To Textbook or Not To Textbook

Tis the season of textbook selection for the upcoming semester. The college Bookstore has sent me repeated e-mails the past month that I have not made my textbook selections for the upcoming semester. Over the years I have learned some things about the changing landscape of the college textbook world. When I first started teaching, the business seemed pretty straightforward. The only competition that textbook publishers had were other textbook publishers. The resale market was a minor player, the rental market didn’t quite exist, there were fewer options, and prices (while high for new science textbooks) were not as ridiculous as they are now.

All that has changed. The competition is much fiercer. Textbooks now come bundled with “electronic extras” (we’ll get to that in a moment). But it’s the Internet and Amazon that have really driven the evolution of the textbook world into a cut-throat time-sensitive business. College and university textbook stores are in a no-holds-barred armed race to stock their books at decent prices students might pay for. If I don’t turn in my textbook order (early), it could drive up the price the student has to pay for their books depending on the book and market economics. It has been eye-opening for me, as an instructor, to see the changes that have taken place in the last ten years.

In the old days, I didn’t seriously consider the option of not having a textbook in my chemistry courses. A good textbook significantly facilitates teaching the material, and more importantly saves the instructor significant time. (You weren’t expecting the last bit, were you? Unless of course you’re in the same business as me.) Given the increasing research and service expectations of liberal arts college professors, you have to realistically limit the amount of time you are going to spend prepping for class, answering questions in office hours, and grading. The increased numbers of students in our classes does not make things any easier. This is a sad situation, as teaching is what I love doing most, that I have to find ways to reduce the amount of time I put into the “teaching” aspect of my profession.

What will a good chemistry textbook have? (1) Content to be covered in the class at the right level, preferably in an order that makes best sense to me as an instructor. (2) Sufficient worked examples for numerical problems, again at the right level. (3) Good figures – molecular level diagrams, appropriate graphs, data tables that are easy to find. (4) Clear prose. (5) End-of-chapter questions that are sufficient in variety and level, and are well-posed. (6) Answers to a subset of aforementioned questions so that students can self-check some, but not all, their attempts. From this list, the most important to me is #5, and is often the deal-clincher or deal-breaker when I would choose a textbook back in the old days. Typically there were just a handful of textbooks that would meet all six criteria. You can very quickly triage the first four items by skimming, but item #5 requires some amount of work to evaluate. It’s worth the time, because having a good set of questions to assign students as they learn the material saves much time and heartache (for the instructor) during the semester.

But the world of information accessibility has changed significantly in a short span of time, and with it, market economics. Now, I keep a close eye on the price of a book and its bundled electronic materials – the most important factor now being the robustness of the online homework system. Working problems is still a crucial part of learning chemistry. I was highly skeptical at the first few versions of these systems and did not use them, but they have reached a stage of robustness where the guided tutorials, problems, adaptive technology, user-data statistics, and advanced features, allow me as an instructor to tailor the outside-of-class learning aspects without it being a frustrating time sink both for me and for the students. In terms of writing good problems with increasing levels of difficulty and giving the students feedback as quickly as possible, the online system is a huge winner. Certainly the immediate feedback provided by the online system is something I cannot personally repliate. The system is also robust enough for me to make small modifications to problems I choose from an increasingly good database. Not to mention that user-data mining can tell you how long a problem takes on average and how difficult it is, thereby allowing you to construct very reasonable problem sets for the students. (I am mindful that my class is often not the only one they are taking.)

Up to this point, it seems that I’m still essentially choosing a textbook although my criteria have changed to include evaluating the online homework system. However, as prices have continued to soar for the book + online system bundle, and the fact that our students are now awash in a world of information plenitude rather than scarcity, I’ve begun to rethink the skill set I should be teaching my students. Practically none of them bother to keep their textbook any more (thanks to the active resale market) since we have the Internet, and the online system access is usually only good for a year. Thanks a lot, market economics. What they will be faced with for most of their adult lives here on out (unless we have an information or technological apocalypse) is wading through and trying to make sense of the wealth of information out there. Yes, I have to teach them the basics, but I should move them further up Bloom’s taxonomy than I have in the past.

For my science major classes, I still use a textbook for the most part (but now coupled with some internet resources and reading primary literature). But the last three times I taught non-majors classes, I have not used a textbook. This has its pros and cons. The reason I chose not to use a textbook was because these classes were small (less than 20 students) and composed of stronger-than-average students (e.g. honors-level), and furthermore the classes were designed to be highly interdisciplinary and team-taught to some extent. It’s hard to find a single interdisciplinary text for a team-taught science class at the introductory level. (These classes were aimed at the non-science major.) The Internet provides a great source of content material, but a lot of work was involved in designing the activities, and writing the problem sets. Grading was much reduced given the small class size.

Next semester, however, I am scheduled to teach a regular section of chemistry for non-science majors. (Yes, I scheduled myself to do this since I’m department chair!) It is a class I have taught many times before and I have used a variety of textbooks back in the day. When I looked at the prices of newer editions of good books I have used in the past, I was shocked at the sticker prices! This always happens to good textbooks. Once the market demand starts to build, the publishers come up with newer versions very quickly bundled with the latest access codes for the online homework system. I hemmed and hawed for the better part of two weeks, discussed with my colleagues the pros and cons of different books and the idea of going without a textbook. (Students seem highly uncomfortable without a textbook, but they get used to it after a while. Of course the times I have not used a book were all in small classes.)

Given the larger size of the upcoming class, the average ability of the student who will be in this class (these will be average students rather than an above average small group), I finally settled on using a textbook. However I picked an older edition of the book that is still widely available. The bookstore will therefore be able to get used books at lower prices and many of the students will still buy direct through the internet. I’ve decided to forego the online homework system since the book is sufficiently robust with respect to all six items in my previous list (and does well for #5 and #6). I won’t start working on the class until the summer, but I plan to incorporate a variety of assignments requiring them to go on the internet and critically evaluate what they read. As an added benefit to my decision, the bookstore has stopped sending me e-mails!