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As a professor, I am not surprised about this. Publishers are pushing their online platforms hard. A few years ago Cengage came and gave a whole dog and pony sh

As a professor, I am not surprised about this. Publishers are pushing their online platforms hard. A few years ago Cengage came and gave a whole dog and pony show (with free lunch to ensure as many of us as possible showed up) with all these "statistics" about how great and effective their online learning platform was compared to paper books. Most of their "statistics" were things like "students like them more than paper books" or "students feel like they learn more" rather than any actual proof that these things are actually better for students. Of course what they didn't say is that online DRMed platforms give them 100% of the profits instead of losing money to used books or giving the bookstore a cut and they danced around the fact that students loose access to the material after a year so even if they wanted to use the material later on they couldn't (they can just buy a new code!). Thankfully, our department didn't take the bait and instead worked on creating our own OER https://www.oercommons.org/hubs/open-textbooks https://www.oercommons.org/hubs/open-textbooks but too many educators are falling for it. My hope is that Pearson's move will spur more faculty members to use and create more OER.

cannonedhamster 7y ago
Cengage was terrible to use as a student but it wasn't the worst. Trying to cite the resources from the courseware is impossible as you manually have to type it out removing any benefit and making it literally less useful than a physical book especially if you only have a single screen. The worst online platform I've used it took me a week to figure out the terrible UI to actually use the textbook part, you had to go into the text section, know exactly the section you were going to and then browse the pictures of the physical textbook. Questions for homework build only be accessed through a submenu of this section. Every 10 minutes you'd be prompted to take a break, ruining your concentration, and every hour you'd be signed out. It was a nightmare. I much prefer the books.
black6 7y ago
Cengage pissed me off in that I had to purchase access to the online system in order to do my homework (organic chemistry course). I couldn’t get over the fact that I had to pay a third party for the ability to submit my homework to my professor. I ended up being the squeaky wheel and the professor just so happened to have a couple-few licenses he could hand out to students. It’s a dirty f’ing system when my grades are held hostage by a publisher.

cannonedhamster 7y ago

Cengage was terrible to use as a student but it wasn't the worst. Trying to cite the resources from the courseware is impossible as you manually have to type it out removing any benefit and making it literally less useful than a physical book especially if you only have a single screen. The worst online platform I've used it took me a week to figure out the terrible UI to actually use the textbook part, you had to go into the text section, know exactly the section you were going to and then browse the pictures of the physical textbook. Questions for homework build only be accessed through a submenu of this section. Every 10 minutes you'd be prompted to take a break, ruining your concentration, and every hour you'd be signed out. It was a nightmare. I much prefer the books.

black6 7y ago

Cengage pissed me off in that I had to purchase access to the online system in order to do my homework (organic chemistry course). I couldn’t get over the fact that I had to pay a third party for the ability to submit my homework to my professor. I ended up being the squeaky wheel and the professor just so happened to have a couple-few licenses he could hand out to students. It’s a dirty f’ing system when my grades are held hostage by a publisher.