Seth Godin wrote a Textbook Rant recently, where he decries the high price of textbooks and generally declares them useless:
As far as I can tell, assigning a textbook to your college class is academic malpractice.
They don’t make change. Textbooks have very little narrative. They don’t take you from a place of ignorance to a place of insight. Instead, even the best marketing textbooks surround you with a fairly non-connected series of vocabulary words, oversimplified problems and random examples.
They’re out of date and don’t match the course. The 2009-2010 edition of the MKTG textbook, which is the hippest I could find, has no entries in the index for Google, Twitter, or even Permission Marketing.
They don’t sell the topic. Textbooks today are a lot more colorful and breezy than they used to be, but they are far from engaging or inspirational. No one puts down a textbook and says, “yes, this is what I want to do!”
They are incredibly impractical. Not just in terms of the lessons taught, but in terms of being a reference book for years down the road.
I agree and I disagree. I love textbooks. My second-favorite part of school was opening a crisp new book and paging through the table of contents. (My favorite: reading the course catalog.) As an adult, I continue to buy a new textbook every 4-6 months—typically math- or science-related.
The idea that one day, I might not be able to buy a textbook in their current form (a big, fat hardcover bursting with the promise of knowledge) makes me genuinely sad.
Most people don’t know this about me, but before I was an efficiency consultant I was a technical writer. I composed a number of texts, including full-length study guides for the SAT, CLEP Humanities, and LSAT, not to mention a ton of internal corporate training materials. While I love being an efficiency consultant, I’d kill for some new work writing more training material.
For some topics, I totally agree that textbooks don’t make sense. Seth paged through marketing textbooks before writing his post, and the idea of a marketing textbook is sort of odd. I can see how real-world recent examples and case studies would make more sense.
However, what about topics that don’t change so much, like history, calculus, or statistics? Why aren’t textbooks good ways to cover precalculus?
Maybe what we really need are additional options to use alongside textbooks. People who learn best from reading, writing, and problem-sets (me!) can have our textbooks. Kinesthetic learners can construct physics experiments to learn math, auditory learners can listen to tapes or lectures, and visual learners can watch videos or Flash presentations.
I’ve been considering learning styles while building my own efficiency training courses (coming soon). If I listen to an audio recording, I find it impossible to pay attention for more than five minutes (or, more likely, I fall asleep). Same with video (unless I’m interacting/following instructions). So, while it’s taking me longer, I’m incorporating multiple learning methods into my course; if you like to listen to my voice, go right ahead, or you can mute me and click one button to read a written transcript instead.
Another issue with textbooks: the publishers are so focused on their (admittedly captive) college student audience that they’re completely missing any opportunity to sell to adult learners (or college kids who want to get ahead or learn a topic on their own). I can buy most any textbook, but I can’t access the teacher’s manual or solutions guide unless I can prove I’m a college professor. Not having the answers makes it hard to catch mistakes or incorrect assumptions as you go along.
Making advanced learning materials available to everyone via MIT OpenCourseWare and AcademicEarth seems to be catching on, so why aren’t the textbook publishers catching up?
{ 1 comment }
