The Minnesota Legislature passed a budget a month or so ago that includes funding and a directive to the MinnState public higher education system to create three zero-textbook-cost Z-Degree programs in the next academic year and report the OER and other textbook-replacement savings in two annual installments, this year and next. I think the reports that detail the changes and associated savings are going to be the really important aspect of this initiative and are going to provide a lot of good information as well as documenting effects that extend well beyond the number of students who may actually get Associate’s Degrees without spending a penny on textbooks.
Z-Degree is a very sexy meme, and I understand why attention is drawn to it. But realistically, is the goal to get students through college without spending a penny on a textbook? Or is it to reduce expenses to much more manageable levels like those of a few decades ago, before textbook publishers began increasing their prices at rates an order of magnitude greater than inflation? And should the real focus be on providing zero-textbook-cost for a few students, or on reducing costs for most or all students?
It’s obviously much more difficult to offer a Z-Degree in a Bachelor’s program, as I’ve already mentioned. There more upper-level courses where there’s less chance a viable OER text exists. But at Bemidji State University, there are also ten Liberal Education Goal Areas where students need to take courses ranging from “People of the Environment” to Math and Critical Thinking. In addition to providing a zero-textbook-cost (Z) path through the major, in order to offer a true Z-Degree in History my department would need to insure that all the departments responsible for the other goal areas offered a zero-textbook-cost course our Z students could take.
So it seems that if a university wanted to offer a Z-Degree, there would be two separate tasks to work on. First, finding a department willing to create a zero-textbook-cost path through its own major (again, we wouldn’t need to guarantee that all paths through would be Z, but at least one realistic path). Second, the Liberal Education contributors would need to provide a realistic path through all the core requirements. The legislature specified in the directive they gave MinnState that at least two courses in each transfer pathway curriculum goal had to be Z. That’s probably not a bad goal to shoot for – and these Z core courses would have to be offered frequently enough that any student could accumulate them.
I feel like I always have to say, when I talk about Z-Degrees, that I’m actually a little ambivalent about the concept. Very-low-textbook-cost (VLTC) programs seem much more realistic, much more doable, and much more likely to have really widespread impact on our students. Is it worth jumping on the Z bandwagon because that will carry us closer to our real goal of VLTC? I think it may be; especially if politicians want to throw money at trying to achieve it.
MakingHistory.blog 