As you know, affordability is a major challenge in higher education that can hold significant financial concerns. Although tuition and housing are often identified as the largest expenses for students, course materials expenses can be uniquely burdensome. 

What can you do as a student to impact affordable learning options at Seattle University?

Review required course materials as part of your registration/course selection process

• Review your syllabus carefully to determine required materials for the course
• Visit your bookstore website to review their affordable offerings including:
  • digital textbook rentals
  • printed textbook rentals
  • used textbooks
  • textbook buyback programs

Become an advocate for affordable learning initiatives on campus

• Become active in Student Government on campus
  • Connect with your SGSU representatives to ask for legislation or support for affordable learning initiatives
• Explore the Textbook Options support provided by the Lemieux Library and McGoldrick Learning Commons.
• Encourage your faculty to consider low or no-cost course materials, or the adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER) as part of their courses.
  • Make Textbooks Affordable (via Student PIRGs)
  • Student Advocacy on Twitter's #Textbookbroke (via Twitter/X)
  • Student Government Toolkit - Making Textbooks Affordable (Open Textbook Alliance)
  • Faculty Textbook Handout (Open Textbook Alliance)

Check Open Educational Resources (OERs)

Below are links to resources for locating Open Educational Resources (OERs). OERs are educational materials that can be used and re-used freely, because they're either in the public domain or are openly licensed. Can be reused, revised, remixed, and redistributed due to the author’s/creator’s pre-selection of a creative commons license. This license allows other interested parties to use the resource as they wish, but places stipulations on those permissions like attribution, share alike, and non-commercial. OERs can also be called open textbooks or open source textbooks. 

Google Books

Provides online access to full-text books in the public domain. Use the drop-down menu to limit your results to “full text,” and check the date to ensure that the item is in the public domain.

Project Gutenberg

Find more than 34,000 full-text eBooks in the public domain. In other words, no individual owns these works; rather, they are owned by the public. What does that mean exactly? Simply, anyone can use a public domain work without obtaining permission and without citing the original author, but no one can ever own it.

Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)

DOAB is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers. All DOAB services are free of charge and all data is freely available.