and appreciated by students, but it may require a good deal of time and resources.” Given some faculty concerns about already high workloads, implementing Zero Textbook Cost initiatives and adapting open textbooks can be a difficult task for a single instructor to tackle. However, the accounting instructor shared that collaborative efforts are underway to remove “textbook marking” and expand the use of OER options. “We are working to update our syllabi in the accounting concentration to exclude publishers’ online learning platforms,” she announced. The team behind this work is being led by the Business Faculty Curriculum Coordinator, with the assistance of Student Learning Experience Conveners and other accounting instructors who wished to participate. “It’s been a fantastic experience, and I think we are improving the accounting courses a lot,” she added. The timeline for implementation is set for Fall 2026 to ensure all accounting instructors have sufficient time to discuss and agree upon the changes.