The Fall of the Ivory Tower

[jch]

One of my pet peeves is the cost of text books, especially for Gen. Ed. courses. When I started at a B&M decades ago, your only option was to buy from the school bookstore, or luck out and buy from someone who'd taken the course. Next came the Internet. Yay! With just the ISBN, you could buy a textbook from anywhere!

Now, colleges have businesses create digital books for them, and they cannot be used for other schools. And don't buy a used one 'cause it may not have the "vital" lab access. Or a new edition comes out every few years. All of this is NOT for cutting edge classes, I'm talking about courses like Microeconomics. It seems like many of the PowerPoint presentation, quizzes, etc. are devised by these companies. What ARE the professor's doing/creating to add value to the course?

Why aren't more colleges using sites like OpenStax?

This textbook stuff is one of the reasons why I love ASU EA. There's no textbook or access code hurdles to deal with at all. Everything is included in the course registration and fee. They use open educational resources (OERs), including openstax, whenever they need a text. Their way of doing things definitely seems like the future. I love what they're doing with high school partnerships, and I wish I could have participated in something like that. Thanks to Covid, ASU EA has experienced huge growth. I think ASU is really on to something.

Meanwhile, my "free" term at Strayer still required me to pay several hundred dollars per class for ebook and online lab access codes. Nearly all of the assignments are activities within those tools. The professor just posts some pre-recorded videos and pre-typed announcements, and then grades discussion posts. In my opinion, the ASU EA courses are much better than Strayer online, despite the sticker cost of Strayer being several times higher. There is no way that I could justify the normal cost of Strayer. The value delivered by their product is minimal.