Oh no… you can rent a textbook, but tuition doesn’t cover it.
Great. All unis should do this.
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Wow. Back when I started university we still had the traditional German system where authors of textbooks could (read: were expected to) issue vouchers to students. The author basically gave up their proceeds from the sale and the students could get the books at a reduced price.
Those vouchers went away when the law regulating book prices was reformed, but by that time professors had mostly switched to providing PDFs of “drafts” (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).
Also none of our books were ever really mandatory or even necvessary to buy in the first place.
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I think the calculation was that students (collectively) spend around $500k a year on survey texts for English Comp alone. (We’re a small school). If we pay a few instructors a few thousand and some course releases, but manage to retain even a dozen more students, it’s well worth it.
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Sounds like. Plus, writing a textbook is probably good practice for younger profs… line on the CV, etc… Which reminds me… I should update my CV…
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Yeah, seriously - my first reaction was, not even knowing anything about how they have it set up now, that I couldn’t see any possible situation where NFTs would actually help them or students. If they already have essentially a subscription service to online content, the NFT’s only benefit - to the users - is that they can recover some of their money when they rescind access to the online materials. But that could only come at the expense of Pearson, and since they control all that anyways, they could achieve the same results by simply offering the material for less cost to begin with…
The bit about exploring uses for “the metaverse” really gives the game away, though.
(Every time I see something about NFT being used as part of a business plan, my brain immediately thinks:
)
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At first I thought they were trying to get colleges to require possession of a licensed copy of the book. You buy the book - paper, ebook or subscription - and you get the NFT certifying that you are indeed a legitimate user of the book in question. If you buy, borrow or pirate a used copy, then you lack the right monkey picture and they can encourage schools to consider that not meeting the requirements for your class.
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Ideally. But. In reality the untenured folks were told “that’s not original scholarship, and so won’t count for research. It would count as service.” Which of course means nothing. So then the senior faculty got to do it. Which also meant a scholarly viewpoint not necessarily as current as it might be.
Great idea, good intentions, good for students’ finances. But the execution was not great.
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This is adequately solved – with far less infrastructure and overhead – with plain old license management as has been practiced for the last quarter-century-plus.
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But that doesn’t sound fashionable and every new technology is an opportunity to normalize another round of loosely related bullshit.
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@KarlS That sounds like it should be a Law. I like it.
@Mindysan33 Yeah, total BS. When it got to my department we did it collaboratively, with people taking chapters in the period of their specialty. Took much longer than it would have otherwise, but I feel like it helped us understand better how each of us teaches the survey. The money went into a department fund for general BS purchases.
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That’s a pretty cool way to do it, actually. Excellent work by your department!
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I mean, it’s dystopian nonsense, but seems to make more sense than their actual implied proposal…
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One thousand times this.
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I couldn’t remember for sure and it was bugging me at work, so I had to look it up. The school still has cost-free textbook rentals. From what I remember of the process, shortly before the start of the semester you would take a book list to the university store, search through the stacks of books for yours, then checkout. The book rentals were part of the cost of each class. Occasionally a class would have a book you would have to buy.
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Sounds like it’s unique to your school, then? As far as I know, it’s not the case where I teach or where my daughter goes (same place, essentially).
it’s a good model, though and more schools should have that as an option, at the very least for kids with not a lot of income to support them through their college years.
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I’m not sure if it was just my school or the entire UW system. I would guess it was just my school as I seem to remember it being somewhat unique. However, unique or not it did save money. I am just surprised they still use the same system.
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could be!
Yep!
It seems to work (which is to help students get through the program successfully. From where I teach, I know that cost is a huge problem, even though we’re not that much in the scheme of things… but even a little unexpected costs can be a problem for many of the students I teach.
Really, we should fully fund k-16 education in this country, books included… everyone should have the opportunity to get a college education if they want (or the equivalent for the trades, etc).
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Which is hopefully the school administration’s top priority.
I was in a relatively inexpensive public school in the early 2000’s, I can’t even imagine the expense student’s have to deal with now.
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There are alternatives, and their offerings are getting better and growing in numbers.
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