Listening to a webinar about how course material costs affect students other than simply financially, and one thing they touched on is the temporary nature of a lot of course materials these days. They’re e-books that you rent and then get returned, or physical book rentals, or they’re so expensive you have to sell them back to the bookstore to recoup the loss of money. And I hadn’t really grokked how much mroe true this was now? @academicchatter #TextbookAffordability
Like, there was some of that when I was an undergrad 20 years ago, I certainly sold back some of my books. But ebooks and book rentals weren’t as much of a thing, certainly not this current trend of “affordable access” publishers are doing where you pay a monthly fee for access and then when you stop paying the fee you lose access to that resource. And it just makes me really sad that students today are unable to hang onto useful course materials like I was able to. @academicchatter