Vaporware

I’ve been thinking about the evolution of textbooks and materials, from physical materials to digital in-the-cloud. We’ve heard it said that once something is on the internet, you can’t get rid of it. Perhaps it lurks in some dark corner like a cockroach, ever-ready to be a pest when the environment is suitable. But you can’t always find what you’re looking for. And if there’s an opportunity for monetization, gatekeepers will establish themselves to collect the toll for passage.

 

A little over two decades ago, when I started my present job as a chemistry professor, teaching materials were similar to when I was in college. We had physical textbooks, and homework was done physically with pen and paper, submitted, and graded by hand. When teaching upper division courses, I could remind students to look over things they had seen in their lower division courses, and even quote chapter and verse if needed. Students who were majors did not sell their G-Chem textbooks right after finishing the course. The market for used textbooks was much smaller and typically involved the college bookstore. I didn’t sell my chemistry textbooks after the cold hard cash I had to fork out. I thought they were expensive then, but they are ridiculously priced now. (I did sell my other books as I was graduating.)

 

Today, none of my G-Chem students has a physical textbook. Publishers have figured out that what professors want is not to have to grade homework. Hence the rise of the online homework systems. If you have a system the professors like, they will go for it, and along with that the associated textbooks. The quality of the textbook has become less important than the streamlining of the homework system. No muss, no fuss, is the selling point. The pricing system is a package deal: choose the homework system, and the digital textbook is included for a small fee. It’s a rental, of course. Students only have access to the materials for one semester (typically costing $50, and most of that cost is for the homework system). And after the semester is over, access disappears. It's vaporware!

 

Now, one could purchase a physical textbook for keeps. But that’s very expensive! Even a digital textbook for keeps (and all sorts of copy-protection so you can’t distribute) is expensive. Renting the digital textbook without the homework system is almost as expensive as the aforementioned package deal. For instructors who care about price points but who also don’t want to grade homework, the vaporware package costs the least to the student. All this is positively packaged as “Inclusive Access” checking the appropriate feel-good boxes that you’re making some sort of good ethical choice.

 

I don’t deny that working on problems (via homework and problem sets) is a crucial part of learning chemistry. But the textbook has become secondary, and students no longer know how to get the most out of reading their textbook. It’s possible that the quality of textbook content is going down anyway since they’re no longer what gets scrutinized by professors. This is what vaporware has done. And we professors have bought into it because we don’t want to be writing and grading problem sets by hand. (I’ve yet to try GradeScope, which I think might cut down some of this work.) We’ve outsourced the work to the automated bot which claims to provide feedback cheerfully and repeatedly without complaint. But I’m less sanguine about the feedback quality especially when it comes to the important conceptual parts of chemistry. (A bot can easily grade for a numerical answer, but that’s not what is most important.)

 

My partial solution to this problem is to teach the students to annotate their own work. But it takes work to get there, for both me and the student. I also assign problem sets outside of the online homework system in my smaller honors G-Chem classes because the grading is much less onerous when you have a smaller class. And I can ask more interesting and more challenging questions to get the students to think a little harder and deeper about the course material. So right now I have a hodgepodge, neither-here-nor-there, system that also includes the vaporware. I haven’t yet rebelled and gone my own way because I teach one or two out of a dozen G-Chem sections offered. And if you do things very differently from other sections of the same course, that can cause its own problems.

 

But maybe vaporware is not so bad. At the lower division level, you can find what you need on the Internet to review if you needed to. Accessible and free. But possibly error-riddled. The challenge is plowing through the chaff to find the gems. And most of my G-Chem students are not going to be chemistry majors. No fuss, no muss. Just because I’ve found my chemistry textbooks useful and I’ve kept them doesn’t mean that the same is true for others. In fact it’s likely untrue for the majority of students who take G-Chem. And vaporware means not having to carry around heavy physical stuff every time you have to move. And young people will be moving a lot these days. Gone are the days where you parked yourself in one place at one job for the rest of your life. And our lives are ephemeral in the grand scheme of things. Vaporware reminds me of that fact.