Thursday, November 29, 2012

AcademicPub and The Price of Textbooks

One of the primary concerns in higher education today and one of the greatest questions is: why don't students buy course materials? We know that students are less likely to buy textbooks when they are more expensive even though students are (far) less likely to succeed in class when they don't have access to the materials.

If we can lower the price of course materials we assume that we can increase the number of students who purchase the books and increase the number of students who have a greater chance at being more successful.

The easy answer is "digital lowers costs," and while that is certainly true in part, as we've covered here in the past, it is not a be all end all solution. Open Educational Resources are a great step forward, but, as recent events have shown, an entirely open model has had trouble remaining all-encompassing, entirely free, or comprehensive enough to provide a breadth of information beyond introductory subjects.

Rather, as we've also noted in the past, the answer seems to reside in content mixing. Particularly the ability to mix, when applicable, Open Educational Resource content along with carefully chosen copyrighted material.

In our opinion, of course, there's an easy solution: AcademicPub™. The ability to add just a little bit of everything, whether it be multimedia content, images, web articles, embedded links, material from our expansive content library, or your own writing, can not only streamline your course, but it can save your students money. Imagine instead of assigning three, four, or five books, you can assign one considerably slimmer book at a considerable lower price point.

That's the future, that's AcademicPub.

Be sure to to visit us today to register and begin creating your course packs for the Spring semester.

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