To avoid the last-minute struggle to find resources for high-cost textbooks, consider adopting OER (Open Educational Resources). Often, they are faculty-developed course materials, but more generally, they are "teaching, learning and research materials in any medium in the public domain or which have been released under an open license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others." (SBCTC). If you are looking for a good place to start, try the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) site on OER. There are resources, including the Open Course Library with materials ready to adopt in 81 high-enrollment courses, as well grants for developing additional materials. While OER approaches are not available in every discipline and don't address the non-textbook materials required for some programs, they are a good start.
If you are interested in developing and using OER content, you can get help from the eLearning Department and/or your liaison Librarian.
Here's an OER success story from SCC Language faculty Erin Huebener and Diamond Wilson. Their Spanish OER has saved students at SCC alone $197,010, and the French OER has saved students at SCC $37,945. These figures do not include the savings to students at over 30 other institutions where these OER are being used or have been adopted, places of learning such as Indiana State University, California State University Channel Islands, and even Yantai Huasheng International School in China. See the following infographic developed by Diamond Wilson.
Here's what Erin Huebener says about her work in the books's note:
With all of the expertly written and edited Spanish textbooks on the market (most of which are accompanied by beautiful interactive websites), many instructors enjoy and trust the quality, ready-made materials that large publishers offer. I know this because I was one of them.
However, over time I grew concerned about the cost of my traditional textbook. Even after “bundling” my book into three-chapter packets for each term, at approximately one hundred dollars per quarter, many of my students were unable to purchase the book when classes started, if at all. I witnessed the cost of my book impact student success in my courses time and time again.
With this in mind, I began to examine how much value the book and companion website were adding to my students’ educational experience. After polling my students and doing a lot of self-refection, the answer was this: my students were paying for a lot of features and materials that they weren’t using, and there was a general dislike for the book and its website. Having taught with several other books over the years, I felt confident these issues were not specific to our current text. It was time to look for a solution, and the answer was to adopt Open Educational Resources.
In my research, I found some great low-cost materials; however, my goal was to find something I could adapt to fit my teaching style that was editable, printable, and no-cost beyond printing. Coming up empty-handed, I decided to write this book and to publish it under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license so that others may use, adapt, and share this material.