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Features
The Future of College Textbooks
8/20/2004
Anyone can have a vision. Making that vision a reality is another matter.
Not long into my teaching career, I found myself with a vision for college textbooks. I wanted to utilize the Internet for publishing the textbooks, which had become too big and too expensive. I wanted to save the students a significant amount of money and save a few trees along the way. I knew where I wanted to go. I just needed a little help getting there.
Bigger Books D'esn't Equal Better Learning
I’ve been at Cornell since 1980, where I teach Introduction to Research Methods — one of the most challenging courses in my field of Policy Analysis and Management. And although it is very rewarding, it had also been a bit frustrating to me, and many others who taught it, that we have to purchase these huge textbooks for our students. I firmly believed that the bigger introductory textbooks didn’t translate into better knowledge or better learning. It seemed to me that there had to be a way to address the problem of these oversized textbooks.
I had always been an avid user of technology, wrote some of my own software, and vigorously used this relatively new media called the Internet. When I started creating my own presentations to teach my classes, the students wanted to copy them. I eventually loaded my presentations into a networked web environment. Then I wrote out my lectures to provide some narrative to go along with the presentation slides. I could simply point the students to this Intranet and let them download the classes. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I didn’t need to order those huge textbooks anymore. At the time, this was a relatively innovative idea —I had an entire textbook online, as a shared resource for both the student and the teacher.
Too Good to Be True
A short time after starting to use this innovative online study guide, students began showing up with binders that were getting bulkier by the week. I was also getting complaints from the Cornell central computer services office informing me that my students were tying up all the network printers. It was clear the students were printing the entire course website a bit at a time, several hundred pages in all. At that point, I felt I was back at square one. The only difference was that I now had this complete hypertext-linked textbook online. It was not only available to my students, but because it was now on the Worldwide Web, it was available to anybody, anywhere, anytime.
To solve the printing problem, I worked with the campus bookstore to see if they could print the entire course website and bind it in such a way that they could offer it at a low cost. They agreed and it worked that way for several years. The campus bookstore was the sole provider of the text hardcopy and I was the sole provider of the Web content. Meanwhile, I was being contacted by Professors and students from around the world wanting a hardcopy of different sections of the course. I referred them to the bookstore where they could order a hardcopy of what they wanted. I had to invest a lot of time in this coordination activity and realized I had a new problem. I was actually becoming an independent publisher, a terrible use of my time.
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