BlogU

  • A Defense of Textbooks

    By Joshua Kim April 4, 2010 9:25 pm EDT

    I like textbooks. I like to design courses around textbooks.

    How can I promote textbooks with one hand and open learning materials with the other?

    Yes, building a course around open learning materials is attractive. Thanks to the Web, curricular materials, once scarce, are now abundant. One could design an entire course around free, linkable, quality materials. Everything from M.I.T.'s OpenCoureWare to iTunesU to YouTube/edu to Carnegie Mellon's OpenLearningInitiative to TED. Free and open materials allow courses to also be free and open, which has the benefit of moving our students from consumers of scholarly conversations to contributors.

    Yet, as I'm developing materials to help design an undergraduate e-commerce course, the first thing I do is turn to a textbook. Specifically, Laudon and Traver's E-Commerce 2010 (6/e) from Pearson, suggested retail price $178.67.

    Why use closed and proprietary content? Why ask the students to pay so much for the material when the Web offers so much good material for free? Why use a textbook at all in an age of online articles and videos, electronic article databases and high quality Web simulations?

    Here are my reasons to use a textbook:

    1. Narrative and Structure: A textbook provides a narrative and a structure to hang a course around. For this course, we will break the 7 week course into 4 modules that match the structure of the textbook. The 4 modules go as follows: Module 1, week 1 - Introduction to E-Commerce (chapters 1 to 2). Module 2, weeks 2 through 3 - Technology Infrastructure for E-Commerce (chapters 3 to 5). Module 3, weeks 4 and 5 - Business Concepts and Social Issues (chapters 6 to 8). Module 4, weeks 6 and 7 - E-Commerce in Action (chapters 9 to 12). By the end of the course we have read the entire textbook, a completion of a task that brings a real sense of accomplishment.

    2. Correlated Learning Materials: We chose this textbook because it comes with numerous ancillary materials that are crucial for teaching. These materials include a test bank, that we will utilize for computer graded formative assessment (brief mastery quizzes), and open-book summative exams. The book also comes with PowerPoints from which we can make voice-over presentations (lectures) and videos (which we can digitize to show online).

    3. Foundation for Project Based Learning: I've found that relying on a textbook for the core curriculum and course narrative structure gives us the freedom to develop large course projects. The trick is being willing to restrict oneself from assigning too much reading and material in addition to the textbook reading. If you are disciplined enough to stick with the textbook for the core curriculum, it becomes feasible to integrate a large course project (usually a team project), that will require the students to add value to the textbook curriculum.

    I've tried designing and teaching courses without a textbook and it has never worked as well. Sure, some courses do not lend themselves well to a textbook - and sometimes pulling together the curriculum from primary documents and a range of scholarly and online sources makes sense. But in my experience, a textbook can provide a courses with a solid foundation to build active learning assignments and a collaborative and interactive learning experience.

    What do you think about textbooks?

Go to comments (6) »
Advertisement
Don't Miss a Great Opportunity

Comments on A Defense of Textbooks

  • acceptable if reasonably priced
  • Posted by Bryan , Instructor at USF on April 5, 2010 at 9:15am EDT

  • I am comfortable assigning textbooks if they are reasonably priced. $178 isn't even close to being reasonably priced; and would definitely have me hunting for alternatives. Who pays $178 for any book that isn't a collector's item, or a required text? I wish more publishers would release reasonably priced (<$40) paperbacks; I hate to be part of something that seems like price gouging.

  • Unsustainable Practice
  • Posted by Brian Lindshield , Assistant Professor at Kansas State University on April 5, 2010 at 10:15am EDT

  • I decided as an undergraduate that I wasn't going to use a textbook if I ever taught a class because I felt so exploited by the prices. Two years ago, I was hired as a new faculty member and taught a class without a textbook. I looked at textbooks while I was putting the course together, and then I had the students collaborate on a wiki to make a substitute reference document. My class of primarily sophomores and juniors didn't like the wiki, outside of exam reviews, and their feedback indicated that they wanted some type of textbook or an alternative that wasn't constantly changing. This year I have put together a flexbook in google docs that the students can use for this purpose and dropped the wiki. I believe the flexbook is superior because it focuses more on video & images than a traditional textbook. It is also exactly taylored to the class.

    This was considerably more work than to take a textbook and its resources and just use it. The fact that so many images are copyrighted makes this even more difficult. But using platforms like google docs allows faculty members collaborate and share resources. It also gives students the option of viewing it online, printing, or downloading it as whatever their preferred file type is. Textbook prices are increasing at a rate that is unsustainable when coupled with the increasing prices of higher education. Redirecting some of the money from textbook companies to campuses would benefit both students and institutions.

  • Posted by ak , Prof on April 5, 2010 at 8:15pm EDT

  • Well, they helped me pay off two mortgages.

  • price isn't the main problem
  • Posted by Russ Hunt , English at St. Thomas University on April 10, 2010 at 2:00pm EDT

  • I remember being surprised, as a visiting professor at a university in Germany, that no one there used textbooks, and were amused and a bit contemptuous at the way textbooks drove curricula in the US and Canada. How many instructors make only one decision in planning a course: which textbook to choose? After that, it's a franchise operation.

    I haven't used a uniform, commercial textbook in over twenty years -- the only way I've used them is to put a range of texts out on loan for students and let them see the differences and use them as resources. More commonly, I use the library and online resources.

  • Re: acceptable if reasonably priced
  • Posted by Situmaster on April 15, 2010 at 11:15am EDT

  • Bryan, sounds like you might benefit from checking out http://www.flatworldknowledge.com Flat World Knowledge.

    $30 textbooks in print, $free on the web. They make money by selling the $30 print and other study aids. Interesting model.

  • Posted by Profdl on June 24, 2010 at 5:15am EDT

  • Flat World Knowledge is worth a look for free and low cost alternatives to traditional textbooks. So is Textbook Media (http://www.textbookmedia.com). Both companies offer either free or low cost electronic textbooks (under $10) and various upgrades, including soft cover printed editions in the $30-$40 range that can be read online or downloaded to a computer or book reader.

    These companies and the recently enacted federal and state legislation in at least eight states intended to lower the high cost of college textbooks is forcing the traditional publishing houses to offer lower cost versions of at least some of their titles--a trend that is sure to continue. In the long term, the relatively few remaining traditional publishing houses will all need to rethink their distribution and pricing models or face the very real possibility of extinction.

    Whether quality and choice can be maintained under emerging models, however, is a different question. Intrinsic rewards aside, asking authors to forego a reasonable return for the three years of effort required for an average book, as well as the army of reps to help sell their books, and the prestige of publishing with a leading publisher is also not an easy sell. And how many of us are even aware that these not so new textbook alternatives exist (Flat World Knowledge has been in business for about two years and Textbook Media, formerly Freeload Press, for about six), let alone what titles they currently offer?

Print
© Copyright 2011 Inside Higher Ed