Textbook Affordability Project Administered by the University Library

About Dr. Reto Felix

Dr. Reto Felix is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Robert C. Vackar College of Business and Entrepreneurship at UTRGV. Originally a native of Germany, he holds a master in marketing and PhD in management from the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. From 1997-1998, he stayed as a visiting scholar at the Monterrey Tec (ITESM) in Monterrey, Mexico. In 1999, he accepted a job offer as a marketing faculty at Universidad de Monterrey (UDEM), Mexico, where he stayed until 2013. Meanwhile, in 2003, he was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, for one year. In 2013, he accepted a job offer in the Marketing Department at UTRGV.

Dr. Felix has been teaching a variety of courses at UTRGV, including Principles of Marketing and Social Media and eMarketing (undergraduate), Marketing Strategy and Marketing Research (master), and Research Methods (PhD). His research interests focus on environmentally-friendly consumption and issues related to emerging technologies, such as AR and VR. He has published articles in academic journals such as Journal of International Marketing, Journal of Business Research, International Marketing Review, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Brand Management, Journal of Marketing Management, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, International Journal of Consumer Studies, Journal of Consumer Marketing, Journal of Consumer Behaviour, Journal of Macromarketing, Computers in Human Behavior, and Psychology & Marketing, and he has presented his work at conferences hosted by AMA (American Marketing Association) and ACR (Association for Consumer Research).

Project

For the Fall 2022 semester, Dr. Felix redesigned his MARK 4360 Social Media and eMarketing course based on an open educational resource (OER) textbook available through the Open Textbook Library. The authors, a group of marketing experts at a Marketing Agency in South Africa, came out with a new edition of their openly licensed textbook in July of 2022, just in time to integrate this latest edition into his course for the Fall 2022 semester. Dr. Felix was impressed by the quality of this freely available textbook, which in his opinion easily compared to or even exceeded the quality of textbooks from commercial textbook providers, such as Pearson, McGraw-Hill, or Cengage.

Course Redesign Experience

According to Dr. Felix, redesigning and rebuilding the course based on an OER textbook was a gratifying endeavor, given that it would decrease costs for students quite substantially. However, it was also time-intensive since typical OER textbooks, including the one used for this course, do not typically come with supplemental materials. Hence, generating additional materials, such as Powerpoint slides and quizzes, became quite time-consuming.

Student Feedback

Students very much appreciated the inclusion of an OER textbook. Dr. Felix believes that costs for learning materials are a major concern for many of our students, and using OER learning materials addresses this need.

Reflections

Overall Dr. Felix believes adopting an OER textbook is gratifying, but it also requires good time management, given that many supplemental learning materials typically need to be developed from scratch. A clear advantage of OER textbooks is indeed their flexibility. For example, instructors can adopt the complete textbook, or they can “cut and paste” only specific chapters or sections of a book for inclusion in their existing course without cost.