Re: Coursepacks

From: Karla Gower <kgower[_at_]email.unc.edu>
Date: Fri, 26 Jun 1998 09:38:48 -0400 (EDT)

On Thu, 25 Jun 1998, John Noble <jnoble[_at_]dgsys.com> wrote:
>
> Is your point here that permission is never required to reprint articles
> in coursepacks, or that CCC can't grant that authority, or that David's
> course is like a day in the park. Actually my initial reaction to
> Post's post was 'hell, given what they're paying for tuition, and what a
> textbook would cost, an authorized coursepack wouldn't dent the wallet
> much.'

As a graduate student who has had to buy authorized coursepacks, I can tell you they are expensive. I know professors who have stopped using coursepacks because the students complain about spending $70 on 100 pages or so of photocopied material with a cerlox binding. At least with a $70 textbook you have the option of reselling it.

The idea behind coursepacks is to expose students to a wider variety of material, hopefully increasing their critical reading skills, than you can with a regular textbook. Also the material in a coursepack is often more current than that in a textbook. The downside is that getting the different permissions for something that may only be used for one semester is time-consuming for professors and the end product is expensive for students. This isn't meant to be a justification for unauthorized coursepacks, just an explanation for why the problem exists.

Karla

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

 Karla K. Gower
 Doctoral Student
 School of Journalism and Mass Communication  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill  CB#3365, Howell Hall
 Chapel Hill, NC 27599
 kgower[_at_]email.unc.edu

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

Received on Fri Jun 26 1998 - 13:40:06 GMT