Every quarter, UCLA students shell out large sums of money, sometimes in the hundreds, for one-time use course readers. In light of the online resources available to students and professors, it is time to move away from this old, expensive model.
The typical course reader is a hodgepodge of copied pages from textbooks, articles and other textual material assigned at the professor’s preference.
Most readers are sold through Westwood businesses that do not give refunds or take returns. Students uncertain of which courses to take at the beginning of the quarter must choose to either invest in a potentially dead-loss product or risk falling behind.
Although textbooks are generally more expensive, they can be resold. Many course readers, however, change frequently and require new students to buy the latest version, preventing them from reselling their outdated copies.
Even though the majority of the reader fees reportedly pay publishers for reprinting copyrighted work, charging students anywhere from about $25 to more than $100 for a course reader adds to their already substantial financial burdens.
This is especially true for professors who assign their own published work and receive royalties for each course reader sold.
While professors can and perhaps should use their own published materials, charging students heavily for access to them leads to the perception that professors prioritize royalties above students’ concerns.
Many professors elect instead to use UCLA’s Common Collaboration Learning Environment website to upload their assigned readings.
Students can access the same content other professors put in course readers online at the CCLE website through a simple login.
The service generally restricts course content to enrolled students and requires an intellectual property adviser to approve all uploaded content, though not all professors follow proper procedure in consulting the adviser.
Nevertheless, the procedure for dealing with course-reader copyright issues is no simpler than that of the CCLE site, and professors have resources to utilize the website.
Outside of CCLE, students can access many articles through archives such as JSTOR and Google Scholar, making course readers redundant.
Students are already paying for these services through their student fees; they should take advantage of them. Students who prefer physical copies can print at their own expense.
Instead of having to pay large sums of money for a set of photocopied pages, students should be given the autonomy to choose whether a reader will be a wise investment.