Textbook shopping got even simpler for some students: Download at the click of a button without a cent leaving your bank account. This is made possible by using free open educational resources, including three recently published textbooks written by DePaul faculty members.
Funded by a $150,000 grant from the Illinois State Library and facilitated by the Consortium of Academic Research Libraries of Illinois, faculty, staff and students spent the past two years creating textbooks tailored to DePaul students’ needs. These free course materials are estimated to save students approximately $234,000 over the next three years. The textbooks include:
- “Back of the Yards: Histories & Contexts of a Chicago Neighborhood” by Aaron Lefkovitz, a teaching professor of history.
- “Business and Professional Communication” by Kristen Pengelly, a professional lecturer in the College of Communication.
- “Decentering Theater Histories” by faculty from The Theatre School: Coya Paz Brownrigg, Reza Mirsajadi, and Emilio Williams.
The textbooks are now available for students and faculty to use in classrooms at no cost.
Open Educational Resources are learning, teaching and research materials that are either in the public domain or have been released under an open license to use, adapt and redistribute at no cost.
According to a 2023 CARLI student survey, which 275 DePaul students completed, expensive textbooks are both economic and educational barriers for students. Survey respondents said that they might forgo buying textbooks in favor of basic necessities like groceries, increasing the likelihood of the student failing or withdrawing from a course.
“Some students are completely funding their education or supporting their families. So they might wait until payday to buy a book or not buy it all,” explains Kelly Hallisy, a scholarly communications librarian at DePaul. “That can have big ramifications on their performance in the classroom.”
Open Educational Resources make higher education more affordable and accessible to students. These free class materials also include features that students need, such as screen reader accessibility, lifetime access and compatibility with both computers and mobile devices.
Tailoring textbooks to DePaul
Faculty members creating these textbooks for DePaul students tailored the content to their students' needs and their areas of expertise, while maintaining academic depth and rigor. Williams introduced the idea of replacing the cost-prohibitive, outdated anthology of plays used in the History of Dramatic Literature class with an open textbook tailored to the needs of the course, offering deeper historical context and global perspectives. He enlisted Brownrigg and Mirsajadi to help write the three sections of the textbook.
“Creating this textbook presented a very unique opportunity to push back against the Eurocentricity of a lot of the existing theatre history texts and offer a more expansive version of performance history,” Mirsajadi says.
The project was a collaborative effort, and the team included librarians, staff from DePaul’s Center for Teaching and Learning and faculty peer-reviewers from other universities. Students gave feedback on drafts, copyedited the texts, and created cover art.
Animation student Jess Correa, lead artist and graphic designer for the project, designed the textbooks’ cover art and illustrations. Connected to the project through DePaul’s DIGI Lab, Correa worked with each faculty member to create images that supported their educational goals. Each book was unique, she says.
“For the Back of the Yards book, I liked playing with creating a more realistic environment and capturing the expressions of people protesting for what they needed in their community. The communication textbook gave me the opportunity to use a program I wasn’t very familiar with, and the theatre textbook was more about integrating elements from the plays into the artwork,” Correa says.
Correa says the experience expanded her career goals, as she used new programs and techniques, and worked with a client on educational materials at the DIGI Lab, Correa expanded career goals. Correa hopes to apply this experience to help land a job after graduation, incorporate it into her passion projects and even submit some animations to film festivals in Chicago.
This project starts a journey for DePaul to build a more structured OER program, including more opportunities for faculty members to get involved with creating OERs. Any faculty members interested in onboarding onto DePaul’s OER publishing platforms should contact Kelly Hallisy.
To access the faculty-created open textbooks, visit DePaul’s Pressbooks website.