From the
perspective of college faculty, the digital rights management (DRM) controls
that are inherent in commercial electronic textbooks simply serve to prevent
students from acquiring or fully utilizing their course materials. In the end,
that means students aren’t as prepared for class as they should be.
In an article for Educause Review Online, Gerd Kortemeyer, associate professor of
physics education at Michigan State University, makes an argument for replacing
e-textbooks with a “truly interactive, adaptive, and individualizing online
coursepack—instead of a PDF file with static book content—delivered via a free
course management application to any web-capable client platform.”
Kortemeyer,
who is also director of the Learning Online Network with Computer-Assisted
Personalized Approach (LON-CAPA) project, sees a number of advantages to
distributing course materials through the school’s learning management system.
Among them: It would be easier for faculty to assemble a collection of the
exact readings they want for their classes and to display materials during
lectures. Students could access their coursepacks from anywhere with one login
(including studies abroad), right from the first day of class—no more waffling
about whether to buy materials or not.
Students
would still have to pay for their class coursepacks, he noted. The system would
add up the cost for each student and charge a single fee.
“The
question we face in education today is: Will textbook publishers stick with the
dead-end strategy or opt for a model that actually supports the education
process?” he wrote.
