Page 317 - Crisis in Higher Education

Creating High-Technology Learning Materials • 287

There are other advantages with the high-tech approach as design-
ers and authors create new ways to present ideas and interactive tools,
which enable students to learn better. In addition, they can create a vari-
ety of modules, which enables faculty to select the ones that are appro-
priate for their course. With hardcopies, faculty members are limited
to what is in the printed textbook, which cannot be changed until the
next edition is published in three to five years. Their only option is to
eliminate topics by asking students not to read this or that part of the
book. With this in mind, authors tend to put everything, including the
kitchen sink, into textbooks to ensure that anything faculty may want
is available. This causes books to have 1,000 pages or more, driving up
printing, transport, handling, and storage costs.
Another advantage of high-tech reading materials is that errors can be
fixed quickly, easily, and cheaply, whereas errors in traditional textbooks
cannot be fixed until the next edition, unless the textbooks are recalled,
reprinted, and replaced. This rarely happens because the process would be
chaotic and very expensive. The second best alternative, which is highly
ineffective, is to send errata sheets to all faculty adopters that explain the
errors and hope they are given to students. Revising high-tech reading
materials to cope with changing ideas is also simpler and cheaper because
the electronic text and images can be altered quickly. Adding new ideas to
later editions of a traditional textbook requires repetition of the process
described in Table 13.1.
As proposed earlier, these high-tech reading materials would be pur-
chased by universities and provided to students as part of their tuition.
This is more than a cost shift from students to universities with uni-
versities simply adding the cost to their current tuition. It represents a
lower overall cost for reading materials. There are several advantages for
students, universities, and publisher such as:

1. Lower costs for students: Beside the fact that high-tech reading
materials should be cheaper than traditional textbooks, universities
can negotiate price with publishers more effectively than individual
students. Now, universities do not consider the price of textbooks—
they make the choice and students pay the price.
2. Better content for universities and students: Because the process for
creating reading materials is flexible, universities can choose the
content, so these materials are focused and appropriate.