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CCSC Looks to Increase the Availability of Online Course Materials
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 25, 2008
As part of an ongoing effort to lessen the cost of a Columbia education, the Columbia College Student Council passed a resolution last night to gradually move course material online, an alternative to often expensive course packs from local copy shops.
The current use of reading material beyond traditional textbooks, such as articles and other text excerpts, has been criticized by some students as being largely inconsistent. Literature for some courses is available through Web sites such as CourseWorks and CCWeb, while other texts are compiled in course packs and sold at Village Copier, sometimes for hundreds of dollars.
The resolution, authored by George Krebs, CCSC junior class president, and Adil Ahmed, CC ’09, urges Columbia libraries to work toward getting more course material scanned and available for students online.
“We want to make it the trend, not the exception, to put these things on E-reserves rather than using course packs,” said Krebs, who is running for CCSC president with Ahmed as his vice president for policy.
Krebs said that because Village Copier sells course packs for profit, it must pay copyright fees to the publishers—fees from which Columbia libraries, as nonprofit, are exempt under the fair use doctrine of copyright law—and that cost is passed onto students.
Ahmed said that the high cost of reading material sometimes deters students from completing their assignments. In one of his own classes with online text, “I’m doing much more reading than I would have done if I had to buy all the books.”
He added that the goal of the resolution is “very realistic, very practical.”
The logistics of such a project have yet to be worked out—Krebs and Ahmed intend to meet with the administration to lay out a comprehensive plan, which would likely enlist library assistants or work-study students to scan and upload course material.
Some secondary benefits to the resolution, Krebs said, are to potentially increase work-study positions and to cut down on paper use, if students opt to read assignments online.
But Krebs and Ahmed acknowledged that some students prefer to have their reading in a single, bound form.
“We want people to have options,” Krebs said. “We don’t want to limit them.”
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