"Oh, that's adorable": Required Textbooks

Who saw this piece in yesterday's Chronicle of Higher Education? Students - from a range of majors and backgrounds, traditional and nontrad - speak honestly about their options when buying textbooks for their courses. It's enlightening - go, read it. I'll be here when you get back.

Did you know that there were so many options - legal and not-so? Have you mostly just assumed that your students either buy the book(s) you require here at the campus bookstore, or maybe on Amazon.com? Have you ever thought, "That doesn't really affect what I do in my classroom - it's the students' problem"?

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you shocking news. Are you sitting down? Our students are buying textbooks as a last resort. In many cases, it's a rational trade-off to try passing without the textbook instead of getting into even more credit-card debt.

Can you do anything? Yes. There are plenty of high-quality, legal, and free options you can present to your students - instead of continuing to play the traditional dead-tree textbook game.

Far too many of us still think of online resources as a free-for-all of random websites of academically dubious value. This view carried some weight early on - I remember the mid-90s too! - but the medium has matured. 

Often, tech tools are presented as gee-whiz gadgets which may or may not last - overhead projectors, anyone? - but with no underlying conversation about how they might effect structural change in the methods and aims of our teaching. Some of my future posts will try, incrementally, to engage this broader conversation, and to move beyond the slightly tired rhetoric of technological determinism. :-)