[mralvar]

I absolutely hated Top Hat during my undergrad. It was just another thing I had to buy that teachers used as an excuse to be lazy because it was ~interactive~. You were so tied to a device for all your classes that if multiple teachers used it it wound up becoming a pain.

I noticed it was mostly instructors who taught one-off elective/strictly credit classes that used it in almost a punitive way to make sure you paid attention to them.

edit - another ironic thing regarding the title of the article, is that the instructors would upload the Pearson, McGraw, etc provided slides with the textbook to tophat.

[HarryHirsch]

Do you really expect an underpaid adjunct not to outsource the grading to the department's textbook company of choice? Adjuncts don't get to pick textbooks.

But what's with the griping about textbook publishers? The overreliance on adjuncts allows the university to charge lower tuition and the publishers make the feat possible!

[mralvar]

So the cost should be pushed onto me instead? I understand the struggles of adjuncts and grad-students as they were most of my friends in Undergrad because I came into school older. But not one of them used Top Hat or a clone equivalent.

[HarryHirsch]

The cost will continue to be passed on to you until there is a robust discussion about the financing model and the working conditions in academia. If any change is going to happen it's going to come through student effort; despite their protestations the position of the unions and the professors is to preserve the status quo. Back then we'd call this "revolutionary consciousness".

The goals of the students will also need to be taken into account. A colleague gave up giving detailed comments on the lab protocols he graded, the only thing the students were interested in was the grade. My experience matches. It's understandable, at our institution students mostly plump for medical school or associated profession, and it's the grade that counts, not the subject knowledge. The GPA really haunts you.

[rhizome]

I'm sorry you're so jaded, but how is textbook/online pricing not relevant to the financing model? There's no need to dismiss that avenue of conversation.

[BeetleB]

>But what's with the griping about textbook publishers? The overreliance on adjuncts allows the university to charge lower tuition and the publishers make the feat possible!

Not all publishers. Just those that make trivial, minor changes that prevent you from using used books for classes.

Also, the whole "Let's create a separate text book for each university" thing.