Georgia State Eliminates Textbook and Material Costs for Criminal Justice Students

ATLANTA—The average four-year college student paid an estimated $1,240 for textbooks and supplies in 2021-22 while 98 percent of the 7,018 students taking criminal justice and criminology classes at Georgia State University paid next to nothing for required reading and course materials. The benefits continue as these costs have been eliminated this fall semester and into the future.

Actions taken by the Department of Criminal Justice & Criminology to advance AYS Open, an initiative to move all courses to low- and no-cost textbooks and materials, led to a $30,000 Textbook Transformation Grant from the University System of Georgia’s Affordable Learning Georgia (ALG) in 2019. The grant award launched a department-wide effort that in six semesters has saved nearly 10,300 undergraduate and graduate students more than $800,000 (est.) total.

All instructors participate, although some still use for-cost textbooks critical to how they orient or teach the class according to Professor Dean Dabney, department chair.

“We’ll eliminate those costs next by simply buying the necessary number of those texts and other essential materials that cannot be accessed for free,” he said. “Once purchased by the department, we will partner with the Georgia State Library to make them freely available to enrollees through the library’s reserve access service.”

Professor Scott Jacques initiated the planning and early forward progress of AYS Open, one of three strategic priorities of the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies’ Digital Landscape Initiative. Clinical Associate Professor Cyntoria Johnson, an early adopter, helped lead the ALG grant process.

Clinical Instructor Ellen Ballard is building the in-house text and materials repository, supports instructors and works with Georgia State’s CETLOE to develop courses with the new no-cost materials.

“Scott became a champion, encouraging others to take advantage of the grants he and Tori found,” Dabney said. “Then we sped up the process to convert more courses at a higher rate with our department resources. We identified the courses that had not yet been converted to a no-cost format and paid faculty what the ALG grant would have paid them for their time to convert their courses.”

Georgia State librarian La Loria Konata helps faculty find no-cost resources within the university library system or from online repositories external to the university. Ballard is the bridge for standardizing no-cost courses. She puts everything in a Georgia State repository so faculty can see what texts and materials they can access to tailor their version of a course the way they like.

It takes time as well as resources to make the switch, Jacques admits.

“Faculty and instructors can be hesitant, which I understand,” he said. “We’ve used for-cost materials for a long time. However, having made this change over the last two years shows it can be done. It takes time, but it also saves the students a lot of money.”

“Moving to free and low-cost materials takes nothing away from academic freedom,” Dabney said. “There are many ways an instructor can make a course no-cost. You can use an Open Educational Resources (OER) textbook online. You can go around and identify no-cost resources on your own, like government reports, multimedia, and other online resources.

“By encouraging faculty to get away from one-size-fits-all textbooks, our teaching is more in line with how the millennial student learns. Videos, reports, commentaries and short articles work much better for our students. It meets them where they are as citizens and 21st century learners.”

However, open access in practice does not require the massive culture change some would assume.

“Professors are always looking for ways to keep their courses fresh and contemporary,” Dabney said. “That’s nothing new. Open access is just a mindset that makes it more deliberate. It becomes normal to think, ‘I’m not changing 100 percent of my class, just parts of it.’ Most courses, especially those delivered in an online format, are taught in chunks and it’s easy to replace those chunks with OER textbooks or other freely available materials. More publishers are publishing eBooks, where students download the materials via a link instead of in paper form. We haven’t forced faculty to get rid of texts, they’re just using the e-version that is purchased by the GSU library.”

Dabney believes the next step for his department is to present what they’ve learned to other departments and universities through communications, training seminars and opportunities like pre-conference workshops at the American Society of Criminology or the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.

“I know of no other department-wide program like this in the country,” he said. “There’s great potential for student savings as we communicate the benefits and practice of building courses around no-cost textbooks and materials nationwide to our colleagues.”

The department is also looking for funding to evaluate the pedagogical impact of what it has achieved.

“We will need to determine how students feel about low- and no-cost learning, and how it may impact their learning,” Dabney said. “Obviously, they’re happy to pay less money, but are they getting the same quality education and are learning outcomes as good? We will work to find the funding necessary to evaluate its impact and turn it into a model others can use.”

If you’d like to help support students and remove barriers to education, you can make a tax-deductible gift at giving.gsu.edu/aysopen.