July 8, 2008
Online Community-College Students in Colorado Get a Break on Textbook Prices
The high cost of textbooks is driving some students to download illegal copies of textbooks online, and others to rent them for only a semester.
Colorado Community Colleges Online is offering students another option. The distance-learning program, a consortium of 13 institutions in the Colorado Community College System, has teamed up with Pearson Education to offer digital textbooks at a one-time cost of $49 per student. The deal is the first of its kind between a major publisher and a public college system according to Rhonda M. Epper, co-executive director of learning technology for the Colorado online system. The $49 fee is rolled in with tuition.
Students can print any and all sections of the digital textbooks. They can also purchase custom black-and-white print versions via participating campus bookstores.
The program is being phased in gradually, beginning this summer. At the end of the 2008-9 academic year, students in 17 courses will be able to take advantage of the digital textbooks. By the spring of 2011, the Colorado online system expects that most students will be using the digital texts. To make course material more affordable, the Colorado online system is also using wikibooks and content from the National Repository of Online Courses. —Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Tuesday July 8, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
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$49 is a break? Wow. And that is supposed to stop downloading? Yeah, we’ve seen this kind of thinking before, in the music industry…
— Jeff McNeill Jul 8, 05:49 PM #
$49 is a break. Buying these books at a campus bookstore can be $100-$150 a book sometimes. Even if you buy them on Amazon it is more than $50… and if you want to use your student loan to buy them, sometimes they make the students buy them through the school’s horribly-jacked-up prices. I think that what Pearson is doing is great.
— Zanbabe Jul 9, 09:58 AM #
About wikibooks, now you can order some of the better wiki textbooks directly from Amazon.
here are some links:
Paleoanthropology
www.amazon.com/dp/0980070759
Cognitive Psychology
www.amazon.com/dp/0980070783
Sociology
www.amazon.com/dp/0980070775
— Jack Jul 11, 11:29 AM #