In light of rising textbook prices, open education resources (OER) have been shown to decrease non-tuition costs, while simultaneously increasing academic access, student performance, and time-to-graduation rates. Yet very little research to date has explored OER's specific impact on those who are presumed to benefit most from this potential: historically underserved students. This reality has left a significant gap of understanding in the current body of literature, resulting in calls for more empirically-based examinations of OER through a social justice lens. For each of these reasons, this study explored the impact of OER and textbook pricing among racial/ethnic minority students, low-income students, and first-generation college students at a four-year Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) in Southern California. Drawing upon more than 700 undergraduate surveys, our univariate, bivariate and multivariate results revealed textbook costs to be a substantial barrier for the vast majority of students. However, those barriers were even more significant among historically underserved college students; thus, confirming textbook affordability as a redistributive justice issue, and positing OER as a potential avenue for realizing a more socially just college experience.

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The implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) in work is increasingly common across industries and professions. This study explores professional discourse around perceptions and use of intelligent technologies in the legal industry. Drawing on institutional theory, we conducted 30 semi-structured interviews with legal professionals and semi-professionals in varying roles including lawyers, law librarians, legal staff (paralegals, document clerks), and law students. Their discursive accounts provided evidence for three institutional logics—expertise, accessibility, and efficiency—that guided their understanding and use of AI. Our analysis further revealed that legal professionals and semi-professionals held contradictory attitudes towards intelligent technologies and invoked contradictory institutional logics. These findings contribute to theory on institutional logics and digital transformation, providing insights into how occupational roles and institutional logics shape professionals’ discursive construction of intelligent technologies, and how discursive tensions are redefining professional boundaries and contributing to institutional change in knowledge-intensive work.

Nitzan Navick obtained a B.A. in Psychology from California State University Channel Islands. She is now a post-bacc student working on a new, original study and will be entering the MA/PhD in Communication Program at UCSB in Fall of 2019. Currently, she works as a grant coordinator for Projects iPath and Adelante at CSU Channel Islands, two Title V grant sub-awards dedicated to increasing the 4-year college attendance rate among community college students in Ventura County-particularly students from historically underserved groups. Her academic and research interests include team processes; virtual teamwork; subjective states' effects on collaboration in computer mediated settings; and network analysis.