It is well known that college textbook prices in the United States have skyrocketed for decades, at times outpacing even medical services and home prices. As a result, course material affordability and access has become an equity issue for a generation of students. However, in recent years the landscape has started to change, in part driven by the textbook industry’s shift toward the "Inclusive Access" model, which automatically bills students for digital textbooks. While these programs advertise many short term benefits, the industry’s legacy of rising prices makes it more important than ever to examine the long term implications.

Join us for this upcoming webcast on May 24th at 3 pm ET, as InclusiveAccess.org traces the history of how high textbook prices evolved, how the market is changing, and how higher education leaders can apply lessons from the past to the future.

This event is a public lecture component of the Knowledge Equity and Justice Spring Seminar.

Anasuya Sengupta is Co-Director and co-founder of Whose Knowledge?, a global multilingual campaign to centre the knowledges of marginalised communities (the minoritised majority of the world) online. She has led initiatives across the global South, and internationally for over 20 years, to collectively create feminist presents and futures of love, justice, and liberation. She is committed to unpacking issues of power, privilege, and access, including her own as an anti-caste savarna woman. She is the former Chief Grantmaking Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, and the former Regional Program Director at the Global Fund for Women. Anasuya is a 2017 Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, and received a 2018 Internet and Society award from the Oxford Internet Institute. She is on the Scholars’ Council for UCLA’s Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, and the advisory committee for MIT’s Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship (CREOS). Anasuya holds an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. She also has a BA in Economics (Honours) from Delhi University. When not rabble-rousing online, Anasuya makes and breaks pots and poems, takes long walks by the water and in the forest, and contorts herself into yoga poses.

This event is a public lecture component of the Knowledge Equity and Justice Spring Seminar.

Speakers

Stefanie Haustein is associate professor at the School of Information Studies (ÉSIS) at University of Ottawa. She also co-directs the Scholarly Communications Lab (ScholCommLab), an interdisciplinary team of researchers based in Ottawa and Vancouver, Canada. Her research focuses on scholarly communication, bibliometrics, and open scholarship.

Leigh-Ann Butler is a Master’s student at ÉSIS and member of the ScholCommLab, conducting thesis work on article processing charges paid for gold and hybrid open access articles by Canadian researchers to the oligopoly of academic publishers. Leigh-Ann is also a policy analyst at the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

Crucial work to advance open education is happening across U.S. higher education. Despite the significant impact these initiatives have, many barriers stand in the way of collaboration across campuses, stakeholder groups, and states. This special Open Education Week webcast will focus in on the issue of “silos” within the open education field: where barriers to collaboration exist, what factors can perpetuate them, and strategies to breaking them down. Featuring speakers who have successfully navigated siloes in their own institutions, states, and regions, this lively discussion will share insights based on best practices and explore how the open education movement can best build a field free of silos.

Speakers:

• Dr. Robert Awkward, Assistant Commissioner for Academic Effectiveness for the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education

• Jenny Parks, Vice President of Midwestern Higher Education Compact

• Dr. Lisa Young, Faculty Director for The Center for Teaching and Learning at Scottsdale Community College, Arizona

• Moderator: Trudi Radtke, Open Education Project Manager, SPARC

Click this link to access the webcast recording.