Listening to a webinar about how course material costs affect students other than simply financially, and one thing they touched on is the temporary nature of a lot of course materials these days. They're e-books that you rent and then get returned, or physical book rentals, or they're so expensive you have to sell them back to the bookstore to recoup the loss of money. And I hadn't really grokked how much mroe true this was now?
Like, there was some of that when I was an undergrad 20 years ago, I certainly sold back some of my books. But ebooks and book rentals weren't as much of a thing, certainly not this current trend of "affordable access" publishers are doing where you pay a monthly fee for access and then when you stop paying the fee you lose access to that resource. And it just makes me really sad that students today are unable to hang onto useful course materials like I was able to.
I certainly didn't keep every textbook, but I have a good box I've been carrying around for two decades, and just last month I pulled out one of my old Roman textbooks and gave it to my kid to do research on Rome for his social studies class because I knew it was a good basic resource for what he needed, and he didn't need the most cutting edge research or anything. But students of today won't be able to do that. @academicchatter#TextbookAffordability
@academicchatter As they pointed out in the webinar, this also discourages today's students from becoming lifelong deep learners, because they are conditioned to just think "I only need this resource long enough to pass this class then it is history" instead of "this is a good resource, I'd like to keep it around for the future to return to". @academicchatter#TextbookAffordability