Sometimes Umass makes questionable decisions. These decisions cause one to wonder if anyone really thought deeply on the resulting impacts, or if we as a university are being used as a big guess and check problem solving testing area. Decisions such as was assigning Orange is the New Black for the common read then not inviting the author to do a talk since they felt a prior convict was not a good role model for the students of Umass. Or, deciding to preach sustainability while contributing vast amounts to food waste in order to beat a Guinness world record. I honestly feel Umass’s decision to partner up with Amazon is another questionable decisions.

I have a few questions. Does UMass honestly believe the deal will result in less costs to the students? Are they really just profiting from this deal and hoping the students don’t catch on? Did they put any thought or research into how this deal would actually affect the students and the community?

I honestly don’t know which I would prefer, if UMass didn’t think about all these things or if they did and decided the deal would be more profitable for them in the end.

Since this is a subject that particularly bothers me, I did a small survey of students and their textbook expenses and usages as well as a separate one for faculty on how they make their textbooks available to students.

The links to each survey can be found at the bottom.

From these surveys I was able to see that students pay huge amounts of money for their textbooks but rarely use them.

In the readings and from the podcast that my peers made for their final project it is clear that the Amazon deal will not be helping students cut down on their costs. However teachers do not need to limit themselves to what Amazon intends to limit them to. I was in a number of classes this year in particular including Race, Gender & New Media that bypassed this system to allow their students more accessible reading or listening material. Between making the readings articles online, taking advantage of free online textbooks, and putting textbooks on reserve for students to use teachers can really cut down on costs for students. It also helps to increase how often the readings will get done. If for say you can’t afford to buy the textbook, you will not be able to do the readings. However if the material is readily available online for free, there is no financial barriers preventing you. Teachers need not bow to the Amazon deal, there are still other options that will promote learning without breaking student’s banks. Hopefully Umass will see that this deal with Amazon is unhealthy and decide instead to put their money towards promoting more efficient reading material models.

Faculty

http://goo.gl/forms/ClBZU4tfet
Student

http://goo.gl/forms/YJL14Zws5Y