Are Used Texts Really the Answer?

  At the beginning of the semester, textbooks are a common topic of conversation.  In my classes,  promote buying used books and often tell students to look online to find good deals.  As I read the article Why are Textbooks so Expensive?, by Henry L. Roediger III,  I wondered if I was, in fact, contributing to the problem of high textbooks. 

Photo from blog.georgetownvoice.com

Roediger says that the used textbook companies are to blame for the problem.  The publisher has to spend money on the production and marketing of the textbook, which can be quite expensive.  Students sell their books back to the bookstore or to a used textbook company for a small price.  Those books are marked up and sold again.  When the books are resold again and again, the publisher nor the author makes no additional profit on the books. 

Richard Hull and Michael Lennie in their article Why E-Textbooks Just Make Sense agree with the thought that the high price of books is directly related to the used textbook stores.  They say "perceived student savings from buying lower-priced used books is deceptive, because the used-book industry essentially forces publishers to prematurely publish expensive 'revised editions' for the primary purpose of reducing their losses from used-book sales."  Hull and Lennie say that few course texts need to revised every three years. 

Online texts, or etexts, may be the answer.  Publishers often offer online texts, which can save the student quite a bit of money. Purchasing a text this way would give the authors and publishers some profit,  and may stop some of the used textbook sales.  The students, however, wouldn't be able to recoup any of the money at the end of the semester.

What are your thoughts?  Do you feel that texts would become less expensive if students purchased more new texts?  Should students purchase etexts?  Would this require them to print out their texts if they are to be used in class?  Many questions to ponder at the beginning of the semester!

Note:  Thanks to Cheryl Bowman for today's blog information. 

Movie Clips in the Classroom

The start of a new semester is always inspiring.  What will you do to tweak your class this spring?  I'm going to add a few movie clips to my lectures, just to spice things up a bit. 

There are a number of ways to get movie clips.  One way is to buy the DVD and then play the clip you have found.  Another way is to use your Netflix account and pull up the movie, if available, via online streaming.  You might also use movie trailers, available on many websites.  I recently discovered an even easier way to find and use movie clips, and that's through the website movieclips.com.

The good folks at Movieclips have dissected over 1700 movies and have provided over 12,000 clips.  Going through the clips would be a daunting tast, but because Movieclips has attached categories to each clip, it's a breeze to find the one that would work in your classroom.  You can search the movie clips by movie, mood, theme, actor, director, or 25 other categories.  Once you find the movie clip you want to use in class, you can embed it into your PowerPoint or Prezi presentation, or share the clip through e-mail, Twitter or Facebook.  As with many cool online sites, this one is helpful, but can be a time-waster! 

Here's a good one for the start of the teaching semester, even though it's related more to high school than college.  Click on the link, and move the curser at the bottom of the video to :45 seconds into the clip to start the feel-good video of the day.   I am a Teacher!  (Note:  The movie clip isn't embedded here because it's now allowed by Blogger.)

Movieclips provides a great service, but with any use of movie clips in the classroom, you need to follow a few general guidelines.  Make sure the movie clip is introduced properly.  It should be closely tied into the class topic.  Test the clips prior to class to make sure they will work properly when you need them to work!  Finally, don't overuse movie clips; they lose their effectiveness if used too often.

Questions? Comments?  Please comment below or e-mail me a jrudnick@epcc.edu.  See you next week!