A Classroom Experiment: Ditching a Textbook

I am about to embark on my third year without using textbooks in two of my courses. All my readings appear as links on my syllabus or are posted electronically by the university library. I like it better this way. Besides, publishers and university bookstores are ripping off the students.

I really hate most textbooks available in the disciplines I teach. Not only are they ridiculously expensive, they present the humanities as a boring flood of facts occassionaly punctuated by a picture. I love the topics I teach, but these books put me to sleep. Finding primary sources, articles, videos and websites related to the class topics is time-intensive but worth it. Add that to well-written trade paperbacks and you can present the same concepts that textbooks cover, in a more lively and interactive way.

I taught a very introductory symbolic logic (little more than the propositional calculus) several times with no text. What’s on the web, plus a bunch of handouts and exercises prepared and collected over the years served more than adequately. And expensive available texts include ‘way ‘way more than can be dealt with in a single course of ordinary students (all our majors have to take this course).

I teach Western Civ and I have used textbooks for some versions of the class and dropped the textbook for others. The main text I use is some sort of documents reader, since the class is structured around primary sources. By textbook I mean one of those big, glossy, chronologically ordered narrative histories with loads of maps and pictures. I do not like these books, but every semester students tell me that they need them, both in person and in the teaching evaluations. So I have come up with a compromise, I won’t assign a textbook unless I can stand to read it and it won’t break the budget I set for the class (the required reading list cannot cost more than $100 on amazon or $120 from our bookstore). So far I have found a textbook that covers the period of 1789-1989 that is printed in black and white and costs around $30. It reads well, so I assign it. By and large most students find it useful. When I teach the early modern era, I recommend another textbook (for $60), but I don’t require it. The trade off is that I have to structre the lectures chronologically. But thats ok.

I stopped using textbooks at all decades ago, after a psychologist friend explained that he used a shelf full of examination copies of various intro texts and invited students to choose among them individually, see what they said about the immediate topic, and report to the rest of the class. At the same time I was working on how students (and others) read, and realizing that reading in a textbook is a completely strange way to read, compared to anything anybody does in the “real world.” You read completely arhetorically: this text is Truth, unwritten by any person and without any rhetorical motive. Learning to read anything academic that way is a powerful tool to keep people from reading critically and engagedly. Most students have never read anything academic that wasn’t a textbook. Encountering an article or book, they read as though it were a textbook: to remember what it says.

I teach humanities courses as well as theatre courses. While I, whenever possible, put links up for plays for my students’ reading, I am in a catch-22 situation. Most of the plays available online are older and the language is often a bit archaic, so while it’s great that the students can read the plays for free, they have a hard time understanding the language (as these plays are generally just scripts – no word explanations/analysis available). So I tell them that if they have a problem understanding the language, they may be better off purchasing the hard copy books from the book store. Having an online text version of the play with the explanatory notes of a Folger’s edition would be perfect. Will that ever be available? We’ll see.

One note:The writer mentions the idea of using paperback textbooks as a way to reduce costs significantly. This may be true, however, it probably is a something of ruse carried out by the publishers.Paperback and hardback is a false idea taken from trade books, where the publishers deliberately withhold the (less profitable) $14.95 paperback version until sales of the (more profitable) $34.95 hardback drop off.With textbooks, publishers use this thinking against you, fooling you into thinking a paperback text costs a lot less to produce, and therefore, should cost a lot less at the bookstore.In truth, the cost difference to produce the two different books is nominal, a few cents at most.these are the real costs that matter: marketing, sales, mangement, administration, health insurance for employees, costly illustrations, electronic homework systems, PowerPoints, transparencies for dinosaurs, the used book problem, free samples, royalties, distribution, etc… Pages between soft covers and pages between hard covers are virtually identical with respect to costs to the publishers.This is a way for them to dicsount (a little) without really devaluing the product. That is all.

What about Nook and Kindle? If a student purchases this equipment, they can download any text Amazon or Barnes and Noble has available, at a far reduced fee. It is lighter to carry, has the capability to hold hundreds of texts, and is easy to organize. I think many of our students will be utilizing this type of system in the future. One benefit is the immediacy of being able to obtain the current text. It takes 60 seconds to download, not many days to arrive UPS. No more excuses about not being able to complete a reading because “I don’t have the book”. By the time a textbook gets published it is, in essence, old news. Our students deserve better. Use current information, encourage each student to complete research, and develop critical thinking skills, and you’ll be surprised at the outcome.

I teach mostly English comp, and a textbook has to be really awesome or required by the department for me to use it. (For lit classes, I think it’s important for them to hold novels and collections of poetry in their hands. Plus, they’re cheap enough.) I love being able to design my own anthology, in essence, by selecting texts that are largely available online. Most students realize that printing out texts this way is far cheaper and are usually appreciative. The one time a student complained about how much it cost to print out texts, before I even had a chance to explain how much she’d save, the other studets rallied to my defense and tallied up how much cheaper it was than any other text they’d had. I also particularly liked using full-text articles from the library’s online databases, which gave them practice accessing databases in a nonthreatening manner.Here are the two main problems I encountered, and what I did to pre-empt them in future classes:1) Students try to print out texts from Blackboard at the last minute only to find Blackboard is down and come to class unprepared.Write it into the syllabus that they’re responsible for readings no matter what, that it’s a good idea to print things out a week in advance, if not earlier. If they have problems, they need to contact me immediately because I can probably help.2) Some prefer to read on their computers, which is great if their eyes can handle it and they can develop adequate note taking systems. (I stress annotating texts.) Having access to the text in class is required.I write it into my syllabus that they’re then required to bring laptops to class so they can follow along and refer to the texts in class. I make students be able to “point” to specific passages in the text to back up their claims about it. This also means it’s possible they’re doing something else with laptops while in class. If they don’t seem to be following along, I ask them questions. I don’t automatically accuse them of goofing off. Coz, oops, often enough they’re not! I’ve even had students surprise me by looking up things on the web–definitions, illustrations, facts & figures–that were absolutely relevant to our discussion and demostrated their ability to do research on the fly. They also need to make sure they’re laptop batteries are adequately charged to make it through the whole class.I hope that textbook companies respond to the changing textbook marketplace with innovations that make textbooks more affordable and more adaptable to student and instructor needs. The old way of doing things just doesn’t work for me anymore.

Well, I believe that I’m in a position to trump all the non-textbook users thus far — our entire university (TUI University — a fully WASC-accredited all-online university with programs at all levels) has from its beginning some ten years ago rejected textbooks of any sort, drawing all our materials from the Internet or from our own brains. Our approach has received strong support from two different teams of accreditors, and from our students as well. It imposes on the faculty some additional responsibilty to help guide students to appropriate material and to attend to it critically, but it is repaid in intellectual flexibility and a sense of contribution to the students’ ability to navigate the constantly evolving infospace. For some of my courses, I will direct students toward particular parts of many of the excellent texts sources that are available publicly, but I discourage their relying on such texts, even the best of them, as an exclusive source. I believe that in the long run, our students are better served by this approach than by any text-centered pedagogy, regardless of level or field.

I think this discussion should consider the alternative viewpoint. I have cowritten an online textbook in World History and also written a supplementary text for such courses. In our text we tried to avoid some of the flaws of the paper textbooks by having more depth, many links to sources, images, and videos, and much lower cost for students. After doing this I understand the complex demands that textbook writers must satisfy. I am certain now that it is possible to write good texts that students can find interesting and benefit from, and that instructors can use effectively. Textbooks can take a lot of the burdens off the instructor as lecturer. Students like all people vary in their need for textbooks and they ability and willingness to take advantage of them. For most students, however, a textbook if well written and conceived can accelerate their learning and provide a basis for outside readings.