Dear Faculty Colleagues,
In alignment with Idaho State Board of Education Policy III.U, beginning with the Spring 2023 semester, ISU’s course scheduling system, Banner, will provide the option of adding course material cost attributes to course sections. There will be three new optional attributes available that will indicate the “list price for the faculty-preferred format of all required instructional materials” as either $0, $1-$30, or $31-$50. These ranges correspond to the Board Policy’s categories of “Zero cost,” “Very low cost,” and “Low cost.”
These optional attributes may be made visible to students at the time of course registration and are intended to provide them with helpful information for anticipating the overall cost of their course materials.
A primary motivation for this initiative is to increase access and affordability for our students as we continue to strive to reduce barriers to higher education and increase retention, especially for first-generation college students and those in rural communities in Southeast Idaho.
Detailed instructions for adding these optional course attributes will be sent to department chairs and designated department schedulers before the Spring 2023 scheduling process begins. These attributes may be included along with other course information at the beginning of the course scheduling cycle (early this Fall for the Spring semester). Accordingly, each department will presumably need to develop its own processes for gathering this information.
Because we recognize that instructors likely will not know in advance the exact cost that the ISU Bookstore will charge for various course materials, we are asking instructors to make these determinations based either on the lower of the publisher’s “list price” or the price that new versions of the materials are currently selling for at any major online national retailer. We also recognize that there will inevitably be points of ambiguity as instructors make these determinations, and we thus ask instructors to use their best judgment so that when students go to buy their course materials at the beginning of the Spring semester, the costs they encounter will be in line with the attributes listed in Banner.
We want to stress, again, that providing these attributes to your department scheduler is optional. In addition, as this initiative is part of a broader effort to reduce barriers to higher education and increase retention, we want to reiterate that ISU has a variety of support options for identifying, creating, and/or implementing low cost course materials, including those licensed as Open Educational Resources (OER). Along these lines, please consider reaching out to one of our library faculty members for more information. Also, in the upcoming academic year, we expect to have presentations from faculty on OER during Open Education Week in the month of March, and we are planning on a second opportunity for OER development grants in the fall.
On behalf of our OER Committee, thank you for your efforts to increase access and affordability for our students. If you have additional questions, please visit isu.edu/oer.
