Bookstores are integral to a successful campus OER initiative. Though at first it may seem counterintuitive, OER programs and Campus Bookstores have very similar goals: getting students affordable access to the materials they need in order to stay in school. Bookstores are also on the front lines of a dramatically changing landscape when it comes to textbook access, and understand as well as anyone else the need for evolving business models.

Like connections elsewhere on campus, forming a working relationship with bookstore managers as OER initiatives scale up will make sure that everyone is on the same page, and that potential problems can be addressed before they become insurmountable. Bookstores should be our allies in this change.

Research from Student PIRGs around OER preferences shows that, if cost is taken out of the equation, a large majority of students prefer access to textbooks in print, rather than digital media. Additionally, students are still willing to purchase a low-cost print book, even when equivalent online material is available for free. Bookstores can help our students answer these desires.

If you’d like to make sure that your own student population feels similarly, survey tools are available as part of the OER Research Toolkit from Open Education Group.

Follett

In 2017, Follett formed a relationship with Lumen Learning to offer OER directly to students. Since SUNY already has a system-wide contract in place with Lumen, the balance between what Follett is providing and what Lumen is providing is still being fine-tuned. Essentially, if you encounter questions about that relationship with your bookstore, please reach out to SUNY OER Services.

• White Paper: Outsourcing the Campus Store

Barnes & Noble

Barnes and Nobel Education (BNED) offers its own OER platform, LoudCloud. Currently the offerings are relatively small (about 12 courses) and most are based on OpenStax textbooks. LoudCloud offers a similar tool set as most learning management systems, as well as adaptive and personalized learning, in order to track student’s engagement with materials and measures of what is successful for each student.

• More about BNED’s OER Courseware, including a white paper, is available here

Independent Bookstores

Broadly speaking, independent bookstores tend to be very closely tied to their campus communities, and are often welcoming partners in cost-savings initiatives.