The Good

• I appreciate having a good test bank provided with an instructor’s edition of a text, “good” being the operative term.  I teach six to eight different classes each year and rely on these instructor’s supplements to help me manage the workload.  Of the many textbooks I’ve used over the last decade in numerous classes, only one (Mary Ellen Guffey’s Essentials of Business Communication) has had a decent test bank.

The Bad

• Prices are too high.  While looking for a textbook for an introductory accounting class, I found three titles of interest.  Two were priced at $185, the third at $80.  I won’t consider the first two, even if they are, in some sense, “better” than the $80 book.
• Few changes are made in new editions to justify the expense of adopting new books every year.  And yet they keep on coming…
• Customization is weak.  Having used one author’s text for several years, I’ve come to learn what I like and what I don’t in that book.  The publisher, Cengage, offers customized versions that allow instructors to include only the chapters they want.  Great!  But they won’t print a custom edition unless they get a minimum run of 100 copies.  I teach at a small school and most of my classes have an enrollment of 10-20 students.  Blurb can print one copy of any book; why can’t Cengage?
• Bundled PowerPoint presentations?  Most are worthless.  Textbook publishers: spend some time here or get the book.
• Too much material.  I’ve taught introductory finance and can cover maybe 1/4 to 1/3 of the information in the textbook in a given semester.
• Students don’t read them because most textbooks are boring.

Alternatives

The textbook dilemma being what it is, I’ve tended to use trade titles rather than traditional textbooks in recent years.  This fall I’m using titles like StartupNation, Guy Kawasaki’s Art of the Start, and Groundswell in my classes.  They are less expensive as well as more interesting and relevant.  The students are more likely to read them as well as keep them for later reference.  Traditional textbooks get sold back to the bookstore at the end of the semester, often for a fraction of what the students initially spent on them.  Using trade titles creates more work for me since I lose the nice supplements like cases, exercises, and a test bank, but I can give the students far more with two or three great titles that cost under $30 each than I can with a $190 textbook with all of the instructor’s goodies.

Any suggestions from students or other teachers?  How do you manage with textbooks?

The opening has been posted since the beginning of November and we’d like to start interviewing in January but, frankly, we’d like to see some more applications.  If you think you’re the right person for us, please send a resume and cover letter to Ed Plumier, Director of Human Resources, and tell him you saw the posting on this site.

If you’re in facebook and planning to begin college in the fall of 2009, joining a “Class of 2013″ group may put you or your identity at risk.

Facebook allows users to create their own groups around common interests, a great feature.  While organizations and businesses can create “official” groups that customers/clients/fans can join, the conventional Web 2.0/social media marketing wisdom has been to let the users create the communities.  Users will be more passionate about something that they create themselves, so goes the thinking.  Most of the time this works.

In this case, however, it appears that College Prowler has a group of facebook users who are not students or prospective students for the class of 2009 setting up bogus “Class of 2013″ groups for 250 or more colleges and universities . Brad Ward, Electronic Communications Coordinator in admissions for Butler University (take note: that position belies some progressive thinking for an admissions office), unearthed the scheme.  Andrew Careaga comments about all of this at his higher ed marketing blog.

What’s the point of setting up the bogus groups?  Data collection and marketing/spam potential for an audience of over 1,000,000 students.  I don’t know that anything illegal has happened here but the intentions seem dubious.

What to do if you’re a student in the class of 2013?  Check Brad’s Google Spreadsheet to see if the bogus group is listed there.  If you’ve joined one of these groups, I’d recommend leaving it to ensure that you keep yourself, your data, and your identity at less risk.  Instead, contact your school’s admissions office to see if they’ve set up an “official” class of 2013 facebook group.  While college admissions offices may be reluctant to create their own facebook groups, preferring that students take the lead, incoming students will be better–and more safely–served by joining school-sponsored class of 2013 groups.

Many thanks to Brad for his outstanding sleuthing work.

Incidentally, the class of 2013 group at the school where I teach is legit and it’s just waiting for you to join.

UPDATE: The New York Times ran a story about facebookgate today (12/24/2008), including a response from College Prowler.