Affordability and Accessibility of Instructional Materials - Thank you!

Greetings everyone,

Thank you for your commitment to bringing affordable and accessible course materials to our students.  Your time and effort with regard to this particular State Board of Education initiative is helping to create increased access for our students and has saved them thousands of dollars on instructional materials.  

This semester, Spring 2023, is the first semester that ISU’s course scheduling system has provided the option of adding course material cost attributes to course sections. With this new data, we are now able to track this information for the entire campus.  We appreciate your taking the time to add these section attributes to the Spring schedule.  

We are pleased to announce that in this first semester of implementation, ISU is offering 232 course sections with zero, very-low, or low-cost instructional materials.  These courses are currently serving 3,694 students and the decreased instructional material costs are potentially saving students thousands of dollars.  More importantly, this initiative reduces barriers to higher education and increases retention especially for first-generation, limited-income college students.  Low to no instructional material costs, when they are available, have the real potential of increasing pass rates and graduation rates, creating life-changing opportunities for our students.  

 Idaho State University is continuing to financially support faculty in this endeavor.  For the second year in a row, we awarded 10 faculty affordability stipends to create, modify, or adopt OER resources (or very low-cost options) to replace more expensive textbooks.  

Please consider adding course material cost attributes to your Fall 2023 course sections, when applicable.  Go to isu.edu/oer for additional information regarding this initiative. 

Thank you for all that you do to support students and fulfill the mission of ISU.

–– The Office of the Provost and the Open Educational Resource (OER) Committee