This raises two questions for me:
1. I am curious about everyone's experience with digital textbooks. When I was forced to use one, the students were very resistant. They had a choice of buying access to the digital book or buying access to the digital book plus paying extra to get a bare bones printed version. Nearly all them spent a little more to get the printed version. They said they learn better with print. These were under 30-year-olds. Frankly, I was shocked! I thought the younger students would love the digital version and my older students would resist. This was not the case; everyone resisted.
2. Are faculty who have a choice in textbooks pushing back against choosing Pearson products because they have taken over so much of educational publishing (textbooks, standardized testing in K-12, the GED, etc.)?
Signed,
Gina from Georgetown
We're pushing back on expensive books. I'm sick of $300 textbooks with bells and whistles that do no good. We've been looking for ways to get around Pearson (and the others) for years now.
ReplyDeleteIf they just sold the book in black and white for a reasonable $75, we'd have no problem...
Students at my joint hate the bells and whistles.
ReplyDeleteA few years ago, an internal study in a colleague's department found the students like low-tech (i.e. books) and tend to blame the instructor if anything with add-on components was assigned.
I think Pearson et al. are doing themselves out of a market by increasingly building in the bells and whistles EC1 mentions, which are often available only with a brand-new copy of the "text" -- which is all the more expensive because of the add-ons, and can't be sold back because the add-ons kill the secondary market.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, I think there's increasing resentment not only from students, but also from professors, and some of that resentment is tied to what test-driven learning has done to K-12 education (and what equally badly-done assessment, and an associated drive toward standardization, threaten to do to undergraduate learning).
There's also the problem that students simply refuse to buy expensive textbooks (or, in some cases, any textbooks), because they've decided that textbooks are a ripoff, period. When the number of students opting out of the textbook reaches a tipping point, professors have to find a way to make it possible for students to pass the course without buying a textbook, or find an alternative to a commercial textbook.
And increasingly, there is an alternative: Open Educational Resources (OERs), which are creative-commons licensed and free, though there may be small fees from third-party providers for "delivering" them on a "platform" to produce something that resembles the sort of "packages" Pearson et al. offer. Still, proffies who adopt (and create) OERs can feel good (since they're helping students, and since very few textbook authors make much of a profit anyway), and they also get to teach students who all have access to the textbook, often in a variety of forms (for instance, one of the better-known OER textbook collections, OpenStax, which is based at Rice, offers online versions, free PDFs and print versions at cost).
So no, I'm not surprised Pearson is in trouble, and in fact I'm experiencing just a bit of schadenfreude (while also realizing that if they fail, that eliminates one source of more-lucrative, possibly more secure, employment, permanent or supplemental, that I've considered on occasion. So yes, I'm a hypocrite.)
One of the things I do to help reduce costs for my students is to assign older textbooks that I happen to know are very good. Cheap used copies abound. As little as $5-$10 via Amazon. And I prefer books that don't have multiple editions floating around. That way, students don't have to worry about getting the wrong edition (as they would do if I gave them the chance).
ReplyDeleteMy school administration has been encouraging us to use open-access resources. My esoteric humanities field tends not to have good open-access resources available.
I have never used those online bells-and-whistles in a class. Last time I looked they were crap with no educational value. And the banks of test questions that I've downloaded from Pearson tended to be crap, too.
Person is pricing itself out of the market. I make clear to our Pearson rep every time I have contact with him why we are using fewer and fewer Pearson texts. Dollop on a heaping helping of schadenfreude for me, please.
ReplyDeleteI use a Pearson text, but point out to students that the previous editions are just as good, and cheaper.
ReplyDeleteI stopped assigning Pearson books a couple years ago, in response to what I regard as unethical pricing and shady business practices (like the OP says). Glad to hear that they're suffering, frankly. Maybe they'll reconsider their approach.
ReplyDeleteI had a Prentice-Hall textbook that I was very happy with. One of the outstanding features was its free, straightforward companion site. Well, P-H was gobbled up by Pearson, and the friendly companion site disappeared. It was replaced by My_Lab, a monstrous, popup-infested, ten-clicks-required-for-the-simplest-tasks, franken-program with a user interface so clunky it could be used in a design class as an example of everything not to do. It's still the best textbook around, and kind of an industry standard, but I'm grumpy about losing the nice companion site and am looking around for a replacement.
ReplyDeleteI actually use a Pearson text, but I HATE the add-ons. I urge my students to buy second hand if at all possible.
ReplyDelete