It’s pretty clear that even while I’m writing this one, it’s going to be contentious. I’ve tried to be balanced in the way I present this, taking comments made by people I have talked to about this who have both agreed with and disagreed with what I’ve said. I’d love to hear what you think, especially if you’re a student who’s also been in this position, or if you’re a lecturer, whether you’ve required students to purchase your book for your course or not. Meanwhile, hopefully the lolcats will break this one up a bit…
Before I started the year-long industrial placement I’m currently on, I went back to University for a day with the intention of attending lectures.
The first lecture I was scheduled was a module that students from all of Systems Engineering (so we’re talking IT, Computer Science, Robotics, Cybernetics, Engineering and all the combinations) are required to take in Part 3 (irrespective of if this is their final year or not).
Twice before the commencement of the year, the entire group was sent an e-mail explaining in no uncertain terms (I don’t have permission to publish it here) that a particular text book is required for the course, and detailing how everyone will need it every week and how there won’t be anywhere enough copies in the Library.
Fine, you may think. I took a bit of an exception to this, as the book in question was written by the lecturers who were teaching the course. Fairly mundane and routine, you may say. And some people would agree with that view point, raising points such as there are no other decent books to cover the topic, so the lecturers provided one.
However, I see it from a different perspective.
Surely if the lecturers were designing a book for this course, and they work at this University, and their job is to educate their students, surely we should have access to this book – which, I remind you, is required for our studies – with no additional charge to us? Seeing as we are paying ever-increasing fees for our tuition, surely it would not be much extra work for them to either ensure that there is enough copies in the Library for the students for whom this text is required, or to provide the text as a free PDF for the students to use?
I delved a little further, and to my even greater dismay, almost the entire book is available free on Google Books (with a few pages missing from each chapter). So why were we not pointed to this by the lecturer, who instead gave us a link to the Amazon page for the book?
Others will argue that it was the lecturer’s work in their own time, so they are entitled to sell it, and other arguments. What do you think about the whole thing? Let me and others interested in this story know in the comments below.
I think you have a good point here. In fact, I feel that there should never be a single compulsory book for a module, certainly not one which was lecture-authored. Why no compulsory book? Because you ought to be able to find the information which is necessary to learn the subject in a range of other sources – including books and websites. If some of the material to be covered for the module is not freely available, then it should be made available through lecture notes. That is what they are for, not, in my opinion, as a script for the lectures to follow.
The second point is that a compulsory purchase of a lecturer-written book ‘cheapens’ the whole thing to my mind, whilst it clearly makes it more expensive for the students! I know lecturers are not as well paid as they are in other countries, but they aren’t that badly off that they need to wring extra money out of the debt-funded student body.
Having said all that, I am quite happy with our This Is Me workbook, which you can buy through lulu.com/odinlab. The difference being, of course, that we don’t make any money if you buy the printed version, and you can download it for free anyway
Interesting points. At my uni we were “encouraged” to buy a book, which a lot of the work circulated around.
Unfortunately is was an awful book, Java Gently:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Java-Gently-Prof-Judy-Bishop/dp/0201710501/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255340119&sr=8-1
2 star rating on Amazon. If anything I think it set me backwards in learning OO. Many fellow students felt the same.
I just can’t understand why they’d push such a book on us, unless they were getting a backhander, or were totally out of touch with their students and learning Java.
Plus at £50 it’s extortionate for students, given the much better cheaper variants, and the poor content of the book.
I am going to have to agree with you Chris. I think it’s unacceptable, and I wasn’t aware it was on google books until it was mentioned by yourself last week. I think in our case the information provided should essentially be “Lecture notes” or blackboard material like every other lecturer we have provides instead of the three slide lectures we currently have with this module. At the very least more copies should be available in the library.
I couldn’t agree more, although you are lucky to only be required to buy one essential book. There is a list of 3 or 4, or 6 in some cases of essential books per module which we are required to read to supplement our learning. Many are written by the lecturers, however many aren’t, and at ~£40 each, it becomes very expensive.
Books should be available on a password protected system, we are paying £3000+ tuition fees a year! I understand that it is not realistic in all cases, and that it can be useful to own a few choice textbooks (e.g. an anatomy book in my case), but key texts should be available to student, so that all can access learning, irrespective of financial situation.
You’re absolutely right about that Chris, and we have sometimes this problem in some educational institutions here in Egypt..
P.S. I love the photos you added with the post
I think that when a lecturer pushes you towards the compulsory purchase of their book they are getting incredibly close to a conflict of interest.
It’s no different to an IT consultant giving advice to a company that says they absolutely must have this particular product that, conveniently, the IT consultant made!
As others have said, the learning materials for the course should be made available through the lecture notes, blackboard, or other free-to-view sources. To enforce the purchase of the book is effectively to force the purchase of the lecture notes, which any way you look at it is not fair.
On the other hand – it does seem to be a very good book.
[...] noted by Chris in an earlier post of his (click to read), a very viable option would be to furnish the library with the required number of books. I know [...]