Textbooks
I don’t use traditional textbooks in most of my classes. I try really hard to be sensitive to the fact that textbooks are obscenely expensive, and work around it with chapters and journal articles compiled in various ways.
This semester, I’m teaching a really generic psychology course, with a $95 textbook. I really want to supplement it with a software package of experiments, which costs an additional $42. The software cannot be sold back at all (and in fact, you can buy a registration code and get all of the software and the documentation entirely online). This seems annoying expensive for something that I’m still not even sure how I’ll integrate into the course.
If anyone is still reading here, I’m interested in perspectives from both students and professors on how to deal with not only the cost of textbooks, but the software that cannot be resold. Do you use anything like this in your classroom? How do you feel about it? Is the hands-on learning worth the price of admission?