InCite

In the first issues of InCITE, we introduced NACS Media Solutions' (NMS) efforts to provide stores with access to the right tools to meet faculty and students' demands. This month we are going to discuss the core academic mission within our industry—the information about course material adoptions. This topic is especially important in the context of the upcoming Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) requirements for campuses regarding course materials and existing state laws already in effect.

The Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 requires that by July 2010, institutions of higher education receiving federal financial assistance must provide students with timely and accurate course material information. This information includes ISBN and retail price for each course listed in the institution's course schedule. College stores should work with the registrar's office to take responsibility for meeting the HEOA requirements, related to course materials for their campus. At nearly every campus, it is the college store that completes the hard work of matching course sections and ISBN's, researching and validating adoption information before it is posted for students, and working with faculty to ensure adoption decisions meet the requirements of the course and their student needs. The store should retain this core academic mission. If the information is passed off to another office on campus to handle the HEOA requirements, the larger goals of the legislation in making course materials more affordable and utilized by students will be greatly diminished and students will get hurt by inaccurate information. Further, the store could become unknowingly or knowingly disintermediated from its stakeholders depending how the information is made available.

College stores should also take on the responsibility of tracking adoptions for courses which utilize materials that may not be available to or provided through the store. This includes digital materials supplied through publisher websites or through learning management systems, as well as free open source adoptions. In the past, some faculty may not have made the store aware of such adoptions but HEOA now requires institutions, and by extension faculty, to provide this information to college stores.

The way that course material information is provided to students will vary by institution. For example, an institution can satisfy the HEOA requirements by providing a link to another appropriate website such as the institution's college bookstore, provided that the link is clearly and prominently located on the electronic or printed course schedule, or through more robust integrated systems that allow students to seamlessly jump from the schedule and bookstore websites for relevant information about courses. Depending on the state, some state textbook laws will also require that the course information be made available in certain ways. Depending on the laws or campus compliance designs, online retail competitors may be able to gain access to the course material information.

While many in-house and commercial applications exist to help institutions and bookstores comply with state and federal transparency requirements, NMS realizes the challenges associated with HEOA and has partnered with a company that can help institutions comply with the mandate and keep adoptions (and sales) at the college store. In March, NMS announced a partnership with Verba Software to make cutting-edge web-based tools more widely available to the campus store community. Verba offers a suite of applications called BookLink Enterprise that includes adoptions management and online price comparison tools. Verba's Adoptions Management module provides faculty with an easy-to-use book selection tool to allow more data to flow digitally into college stores with less effort by staff. The solution also fully complies with the HEOA mandate because it provides unique links for each course. The links can be copied into the course schedule, as well as syllabus, so that students can easily view the required book information including: title, author, ISBN, and retail price.

With HEOA making course materials information more publicly accessible than ever, college stores should engage the newly competitive marketplace head-on. Verba's Online Price Comparison tool is designed to help stores retain their position as students' one-stop shop for textbooks. Verba's Price Comparison application allows stores to show students how competitive bookstore pricing is, leading to better sell-through. Students can also choose to purchase from multiple retailers via the tool, which provides the store with valuable purchasing data and an affiliate commission for each referral. The data captured and provided by the Verba application can help stores identify the adoptions where they lose the most sales, which books students are most likely to purchase elsewhere, and help stores adjust pricing given marketplace conditions. Verba also offers additional analytics and predictive modeling tools that can help stores better compete against their online challengers.

As the date for complying with the HEOA requirements approaches, college stores which are owned or operated by the institution are well positioned and must play a key role in the compliance on campus and retain its academic mission, while all stores should consider the use of more sophisticated analysis tools to help keep sales at the college store. In July, more information may be available to online retail competitors so stores must take this time to prepare.