this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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Professors

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Attribution statement: I have stolen this text from the Professors subreddit with the hopes of providing an alternate community on Lemmy for us.

This community is BY professors FOR professors. Whether you are tenured, tenure-stream, a lecturer, adjunct faculty, or grad TA, if you are instructional faculty or work with college students in a similar capacity, this forum is for you to talk with colleagues. This community is not for students. While students may lurk and occasionally comment, they should identify themselves as students, and comments are subject to removal at mods’ discretion.

SYLLABUS

This community is a place for professors to BS with each other, share professional concerns, get advice and encouragement, vent (oh yes, especially that), and share memes. It has erstwhile been described as “kind of a 'teacher's lounge' for college professors.” This community is not for non-professors to ask questions of professors or about The Life™; it is for professors to ask each other questions.

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I received an email from a textbook salesman. This isn't a rarity, but today this line lept out at me:

"Ideal for students learning concepts and reasonably priced at $144.95,"

No. Just no. $144.95 is not reasonably priced. This is the first of what is likely a lot of emails that I get to respond with the line in the sand that I've drawn:

"Reasonably priced" at $144.95?

No thank you. I won't subject my students to materials, including books, equipment, and any online tool licensing, that cost more than $60 per course. Until your offerings are in this range, please do not contact me again.

Even my $60 per course number is high as far as I'm concerned.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yep. Any course that I have control over, I try to switch to OERs to save students money. Unfortunately, it's a ton of investment to do that for our largest courses, where our TAs depend on the homework services that come integrated with the textbooks. And I don't have a clue how much that textbook costs, because it's embedded in their tuition. I just hate that they don't have access to it after the semester is over, which is why I casually mention not to use library genesis to acquire a PDF of the textbook for posterity's sake, because that violates copyright law.