From many positions it would seem that Sweden has a rather unrestrictive and ‘open’ higher education system. There are no tuition fees, and there are various pathways into higher education. These possibilities should reduce socioeconomic inequality in higher education. However, resources that the students need at the university, such as course books and material, still need to be purchased. I have found from my own teaching that many of these resources are extremely expensive and not necessarily easily available through a library. The popular Student’s Grammar of the English Language, which features on many course literature lists is around 800kr (80 euros) A University Grammar of English with a Swedish Perspective is about 500kr, while more specialised titles that occasionally appear on literature lists might reach over 2000kr. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language retails for around 2500kr, for instance. I find charging these prices to be completely immoral. Many of my students cannot afford these books and will simply not buy them. Here, we might ask questions related to education and social justice (Bali, Cronin, & Jhangiani, 2020). Can we really call education socially just if students cannot afford the books they need to study?
Instead of encouraging students to hunt down these books from second hand retailers or elsewhere, I have now started to remove any unreasonably expensive works from my literature lists wherever possible. I prefer to use sources published under a Creative Commons license wherever possible. There are actually quite many excellent freely available sources for the kinds of things I work with. If something does not exist under an Open Access license, then I consult with the university library about the options for purchasing an e-book version of the works in question. More often than not, the library is rather receptive to these requests if presented with a number of options. It can be the case that a work from one publisher is uneconomical to purchase, but a similar work from another publisher may be good value.
One issue I have with the textbook publishing model is that despite these exobharant costs, the authors of the works often receive little compensation. The majority of the profits go to the publisher. Indeed, more than one of the authors of the Student’s Grammar of the English Language is already dead, but the publisher continues to charge a high price for that work. If this is the case, and the publisher restricts the copyright on work that you produced, what indeed is the purpose of publishing in these ways? There might be some kudos attached with publishing with a well-known publisher, but the potential for publishing your own material under an Open Access license would mean that your work can be viewed by a much wider audience. Thus far I have only published works aimed at an expert audience, but I have tried to only publish these through Open Access channels wherever possible. If I intend to produce coursebooks and the like in the future, I certainly will not be going through the traditional model of publication, and instead will choose to publish in a way which results in free accessibility for all.
References
Bali, M., Cronin, C. and Jhangiani, R.S., 2020. Framing Open Educational Practices from a Social Justice Perspective. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2020(1), p.10. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/jime.565
Erica
Hello Tim, your raise a very important discussion. I teach in Finland, and the situation here is very similar, we have almost free studies, but students have to acquire almost all material themselves. Fortunately my university is using the online platform Perlego, and Perlego has quite a good offer on books. But the offer is naturally limited, there are no books in Swedish, so Swedish speaking students writing their thesis in Swedish, cannot find literature in Perlego. Naturally they can translate the English text, but sometime I feel they have difficulties in finding the correct, academic way to express themselves in their mother tongue. Naturally we have the university library, and students can find some course literature there. But there is no idea to have many copies of the same book, as it seems books get out of date quickly nowadays. But books are not the only problem for students. Technology and especially computers are quite expensive, and now when we are so much studies online, this becomes a challenge. I know we have many students struggling with having old computors not supporting their studies.
juho
Good thinking! Yep, we need a quick and simple solution… maybe in the future mobile phone and wifi are the “only” tools needed for students and library is the place where students can borrow these devices/tools if needed. This kind of solutions are already implemented… In the future we need more sponsors etc. new kind of thinking and solutions to reduce “learning costs” globally.