2022 Annual Report

Executive Summary

• Affordable Learning Georgia’s combined impact since its inception in 2014 has included more than $143 million in textbook cost savings through the Affordable Materials Grants program and our OER partnership with eCampus, affecting over 1.1 million student enrollments in USG courses.
• Affordable Materials Grants have saved students over $119 million in textbook costs, with ALG grant projects creating $15.39 in student textbook cost savings by USG faculty and staff for every dollar awarded.
• eCampus OER partnerships with ALG have saved students over $24 million in textbook costs.
• Over 30,000 course sections had no-cost or low-cost materials attributes in institutions’ course schedules this year, but there is still room for improvement in reporting and displaying these attributes correctly.
• A total of 29 teams in the Transformation Grants category saved 7,400 students an estimated $960,000 in student textbook costs just over the course of the project.
• 100% of teams saw overall positive student responses to the new materials.
• Like with past years, teams reported mostly positive or neutral learning outcomes compared to previous semesters, control groups, and/or instructor and departmental averages with a commercial textbook while saving students money on textbook costs.
• Teams similarly reported largely positive or neutral course-level retention and/or DFW rates compared to previous semesters, control groups, and/or instructor and departmental averages with a commercial textbook.
• Students who gave positive reviews of the new materials in courses often commented on cost and relevance (to the course and to their overall career goals/lives) as positive aspects of the new materials, but a new feature emerged as a favorite in positive 2022 student quotes: engaging educational materials.

Student Savings on Course Materials

As of Spring 2023, Affordable Learning Georgia’s textbook affordability programs have enabled USG faculty and staff to save students more than $143 million on textbook costs through the Affordable Materials Grants program and our OER partnership with eCampus, affecting over 1.1 million student enrollments in USG courses.

• Affordable Materials Grants have saved students over $119 million in textbook costs. Grant savings data are created by faculty and then gathered and analyzed at ALG through awarded grant project proposals, final reports, and yearly sustainability checks.
• ALG projects yield $15.39 in student savings by USG faculty and staff for every dollar awarded.
• eCampus OER partnerships with ALG have saved students over $24 million in textbook costs. Partnerships include the full implementation of OER across eCore courses and specific eMajor projects such as a full-OER Organizational Leadership degree with three different tracks. eCampus savings data are reported to ALG directly from eCampus.

Affordable Materials Grants Dashboard

No-Cost and Low-Cost Materials Banner Attributes

About Attributes

In the course schedule and registration system for the USG, Banner, institutions are required to assign the appropriate attribute to sections of courses where required course materials exclusively consist of no-cost materials ($0 required materials costs) or low-cost materials ($40 or under required materials costs). "Materials" are defined as digital and print textbooks, other text-based materials, workbooks, lab manuals, online homework platforms, and access codes or other publisher-provided curricular materials for students.

Excluded from the no-cost and low-cost caps are equipment, such as art supplies, calculators, or physical lab materials, and fees for online test proctoring or online labs.

No-Cost and Low-Cost attributes continue to have reporting issues:

• Each institution has a different reporting structure for Banner attributes, whether faculty report it themselves, office assistants enter the data, department chairs or deans enter the data, bookstores enter the data, or the registrars themselves are responsible for all attribute entry.
• Low-Cost attributes in particular are most likely under-reported: chances are high that far more than 3-5% of course sections use materials that have a cost under $40.
• Institutions are improving on making No-Cost and Low-Cost attributes more visible to students in the course schedule, but some browsing and search issues still persist.

2022 Attribute Data

The following are counts of sections with the No-Cost (ZNCM) and Low-Cost (ZLCM) attributes in Banner in comparison to the total section count for each semester of 2022. These counts include eCore sections, which are 100% no-cost due to an OER partnership with ALG.

Trends and Standout Institutions

State colleges and state universities report more low-cost and no-cost materials sections as a percentage of their total number of sections available. A few factors may contribute to this:

• A higher proportion of introductory course sections to the total amount of course sections offered. Introductory courses are more easily addressed with OER due to more open materials created addressing these high-enrollment courses.
• A more centralized system of reporting course attributes, as compared to larger institutions with far more faculty and courses to manage in Banner.
• A difference in core missions, with state colleges and state universities focusing on an accessible and affordable education. While all USG institutions address this in their missions, research institutions in particular have a more varied set of strategic priorities.

Standout institutions in reporting no-cost and low-cost sections in 2022 include:

• Savannah State University: 65% (1,407) affordable materials sections, with 57% (1,244) no-cost materials sections and 8% (163) low-cost materials sections.
• University of West Georgia: 53% (3,311) affordable materials sections, with 50% (3121) no-cost materials sections and 3% (190) low-cost materials sections.
• Dalton State College: 53% (1,335) affordable materials sections, with 48% (1,227) no-cost materials sections and 4% (108) low-cost materials sections.

Affordable Materials Grants

Affordable Learning Georgia’s Affordable Materials Grants are intended to pilot different approaches in University System of Georgia (USG) courses in reducing the cost of course materials to students. Approaches include the adoption, adaptation, and creation of open educational resources (OER), the adoption of all-rights-reserved no-cost or low-cost materials, and the adoption of materials available through GALILEO and USG libraries at no additional cost to students. The grants support release time or salary/overload, extra staff assistance (instructional designers, librarians, etc.), materials, and professional development needed for faculty to transform their use of learning materials.

Two rounds of Affordable Materials Grants resulted in 39 completed projects from teams of USG faculty and staff at USG institutions. This is a slight increase over calendar year 2021, where 30 Transformation Grants projects ended. All grant projects, along with a collection of their proposals, syllabi, and final reports, are included in OpenALG and GALILEO Open Learning Materials repositories.

There are two types of Affordable Materials Grants: Transformation Grants, where expensive commercial materials are replaced with open, no-cost, and/or low-cost materials, and Continuous Improvement Grants, where open, no-cost, and/or low-cost materials courses are improved by substantial revisions to materials or the creation of new materials. For Transformation Grants, project teams submitted final reports at the end of their final semester, during which all implemented materials were taught within the course. Final reports included quotes from students and professors, data on student performance, drop/fail/withdrawal rates, and measures of student perceptions of course materials. Including savings estimates, this data meets all four attributes of the Open Education Group’s COUP Framework, measuring cost, outcomes, usage, and perceptions in each implementation.

Transformation Grants

Savings

During the course of their initial implementation, grant projects ending in 2022 affected an enrolled 7,400 students, and projects saved those students an estimated $960,000 in student textbook costs just over the course of the project. With teams indicating that these materials or other affordable materials will be used in future semesters, a high sustainability of these student savings is anticipated over at least the next academic year.

Grantee Experiences

Final reports continue to support the idea that projects implementing open, no-cost, and low-cost materials adoption activities are valuable tools in building affordable and sustainable learning materials practices among faculty with positive benefits for students. Not only did the course redesign make resources more affordable, the process of redesigning the course and aligning affordable resources toward learning outcomes often improved instruction.

“Several of my students commented that the materials were high-quality and interesting, and they liked that they were free. The peer review activities were particularly well received by students -- many of them said they had never done peer review this way before and that this was the first class in which they had found peer review helpful. When planning my class, I liked that there was an abundance of materials from which to choose.”– Dr. Christine Harkreader, Kennesaw State University

Project Leads indicated in reports that the activity of redesigning a course with affordable resources enhanced their teaching and learning experiences, including instances of pedagogy that only open resources could enable (Open Pedagogy).

“We had students go back to course tabs from other semesters to rewatch [student-created] videos, retrieve lesson plan templates, etc. In the future, we hope to connect to future student coursework in purposeful and powerful ways as well."– Faculty Member in Dr. Ariel Cornett’s team, Georgia Southern University

Student Satisfaction

Teams reported that students were highly satisfied with the new materials. Student quotes highlighted satisfaction with the reduction in stress associated with having required materials with low or zero cost, the relevance of the materials to what they were expected to learn, and the engaging qualities of implementations with ancillary and multimedia materials.

In 2022, every team (100%) reported overall positive student perceptions.

"I did not have to worry and stress about purchasing a book, and the book is easily accessible." – Student of Dr. Addie Martindale, Georgia Southern University

Student Learning Outcomes

Comparing student performance in a course before and after an Affordable Materials Grant always includes a caveat that multiple confounding variables will intersect with any associations between one change in a course and learning outcomes. However, we can determine from the 2022 Final Reports that the implementation of affordable materials did not adversely affect learning outcomes overall, and in many cases teams saw positive changes.

Out of 29 teams who measured student learning outcomes, 18 teams (62%) reported positive significant changes to student achievement in comparison to control groups, previous semesters, faculty averages, and/or departmental averages, while 9 teams (31%) saw no significant changes to outcomes with the new affordable materials. Only two teams (7%) saw negative changes. This is a baseline positive shift of 55% on overall learning outcomes while using free and/or affordable materials, which is very similar to previous years of reporting on student learning outcomes in Affordable Materials Grants projects.

“All of your assignments have been straightforward and easy to understand... I also really appreciate the workbook/study guide you provided for the class. That is something I have asked of my professors in the past because it can sometimes be difficult to understand what to focus on... It was also swell to not have any exams and to have all our assignments open notes and free of charge."–Student of Dr. Shelby Frost, Georgia State University

Course-Level Retention Rates

Comparisons of course-level retention rates were similar to student learning outcomes. Out of 27 teams who measured DFW rates, 15 teams (55.55%) reported positive significant changes, 9 teams (33.33%) reported no changes, and 3 teams (11.11%) reported negative changes, which is slightly improved in comparison to last year’s reports. This is a baseline positive shift of 44% on course-level retention while using free and/or affordable materials.

“I personally think that the personal use of no-cost/low-cost instructional resources make it more likely for students to succeed. College is expensive enough on its own, so providing low or no-cost resources make it more accessible for students to study and succeed in their courses. The resources in this course made it much easier for me to find information and use it in my assignments.”– Student of Dr. Daniel Farr, Kennesaw State University

Continuous Improvement Grants

Continuous Improvement Grant projects focus on an increase in the sustainability of open, no-cost, and low-cost materials courses through substantive revisions and creations of open materials. While the focus of a Continuous Improvement Grant is to ensure that courses are able to continue the use of affordable materials, any new or revised open materials are also shared with the public, enabling more faculty to adopt these materials in the future.

Materials created through Continuous Improvement Grants during Calendar Year 2022 include:

• Introduction to Biology II Lab Manual, Georgia Highlands College
• Introduction to Advertising: Advertising Practices, University of West Georgia
• Aquí y Allí: Introductory Spanish II, Clayton State University
• Circuits I Lab Manual and Ancillary Materials, Kennesaw State University

Lessons Learned

Each final report contains a section within the narrative document for lessons learned. From these 2022 reports, Affordable Learning Georgia has reached the following overall conclusions when implementing open, no-cost, or low-cost materials to replace a commercial textbook in a course.

When evaluating the quality of materials or planning on the creation or adaptation of new materials, focus on the relevance of these materials to your students. While faculty assessments of quality often diverge on what quality means, often because of differences in subject matter or pedagogical techniques, students continued to assess materials positively based on relevance, whether saying a resource was streamlined, to the point, practical, concise, and/or related directly to assignments and exams.

Future projects should strive to relate new course materials to students’ overall experience with the course; students like clear connections between instructional materials and assessments, for example. Students also appreciate the connection between materials and their career paths or their own lived experiences.

"I found most of them very helpful, but some of them did not show all or any of the things we were supposed to be identifying for our [practical exams].” – Student of Dr. Diana Botnaru, Georgia Southern University

"As a nursing major, I liked having data and statistics from the medical fields in the textbook examples, especially COVID data.” – Student of Dr. James Bellon, University of West Georgia

As instruction moves increasingly online, engaging materials are being recognized as helpful by students. 2022 Final Reports saw a surge in positive student responses concerning materials they found to be engaging in an online, digital format. Students recognized engaging materials in a variety of ways, including diverse formats (such as supplementary videos) and collaborative, impactful projects (such as student peer review activities).

"Hands on practice and visuals are key in my learning experience and the labs this semester certainly were helpful with learning and engaging.” – Student of Dr. Leonard Anagho, Georgia Gwinnett College

Plan on ongoing development after the project: This year, a majority of the lessons learned that were shared in final reports were split on themes between time constraints and the need to make further revisions to the project after the implementation semester.

If possible, ALG recommends new projects to plan for a pilot implementation semester before the final semester. Having a full semester of testing the materials can lead to a more successful full implementation in the final semester after revisions take place. Otherwise, these types of revisions can be built into a proposal’s Sustainability Plan.

"...the biggest challenge in developing the Math Primer was in the production of video content… When it comes to developing video content in Fall or Spring semesters, even with the help of Student Assistants, producing content at our desired quality level was not possible. We plan to address this by using the Summer 2022 term to focus on the development of video content and using the Fall and Spring semesters to update text content and assessments.” – Dr. David Hu, Georgia Institute of Technology

Conclusions

The 2022 Final Reports once again confirmed that the implementation of affordable materials did not adversely affect student s, performance, or course-level retention while improving affordability, and project teams more often saw improvements than they saw declines in either learning outcomes or retention.

Like in 2021, students who gave positive reviews of the new materials in courses often commented on the relevance of the materials (to the course and to their overall career goals/lives) as a quality indicator, but in 2022 they mentioned engaging materials far more than before. As students increasingly engage with materials in a digital, online format, whether in an in-person, hybrid, or online course, instructors will need to focus more on creating materials that both inform and intrigue them.

"I really appreciate having video lectures rather than something for us to read. It felt like we were in class." - Student of Donna Mullenax, Georgia Southern University

"The Study Plan gave me a sense of direction. Something that I've always struggled with writing was I was never taught in a way that I was able to grasp the concept... whether that would be physically in class: video/ live (zoom) lecture/ presentation, online or a mix of. Though I believe it's not just the study plan that determines the student’s success—It's a mix of how the professor engages with the students, the material they teach in the in-class portion and how the professor teacher their course material coordinating with the online portion of it and the study guide that has been created.” – Student of Dr. Tamara Powell, Kennesaw State University

Note on Analysis Challenges

Variation will occur with the number of semesters of data used and whether averages calculated were department-wide or instructor-specific. Confounding factors when measuring learning outcomes and retention efficacy can include differences in student composition between semesters, enrollment shifts, and organizational complications due to institutional consolidations.

Open Licensing

This report by Affordable Learning Georgia is under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.