Utah Adopts Strengthened Learning Materials Affordability Policy
This summer, the Utah Board of Higher Education revised its learning materials policy to strengthen protections for students and expand support for faculty. The revised Policy R465 sets clear rules for programs that automatically charge students for course materials through tuition and fees, and it requires every institution in the Utah System of Higher Education to maintain a plan for course material affordability that gets reported to the Commissioner annually.
Among its provisions, the revised policy:
Requires institutions with automatic charge programs to prioritize “benefits to students over financial or other benefits to the institution,” including by minimizing the impact of these programs on faculty use of OER, offering students an à la carte purchase option if they opt out of a flat-rate program, and ensuring that any advertised savings are accurately represented
Requires that institutional plans include strategies for course marking in order to provide provide students with transparent information about course material prices and automatic charges
Requires that institutional plans address how they will offer professional development and incentives for faculty who adopt, adapt, create, and share OER, and explicitly allows institutions to count that work toward tenure and promotion
Adopts a strong definition of OER as “teaching, learning, and research materials that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits free use and repurposing.”
"Everything in this policy comes back to the student," said TJ Bliss, chief academic officer for the Utah System of Higher Education. "Utah institutions have been building toward affordable learning materials for years, and this policy protects that work. We wanted strong guardrails on automatic charges, because affordability only works if faculty still have real support and freedom to adopt and adapt open materials. I hope to see institutions come out of this with concrete strategies that connect affordable materials directly to student success."
Librarians and faculty have laid significant groundwork for affordability across Utah. A committee of the Utah Academic Library Consortium coordinates OER efforts across the state's colleges and universities. At Salt Lake Community College, students can already search for courses with no-cost or low-cost textbooks when they register, and the college reports $37.5 million in student savings since its Open SLCC initiative began in 2014. Utah Tech University has widely implemented OER in its general education courses and saves students an estimated $600,000 a year.
The revised policy draws inspiration from Idaho’s Policy III.U on instructional material access and affordability, which was also updated this year. States reviewing their own approach to course material affordability can look to provisions in both of these policies as excellent models.
