PILING TEXTBOOKS: Senior Tri Ta receives help
gathering his textbooks at the ASU bookstore Wednesday afternoon.
(Photo by Kyle Thompson)
ASU instructors are using alternative resources in the face of rising textbook prices to help their students’ pocketbooks.
As students find cheaper bookstore alternatives, some professors are
taking a new approach to teaching that allows them to depart from
traditional printed textbooks.
“I make a point, which is that the textbook is optional,” said
Matthew Croucher, an economics instructor at the W. P. Carey School of
Business. “[My students] don’t feel obligated to buy it to get a good
grade. Coming to class is the important thing. Taking notes is the
important thing.”
While Croucher made textbooks optional for his course, Bob Robson, a
professor at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, has done
away with textbooks in his class altogether.
“When I was structuring the course and how I was going to teach it …
I wanted to go out further into the Web world and use technologies that
people are using more and more now than they ever did before,” he said.
Robson, who teaches a police accountability course at the Downtown
campus, said while other factors contributed to making his class
“bookless,” the wallets of his students weighed in heavily.
“The cost of taking the class has obviously risen due to the
economy,” he said. “I felt that I could [teach the class], sparing the
student the burden of that cost [for books].”
Most students feel they must buy every textbook, Croucher said, a
mentality that stems from the fact that books are nearly always
required in high school.
“Now we’re in a lecture format where we can cover more material than what is in the textbook,” he said.
Independent book publishers are also a part of a unique initiative:
attempting to implement open-source textbooks in classrooms across the
country.
Cultural anthropology senior Jason Donofrio is president of the
Arizona Student Public Interest Research Group, which is pushing for
the use of open-source textbooks at more than 50 campuses across the
country.
“Open-source textbooks are licensed to be free online, and it is
affordable for students to print them,” he said. “You can reformat them
any way you’d like, while you cannot reformat PDFs and other files that
professors put online and on Blackboard. This gives the students
options to access them [for free] or pay a small fee to print them.”
How larger textbook publishers like McGraw-Hill will respond to this
initiative remains to be seen, but Donofrio hopes it will allow
independent publishers to create competition.
“The idea behind it is that the market is slowly starting to
expand,” he said. “Right now there are no competitors, … so if that
company wants to come out with a new edition, students are forced to
buy it.”
PIRG is pitching its campaign to professors all over the country to get them to pledge their use of open-source textbooks.
“The more students demand these open-source textbooks and the more
professors that endorse and use these texts,” Donofrio said, “the
market will expand and the quality of these open-source books will
grow.”
Reach the reporter at joseph.schmidt@asu.edu
