Community college student here, can confirm that our instructors (professors, hah!) are using textbooks written specifically for our college. With the unsubtle implication that yes, they are easier.
I find it hard to worry about a $100 text when I only paid $300 for the three credit, accredited class in the first place. That’s still downright cheap for a quality education (I’m going for my CPA).
This year I spent $130 on a “code” that also came with an ebook. 100% of our class is done through the online system that requires the code. Zero physical textbook required. Zero face time or class time required. Hopefully this is the way of the future.
Rather than my other class, with its textbook, no online course work at all, just paper tests and reading chapters. People still do that? Yes, my instructor is a thousand years old.
One possible solution to the medication problem could be to let doctors write prescriptions for classes of medications and then leave the actual choice up the patient. E.g. doctor could write a prescription for “Any SSRI or tricyclic antidepressant other than Zoloft” and let the consumer decide whether to buy one of the “old reliable” drugs or spend more for something a bit more recent. If the patient encountered a problem with the choice they made, the doctor could add that to the blacklist.
Like i said earlier in the thread, this is precisely what i do with my classes. I make the publisher give me an extra free copy of the book, and i place it on reserve in the library. I believe our checkout time for such books is two or three hours. I don’t think that placing books on reserve is required by university rule, but almost every faculty member i know does it.
I’ve studied and taught at multiple universities in Australia and the United States, and every single one had a library reserves system for course materials. And over the last 15 years, they’ve all had electronic reserves, where scanned book chapters and scholarly articles can be placed for download.
Well, as i suggested earlier in the thread, i’ve only used these online instructional tools once, and that was for a pilot program that cost my students zero dollars. And i agree that some professors do, in fact, use them out of convenience.
But the students themselves often beg for this stuff. They want the tech bells and whistles, especially if the alternative is sitting down and reading twenty or thirty pages of text. And the fact is that some of the online tests and quizzes and other stuff that i’ve seen is actually pretty good stuff, produced by people who know their shit.
Also, to be honest, i’m not going to rag too hard on instructors who seek to make their own lives easier. Well over 50 percent of college and university courses in the United States are now taught by underpaid adjunct or contingent faculty, with no few benefits and no security of employment. I’ve met people who make less than $2000 for teaching a course of 50 students over a period of 4 months. When colleges and universities treat many of their instructors like fast food workers, maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised if some of those workers demonstrate a similar level of commitment and professional standards.
Has anyone actually failed a course due to having the wrong edition of the book? I see how that might happen in narrow circumstances where the instructor assigns graded homework out of the book, the homework in your book is different, and you can’t get a copy of the homework from someone else.
I’ve taken a few classes where I barely opened the textbook because I knew most of the material already - the problem was that the school wouldn’t let me test out of the course.
I taught at a CC for a decade, and yes I am a professor, and was department chair so I reviewed all the book orders. The books we bought were identical in depth to the books used in similar classes at the university that I am at now. Same biology text, same microbiology book, same genetics book, same A&P text. Only book I used specifically was a custom lab manual for micro that covered only the labs I was planning to do.
Maybe your CC used some specific community college books, but it’s hardly universal.
Not only that, but LibrarySpy said that they are “using textbooks written specifically for our college.”
I can almost guarantee that this didn’t happen. The book was not WRITTEN specifically for the college. It is probably, like most of these custom edition textbooks, put together from existing chapters based on the selections made by the instructor. That is, the content is the same as content that you will find in the regular editions, but the custom edition might have only certain chapters, or certain bundled labs or documents.
Trust me: no-one went out and wrote a new book for one community college.
Here’s a cover i scanned of a custom edition history textbook that one of my colleagues used a few years back. I only have it because she spent part of the semester on maternity leave, and i had to cover her classes.
The book is a custom edition of this book, which is a well-known and well-regarded text. As you can see from the Amazon site, at $142 it’s fucking expensive, especially for a paperback history text. There is no way in the world that i’d set this book for any of my classes.
The custom edition my colleague ordered has the same text and pictures as the regular edition, and also has about 100 pages of primary source documents (chosen by her) included at the back of the book. I think this edition cost her students just over $100. It’s not an “easier” edition. It was not “written” especially for student at CSU San Marcos. It was simply put together by the publisher based on the requirements of the instructor.
The students saved money with this book, compared to the regular new book price, but i think they still got screwed a bit, because they would have found it very difficult to sell the used copies once the semester was over. Even though the text in the book is the same as the regular edition you can buy on Amazon, it’s going to be hard to convince a potential buyer of that fact when you’re trying to sell your used copy that has your own university’s name prominently on the cover. A San Diego State University student is going to assume, quite reasonably, that the “special” CSU San Marcos edition does not contain the same text as the edition available in the SDSU bookstore.
That’s one of the reasons I avoided custom editions except for lab manuals (which they write in anyway). The resell value is zip. Now my name was on the cover of the custom edition I put together so someone probably thinks I wrote it and am getting a kickback. Not true.
Another shocker was when I found out that the paperback version of the text was more expensive than the hardcover. I’d been selecting the paperback, assuming it was cheaper. It wasn’t, and not by a trivial amount. Felt bad about that.
Before the first semester of this nonsense, I emailed each of the instructors with a short, detailed inquiry about the necessity for a CC-specific text and the online course access code. I got three long, airy, hand-waving replies that told me absolutely nothing of use except that (1) yes, that specific textbook was absolutely required and (2) the online course material was “essential to the course development.” Not one word about why, amid plenty of them saying how wonderful it all was.
Not wanting to saddle my daughter’s image with my… interest, I dropped it. I just sighed at more of the same this semester, until she came home telling me the $190 Accounting book was not returnable.
I agree with the latter. These days, it’s almost trivial to assemble a book from components and send it to press with hardly a touch to the material - TOCs and Indexes are automatically generated, material is written and edited to be seamless blocks, etc.
The argument against “dumbed down” editions is pretty simple: they could just choose a “dumber” textbook from amid the thousands published for basic classes. There is no need to take a standard text and meet in a back alley to have the publisher take out all the hard stuff and re-issue it as the ‘same’ book.
I was saying the same thing as mhendo- a custom book is not the same thing as a book written for a CC. Universities use custom books and can choose books with a range of degrees of difficulties for a variety of reasons. None of that is CC specific.
Yes. I was there from 1998 until summer of 2012. FWIW I was a professor and eventually chair of a department that was biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, allied health and environmental sciences. I looked over a lot of textbook requests from a wide range of disciplines and from everything from non-majors classes to upper level electives for majors.
One issue I haven’t seen raised is the unintended consequence of the very good federal law requiring ISBN numbers be posted when students start registering for the next semester. Registration usually opens midway through the current semester and we have to post books then- it doesn’t give much time to evaluate current textbooks (since we’re only mid-semester) before we have to put our orders in for the next semester and it’s really hard to change a selection once it’s been posted. So unless the book is terrible you reuse it. And even if you decide to you want to move away from it after that, it becomes more difficult as you often designed a class around the text and/or there is pressure to keep using the same book so the students can resell it for more money at the bookstore. Obviously not impossible, but a certain amount of inertia sets in.
Okay. I couldn’t quite reconcile your evident experience and your statements about the current situation. Maybe it’s more selective or regional than widespread.
The ISBN rule is the only thing keeping the process in check at all. I contend that the “inertia” issues are much, much older and due to many aspects of the process, though. I recall similar complaints back in my CC days, along with battles over dinosaur parking.
CC specific texts is something I’ve never heard of from any faculty I’ve interacted with. There are texts CC may use more often (esp in developmental math and reading), but for standard courses most faculty I know request typical textbooks, not CC specific ones. Custom, yes, but that gets done at the University level as well. Something I’ll keep my ears open for since I’m still in close contact with me CC friends.
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The ISBN rule is the only thing keeping the process in check at all. I contend that the “inertia” issues are much, much older and due to many aspects of the process, though. I recall similar complaints back in my CC days, along with battles over dinosaur parking.
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I didn’t mean to imply the inertia is something new. I’ve said the the law is an excellent thing. What it has done is change the time line, making faculty reorder books they may not have if they could have waited until the semester was over, leading, indirectly to more textbook inertia. I’ve seen this from before and after the law and that is certainly an aspect that has become harder.
FWIW, my son is a college sophomore so I feel your pain. Also, I saw too many of my students struggle because they couldn’t afford books and I did everything I could to help- I had a lending library in my office and kept copies of the textbook on reserve. I get it from an administrator, faculty and parent perspective.
Suggested fix: legislation requiring universities to include the cost of textbooks in tuition. Bet you they’ll make professors find the cheapest effective texts when not doing so cuts into their funding.
mhendo suggested a non-legislative fix; seminars and other programs to educate the faculty and make them aware of how expensive classroom materials are for the students. Every college in America should do this.
Here’s the link to my university website’s section on reducing the costs of learning materials. It has a typically lame acronym, but i think the program is a good one.
Most faculty contracts include textbook selection as a academic freedom right to prevent administration from imposing textbook choices on faculty. This prevents abuses by administration by favoring some publishers over others and forcing professors to choose specific textbooks for non-academic reasons.
I can think of several objections to this proposal, but here’s one: how do you “make professors find the cheapest effective texts” without making them use the cheapest texts regardless of effectiveness?
When I was in college, some books came with these CDs in the back of it that you could use to supplement your class. I don’t remember them ever being required and some used books I’ve bought were missing those discs. Sounds like the publishers have gotten creative in their deviousness since then
