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?
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
Oh, before I forget again, if anyone I know is interested in #OER in any way and has been doing work with it and would like to present at this year's Florida OER Summit in May, we're soliciting proposals now! The website is: https://www.flvc.org/oersummit and the theme is innovation and trends. We have people from all over present at this virtual event, so visiting FL is not a necessity! @academicchatter#OpenAccess#TextbookAffordability#OpenEducation