In the first class of the 2005-2006 school year, after calling roll and introducing myself and co-professor Terry Bensel, I told our students they were participating in an experiment. An experiment that, as far as we knew, no one else had undertaken. They were taking an Introduction to Environmental Science course with no textbook.
Saved by the screen.
Photo: iStockphoto.
Here at Allegheny College -- a liberal-arts, undergraduate institution in northwestern Pennsylvania with 2,000 students -- approximately 180 students are distributed among four sections of this annual course. For the 19 years I've been teaching the class, they've been required to select one of the myriad textbooks that flood what must be a very lucrative market. But this year, in place of a 3.92-pound textbook (I weighed my complimentary copy of Miller's Living in the Environment), the class readings consisted entirely of websites collated on our online syllabus.
Initially, Terry and I were motivated by the prospect of supplying students with real voices on environmental issues in real time, and reaping the altruistic pleasure of saving the students a hundred bucks. We hoped, too, to counteract the disease that is carried by only two known vectors, Tsetse flies and textbooks: sleeping sickness. While it is hard to be certain whether fewer students fell face-first into their keyboards than would have collapsed on a textbook, surveys we collected at the end of the first semester suggested they preferred the online version of learning.
Site Unseen
Many students born in the late 1980s are more comfortable doing their homework reading from a screen, with their iPods blaring, IM screens blinking, and Facebook accounts open in another window. That's a change us old guys, accustomed to the feel of paper and the sound of, well, nothing, had to come to terms with. But once we did, we discovered a gold mine.
Because environmental science is more current, than, say calculus, it naturally lends itself to online readings. When we were teaching population growth, for example, and wanted students to understand the impact of demographic momentum, we sent them to the U.S. Census Bureau. There, students could select from scores of countries and observe dynamic changes in population pyramids over the next 50 years, as many times as they were willing to click on a new country.
During our unit on air quality, we directed students to the U.S. EPA's AIRNow website. It provides daily maps of ozone and particulate matter, as well as video loops that show pollution accumulating over the course of a day, and has map archives back to 2002, so students could hunt for the summer days when their hometowns had turned toxic.
The National Park Service supplies real-time air-quality data and webcams for 16 national parks. On bad air days, smog from L.A. can be seen overtaking the Grand Canyon. Only a textbook used by Harry Potter could make pictures do as much as this website does.
Of course, we didn't just turn students loose on the web, since we feared that after a quick scan and a succession of clicks, too many would be looking at sites that had nothing to do with our assigned topic. For every web reading, we provided a set of directives specifying what content students should focus on. We also stoked our students with additional online information. Our syllabus has links to the PowerPoints we used in class and to assignments. As environmental news appears in The New York Times or Washington Post, we email those articles to the class. The syllabus even has Muckraker and Daily Grist at the top -- which means, I suppose, our students will read this article about themselves on Grist.
For years, our assignments had been filled with directions to pages scattered through a textbook like weeds in a field of hybrid corn. Or we'd ask students to consume whole chapters, only a portion of which was pertinent. Textbook writers, trying to be all things to all students, tend toward the encyclopedic. For our students, it was all those additional pages written in desolate style that brought on the first signs of trypanosomiasis.
School's Out for Summer
So did it work? Well, 41 of 46 students in our first-semester class self-reported doing the same or more reading than they would have in a textbook. This wasn't necessarily due to a sudden interest in the topic; Andrew Mihalcin, a first-semester freshman, said, "I read more because I would be messing around on my computer and get bored, so I would look at the class website and do some of the readings." That's better than nothing.
Of those who admitted to reading less, three said there was less reading to do, because there was less filler than in textbooks. To be totally truthful, however, a lot of students didn't think there was much difference. Tegan Millspaw, for example, walked into my office one day to discuss a class topic and without solicitation blurted out, "I just wanted you to know I hate the online readings. I don't always have access to a computer, and the fact is I really don't like reading from a screen." (She did add that she doesn't like reading textbooks, either.)
At times it felt like a hollow victory to think one group of students saw online readings as the lesser of two evils, and another clicked on our carefully selected websites only after Facebook turned out to be even more boring. But from my perspective, it was still a successful experiment.
The hard part, the potential barrier for other professors, is that it takes a lot of time and effort to put together readings this way. A careful observer will notice that there are a lot fewer readings at the end of our current syllabus, when Terry and I started running out of time and energy, than in the first several weeks of the semester. Moreover, while the major publishers are remunerating their authors to create new editions, a professor reliant on the web could find himself scrambling to replace URLs that have suddenly vanished.
The good news for me is that my entire department has bought into the concept, so we have distributed the work among us, with faculty members adding websites that suit their particular specialties. We're building a bank of readings and PowerPoints that each of us can dip into to create a course that suits our needs. It will probably be close to three years before my department has deposited enough material into our collective bank that everyone feels confident enough to kick the textbook habit.
While others might repeat this experiment, there's way too much money to be made selling textbooks for it to catch on. In fact, most publishers now make related websites accessible to purchasers of their product -- in essence outsourcing the work my colleagues and I have done. Still, I'll continue the text-free battle, if for no other reason than this: our survey revealed that a majority of students recognized a link between the content of the class and our method of delivery. "I didn't print any of the readings, because I didn't want to waste the paper and ink," said Justine Law.
According to a report prepared this spring by the National Wildlife Federation and the Green Press Initiative, Green Textbook Initiative: Campus Toolkit [PDF], the U.S. paper industry uses a million tons of paper a year. Textbooks represent approximately 20 percent of that, consuming the equivalent of 4 million trees annually.
The Green Textbook Initiative is organizing consumers to demand textbooks printed on recycled paper. But like most of the environmental problems we talk about in class, there's often a better alternative. In our case, we dispensed with the textbook altogether. That might just be the answer.
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Comments View as Flat
jbetzzall Posted 6:06 am
02 May 2006
a more permanent approach
I'm sure the students also appreciated not shelling out big bucks for the textbook. My approach, which I learned in the Environment and Community program at Antioch University Seattle, is to use a selection of trade books; they have the permanence of paper and relatively low cost, and can easily be supplemented with web resources. Permanence is desirable after the course is over, in case students want to go back and reflect more on what they may have just skimmed in the course. As you mentioned, web sites can be ephemeral, though the Wayback Machine can help recover some of them. Cheerio! Jonathan
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midnightowl Posted 6:34 am
02 May 2006
I love textbooks!
I loved being able to flip through textbooks in school, but yikes, the prices were back-breaking. Not to mention that I had no use for some of them after I was done with a particular class. Browsing through websites relevant to one's subjects seems easier and cheaper, but it seems to me that it's not REALLY studying. I still like the feeling of sitting down and reading a book on my desk.
As for the Wayback Machine, that's a big help, although sometimes it fails to catch some sites.
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watermirrors Posted 7:12 am
02 May 2006
I love this trend
Several of my professors use either no textbook or small readers. I like this because you know that since the reading was put together by the professor, you don't have to wade through anything irrelevant to the course. A lot of my professors use papers from my university's library database as course content. I don't like websites as much (I really resent "web exploration" assignments), but they can be useful.
Besides that, you can avoid the ridiculous textbook costs, where you are often paying for material (bundled CDs etc.) and content you don't use. They are often pretty heavy too...my chemistry textbook weighs more than my computer and has often caused backaches. If you like the feel of paper/out in the woods without a PC, you can print relevant pages off so you don't have to carry everything around.
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caniscandida Posted 8:02 am
02 May 2006
well done, Eric
From my perspective, as one who loves books, and much prefers reading from a well-designed book than from a monitor (unless I am reading Grist, of course), and would hope to convey to students the joy of the world of books, on the one hand; but on the other, as a liberal-arts teacher who strongly suspects the business in selling science textbooks is a super scam: I definitely come down on your side, and applaud what you are doing.
Not only are those textbooks horribly expensive, much more so than what we who teach languages and literatures assign; and not only are they very often barely portable and so not very convenient for use in the classroom; but also, much of their contents are becoming obsolete by leaps and bounds, sometimes day by day. (That sort of thing does not happen very often with, say, Latin grammar.)
The impression I have, which may or may not be accurate, is that the professional scientific societies have been very successful at getting the scientific journals, reference works and other sources of research materials to make such materials easily available on-line. How complete that success has been, I would not know. But it ought to make it easier to break away from the tyranny of the textbook.
In general, laws regarding copyright and intellectual property are entirely irrational, and desperately cry out for reform. Yes, to be sure, authors, artists, producers, publishers, distributors all deserve compensation for their talent and their work. But we are in a brave new world of information-transfer, thanks to the Internet. It seems that perhaps the Chinese, in that quaint, anarchic, amoral, self-serving, opportunistic way they have sometimes, are helping us stare reality in the face, and indeed forcing us to move into the future.
In lab courses, are written guides to lab work necessary? Are experiments traditional and conservative? If so, there may be one place where printed bound matter is in order. Also, there is presumably a fair amount of historical, traditional, "paradigmatic" stuff in each of the sciences that is not likely to change any time soon, and which a serious, committed student may still wish to have and refer to years in the future. (What, though? Star charts? The periodic table? Yuk yuk.) (OK, "The Skeletal Pig" is likely to work for a bit longer. At least until the genetically modified pigs start taking over, though. Yuk yuk.)
I freely acknowledge that you science teachers have a lot more work to do than we do, in revising your reading lists and lesson plans from year to year. It is not often that we get such a (fictitious!) bombshell as, "It is now believed by some scholars, on the basis of a recently discovered ancient letter on papyrus, that the Republic, a philosophical masterpiece traditionally ascribed to Plato, was in fact written by a Thracian slavegirl named Batrachophile, who over the course of several months in 374 BCE was sending Plato chapter-length installments, in the hopes that he would buy her out of slavery; and that he in fact later published that masterpiece under his own name." Hopefully most classicists, teaching a Plato course, would take the time to mention something like that. But by no means should we expect too much from them. Happily, bombshells do not fall often.
On how to motivate students to do any work, let along do it willingly, gladly, eagerly, I stopped theorizing ages ago. "Why, you young lie-abouts!, you cheeky little Visigoths!, when I was your age, we always did as we were told! And with a smile on our faces!"
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Bart Anderson Posted 9:12 am
02 May 2006
interesting experiment
Intriguing idea. Some thoughts:
- I don't think the main argument should be to save money. Even though textbooks are expensive, they can be a bargain for what you get. Many textbooks today seem much better written and presented than those in the past. The graphics and formatting can be much more imaginative and helpful. Whenever I want to delve into a new field, I pedal over to the Stanford bookstore to see what textbooks are being used. I also look at the booksales to see what textbooks are being offered. Recent editions are often available for a fraction of the price of new books.
- If we want good material to be generated, somehow we have to compensate people for producing it. Writing, teaching and publishing are not the areas of society where obscene profits are being made. Eric and his colleagues are putting in extra effort to research and collect the readings - they are to be commended. But is this sustainable?
- Much online material is suspect - one really has to vet it carefully to make sure that it isn't being produced by a front group. Too much reliance on the Internet makes one vulnerable to the efforts of special interests to frame debates.
- Even if online material is written with the best of intentions, it has not received the vetting for objectivity and accuracy that a textbook receives.
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bookerly Posted 11:28 am
02 May 2006
Textbook Prices
American textbook prices are a scam. It is a dishonest industry, and one that deserves no respect.
In China, textbooks are priced just like regular books (I have contributed to several, made a couple of hundred dollars, but hey...).
Having said that, I don't use textbooks in my classes. I print material as needed and do my best to reduce wastage (though some is inevitable). The local English departments assign books, but when they do, they tend to cover all of the material.
There is a huge market in used books here as well (and waitresses might end up with a 20 year old English textbook for their own study).
Many of the schools use the internet a lot for teaching (my students don't have easy access), and it is growing more popular.
But I do have a problem with using only web based resources. There is a lot of misinformation on the web and also there is a lot of information that isn't on the web, or if it is, exists in greatly abridged versions. My two fen (Chinese cents).
Patrick
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caniscandida Posted 5:47 pm
02 May 2006
Zwei Fen (Pfennigen?) mehr
All of us teachers have the responsibility to try to get our students to figure out how on their own to get information, how to get all the information that is relevant to what they may need, and how to judge how reliable that information is.
On Internet sources, it has been repeated by a number of our friends that they are not reliable, and it is extremely difficult how to determine the reliability of those sources. Good; that is something that must be emphasized over and over again to our students. Let them redirect the natural youthful rage that they feel against adult authority, against pretentious and preposterous contributors to otherwise well-meaning and trustworthy-seeming websites. (No!, stop!, don't you dare hold up that mirror in front of my face!!)
Apparently Eric and Terence are doing absolutely the right thing, by staking out the territory ahead, beforehand, and later telling their students what specifically they are to look for and where. That is exactly the way teachers should proceed with on-line resources.
Afterwards, though, students will want to do their own independent on-line "research"; and their teachers must really be strict on not accepting just any verkachte nonsense that cannot be verified. Ideally, teachers will be able to monitor the students' research at one or more points before the assignment is submitted in its final form. (Bart suggests assigning the students to "find and vett" on-line materials. Sure, great idea; that should work fine in a small class; in a large class, though, it may be a bit too much for a teacher to stay on top of things.) And hopefully the teachers will be able to get across to their students why certain cool-seeming stuff simply does not work as worthwhile respectable scientific source-material. And hoping ever further, let us hope that that habit of skepticism, of needing to trust -- never completely, but more yes than no -- only the reasonable, the likely, the probable, even if the absolutely verifiable remains always out of reach, will be planted in the hearts of at least some of them.
On books: There has been no more perfect information-retrieval system ever invented, than the bound codex (i.e., book), printed on good-quality paper. What is on-line is of course retrievable much quicker, and perhaps more conveniently. And it is available to people whereever they can get Internet access. But, all that is digital will degrade, or, worse, rendered inaccessible by technological unreliabilities of one kind or another. (Consider the fate of vinyl discs, the original "records," 72 RPM, or 45 RPM -- fun to have, impossible to play. Weirder is the fate of those truly floppy discs from the earliest PCs of the early 1980s. To say nothing of those brontosaur computers into which they fit.)
If it is printed on good paper and bound well and kept well, that book is going to last for a long long time, much longer than our brief lives. All undergraduates should be made acquainted with how libraries work, and with what is available to them there, including assistance with on-line sources and searches, and with the more important point that true scholars are nothing without a good library, and good librarians. And all scholars, at every level, connected to a college or university, should understand that their purpose, in a sense, is to save, preserve, uphold, support, defend, treasure, illumine, increase the wisdom of, increase the brilliance of their library.
Respectively, of course.
Unfortunately, to Eric's students in NW PA, I suspect there is not a good research library close at hand. No doubt Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Buffalo, have very good opportunities in this regard. Anyway, the several interlibrary loan systems are extremely important to countless scholars everywhere; and all students should be told about them. Perhaps teachers should regularly design research projects that require students to use interlibrary loan.
It was my honor, privilege and joy to be working once, not so long ago, as a research assistant at the American Museum of Natural History. I was frankly surprised to observe that their library's vast collection of printed books and other materials, NOT available on-line, some of it going back a couple of centuries and more, remains of essential importance to all the scientists and scholars doing research there.
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amazingdrx Posted 9:21 pm
02 May 2006
Textbooks come from Texas.
Neeehaaaww! Somehow a monopoly was developed by a company in Texas. No surprise that there are problems in this area. Just be glad Neil Bush is not running the company yet.
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0827-06.htm
He only sells cheat software for the Bush mandated standardized no-child-left-behind main course in your local school. That's all teachers have time for, drilling students to pass the multiple guess tests that Neil's saudi financed company sells the cheat software for.
Call your local school system and find out if Neil is milking your tax dollars into his latest vile scam. Did they buy into it?
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/12/1534244
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RjGreen Posted 3:54 pm
09 May 2006
Beyond text books... Streaming Video
This point goes beyond just text books being used less frequently in class. Teachers and Professors are even replacing their vhs and dvd videos (not to mention the old school laserdiscs) with streamed video content. The best part about this new development is the student's ability to interact and contribute on sites such as Earth Engine and not to mention on sites with blogs such as Grist!
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LynneL Posted 1:26 am
04 Aug 2008
link to online syllabus
Very interesting article. You've done what I'm considering doing this year during my first high school environmental science course. Unfortunately the link to your online syllabus doesn't work - at least for me. I'd love to get a peek at it.
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LynneL Posted 5:43 am
04 Aug 2008
found link!
Here's the link http://webpub.allegheny.edu/dept/envisci/ESInfo/ES110sp20 ...
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