Rose State Provides Low Cost – No Cost Textbook Option for Students Published June 27, 2017

Student Success at the Forefront for Faculty

Midwest City, Okla. - Students will now benefit from a two-year labor of love as Rose State offers low-cost, no-cost textbook options for English composition coursework.

The latest textbook was written by Rose State English Professor, Kevin Caliendo. The nearly 250 page book can be accessed online at NO cost or students can pay only $15 for a print version which covers the cost of printing.

The new textbook can be utilized for more than just one class as it was written for curriculum in English Composition I and English Composition II at Rose State. “For some time the writing program [at Rose State] has had a goal of customizing a composition handbook for our courses that aligned with the course objectives and it was one of the greatest honors of my professional life to write a book that pursues that goal,” stated Dr. Kevin Caliendo.

“One of our roles as educators is to ensure our students have the tools they need to succeed, but the costs of  mounting tuition, fees and textbooks overwhelm too many students,” stated Rose State’s Dean of Humanities, Claudia Buckmaster. “Our goal has been to cut costs where we can to ensure financial hardships are not preventing students from getting their educations.” 

Rose State is not alone in this effort to reduce the burden of education by centering on course materials. Higher education institutions across the country are turning to alternatives such as open textbooks – those that are online and free to download in order to provide more resources. At Rose State, the reader used in the composition classes in correlation with the new handbook written by Dr. Caliendo was developed using open source resources with original material created by English faculty.

A national college student survey released in 2014 by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Foundation found that 65% of respondents said they didn’t purchase a textbook because it was too expensive – even though most feared that their grades would suffer. That report suggesting the average student spends as much as $1,200 each year on textbooks and supplies alone.

Faculty within Rose State’s Engineering and Science Division are now in the process of writing a student biology textbook.