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>I hate much everything of the "rental" services: you can access something but you can't own it. Universities in the US are doing this with course material now

>I hate much everything of the "rental" services: you can access something but you can't own it. Universities in the US are doing this with course material now. I had to pay for a subscription service to access my assignments, so that my professors didn't have to review anything. I had to pay for the service to get credit for that portion of the class, and then all my work in that service vanished after the semester ended. No more access to the work I had done despite having classes the next semester that I would need that work to reference. The professor didn't pay a dime, and 100 students had to pay the cost so that the professor didn't have to review our work. Involuntary consumerism at its finest. I started a petition, and tried arguing with the admins of the school to see if we could have these services banned or at least paid for by the professor. They asked "How is this different than buying a book you need?" Answer is obvious, books don't disappear after the semester, they can be found in the library if you can't afford them, and they don't do the professors' job. They asked "Well you can afford tuition, can't you afford the subscription?" No, I can't afford tuition, now you want more? At the end of the day, I went back and forth with them, and they wouldn't budge. And I could tell it was really tearing their moral fabric, but no one in power wanted to budge because $$$$$

fact_factory 7y ago
I had a similar experience at a major university in chemistry lab freshman year. The class required a subscription to a site that was owned by a professor. Everyone in the department used it. All the TA’s said they didn’t want to hear anyone complaining about a $25/semester subscription because they had to do it too. All the telemetry from the lab was taken with these machines that were also sold by the professor’s company (to the school). The lab reports were virtual. They involved answering questions on a web form that would have appeared dated in 1996. Every time you submitted an answer it checked the answer according to your recorded lab data. If you were “correct” it moved on and if not, it gave you a few more tries and then marked that question wrong. One slight recompense was that it would tell you the formula you should have been using to answer the question when you were wrong. There was no human oversight as evidenced by the time I answered the question correctly and it reported the wrong formula, an email to the TA went unanswered. “Involuntary consumerism” as you say. I’m sure there are many examples. I just wanted to share another anecdote.

fact_factory 7y ago

I had a similar experience at a major university in chemistry lab freshman year. The class required a subscription to a site that was owned by a professor. Everyone in the department used it. All the TA’s said they didn’t want to hear anyone complaining about a $25/semester subscription because they had to do it too. All the telemetry from the lab was taken with these machines that were also sold by the professor’s company (to the school). The lab reports were virtual. They involved answering questions on a web form that would have appeared dated in 1996. Every time you submitted an answer it checked the answer according to your recorded lab data. If you were “correct” it moved on and if not, it gave you a few more tries and then marked that question wrong. One slight recompense was that it would tell you the formula you should have been using to answer the question when you were wrong. There was no human oversight as evidenced by the time I answered the question correctly and it reported the wrong formula, an email to the TA went unanswered. “Involuntary consumerism” as you say. I’m sure there are many examples. I just wanted to share another anecdote.