Dr. Michael Aubrey
Department of Chemistry
As the 2023-2024 academic year comes to a close, the Senate of College Councils and UT Libraries partnered to solicit nominations from students across campus to recognize instructors who increased access and equity by selecting free or low cost course materials for their classes.
Affordable Education Champions are instructors who assign free or low cost resources — like textbooks, websites, films, and more — for their courses. (Because the “low cost” definition can vary by discipline, we invited students to determine what that means for them.) Sometimes they author their own materials, and sometimes they’re able to reuse free or low cost work created by others. We share gratitude and appreciation for their commitment to fostering access to high quality education at the lowest possible cost barrier for their students.
Today, we congratulate and thank Dr. Michael Aubrey, who was nominated by his students in CH302C in the Department of Chemistry.
Dr. Aubrey grew up in Western North Carolina and attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he received a B.S. in Chemistry. He then went on to the University of California at Berkeley where he received a Ph.D. in Chemistry and where he studied the electrochemistry and electronic properties of redox active metal-organic frameworks. Dr. Aubrey was a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University and Stanford University where his research focused on synthetic inorganic and solid state chemistry before joining the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin in 2021. Dr. Aubrey’s research group focuses on the electrochemistry of materials, energy storage, and mechanochemistry. His lecture courses include undergraduate and graduate materials chemistry, inorganic chemistry, and introductory general chemistry.
When asked what led him to select free or low cost resources for his required course materials, Dr. Aubrey told us:
When I started college I could easily end up spending over $1000 per semester just on textbooks. I personally prefer reading a physical copy of a textbook. I think they allow us to step away from the distractions of phones and laptops that eBooks cannot offer, read for longer periods of time. Further more professionally authored and edited textbooks remain much higher quality than what most self-published and open access resources usually offer. While affordability is important, at a flagship university like UT Austin, the expectation is that we provide students with the best resources without compromise. I am committed to providing zero cost course materials as a long term goal, and opening course content freely to the public to expand access to higher science education.
Within Foundations of Chemistry II, we’ve come to a compromise based on my personal experience as a student. As many of my students are in their first year at UT, we time in class teaching students how to access academic resources by leveraging UT’s library resources, and discussing the history of textbooks and the value of reprints and new editions. Importantly I do not require a specific edition of the course textbooks. For Foundations of Chemistry II, there are a great many editions of the course text that have been in print since the 1980’s. Chapter’s may have been reordered and certainly typos and a errors have been corrected over the decades but the bulk of the text is verbatim identical and the fundamental concepts we cover in the course with few exceptions have been well established for nearly 75 years. Today buying an older used edition is often less expensive than renting the latest edition for the semester, more so if you sell the used book back when your done. Of course students can also just go to the library an edition of the book for zero cost.
Dr. Aubrey’s students shared with us some of the ways in which their choice to assign free or low cost resources impacted them.
“It made learning chemistry much more affordable to me; it allowed me to focus my money on other things instead, like food and essentials.”
When asked what advice he would offer other instructors who are considering transitioning their courses to more affordable materials, Dr. Aubrey told us:
First of all my honors chemistry course is not very large (~100 students) so we can manage a more personalized and flexible approach for students than may be possible in larger courses where maintaining homogeneity between sections may be more challenging. I’ve personally found the students in this course to all be very motivated and self-driven which certainly helps us encourage a more flexible approach to course materials.
In my opinion, the fundamentals of atomic theory, stoichiometry, thermodynamics, reaction kinetics, and bond theory have been well communicated to students new to the subject for nearly 75 years with little change to the fundamental theories presented. Pauling’s “General Chemistry” (1950) remains an excellent introduction to the topic and is freely available online through UT’s Library. “Advanced Batteries” by Robert Huggins is another online book available to students through UT’s library we use as a part or our course. Last but not least there are a free textbooks that we are integrating this year to supplement the course with some more advanced topics in molecular chemistry that are available through sites like Libretexts, and our Chemistry Department’s own Genchem website. My advice is to see if there are alternative affordable options that you can make students aware of before they make an expensive purchases and let the students choose what is best for them.
There is a great diversity of sources many of which our student can access for free through UT Library. I’ve found that many students are not aware of these resources, or how to effectively access them. For my first year students, a ten year old textbook or article can sound ancient in contrast to the “rapid rate of scientific progress”. Discussing and putting into historical context the content of the course helps students make informed decisions about the reference materials they will purchase. Furthermore, I think these skills will help students save on course materials in other classes as well.
Join us in thanking Dr. Aubrey for his contribution to making UT an inclusive and equitable environment where students can succeed without high course materials costs!
If you know of an instructor who is dedicated to making their courses as affordable as possible by selecting free or low cost course materials, let us know by contacting Heather Walter, Tocker Open Education Librarian (heather.walter@austin.utexas.edu)
