Program provides free, reduced-price textbooks

OLYMPIA — Students at Big Bend Community College, and all Washington community and technical colleges, could have access to free materials in 81 courses thanks to a cost -cutting project.

The Open Course Library offers complete course materials, down to the textbooks, for 81 courses taught at community colleges, according to a prepared statement from the state Board of Community and Technical Colleges. Most of the material is free to the users. Students could be charged for some textbooks, with a $30 maximum charge.

“Basically, it’s an entire course online,” said Tim Fuhrman, dean of information resources at BBCC. Available courses cover sciences and liberal arts and range from accounting to music, French to chemistry.

“What really kills our students is the price of textbooks,” Fuhrman said. The Open Course Library, paid for by the state Legislature and a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is designed to help combat some of those costs. “That’s the whole idea, to get lower costs for students,” he said.

Fuhrman said the program is still relatively new, with 39 courses released for use Tuesday. The first 42 courses were released in October 2011.

The program is linked to social media and students can access it from a phone or on Facebook, he said. “It has a lot of potential.”

Because courses are still being added and the project was switched to a new computer program, professors are still getting used to it, Furhman said. Faculty members will get a detailed look at it sometime this spring, he said.