Which scenario sounds better to you?

When you purchase a textbook, you're pre-paying for whatever internet resources the publisher threw together to impress your instructor. For the average course, that comes to somewhere around $15.

If you choose not to use the internet resources, you're out $15.

If you use the internet resources and they suck, you're out $15.

If you complain to the publisher, you won't get any help. And yeah, you're still out $15.

If you get a one-month Premium Upgrade with College-Cram, and for whatever reason you aren't satisfied, we'll refund your $15.

Now, which one of those scenarios sounds better to you?

Sticking up for students,
Professor Cram

How useful are internet resources?

Over and over again, college students have told us that they just don't use the computerized 'stuff' that publishers provide with their textbooks. The words "pointless" and "useless" get thrown around by college students when describing these resources.

So why do publishers continue to spend (your!) good money on these? Because they aren't meant to help students, that's why.

Publishers are in business to sell textbooks, period. Their whole business model revolves around convincing your instructor that their book is best. But since every publisher's Chemistry textbook is pretty much the same, they fall back on the old 'we have more stuff to go with the book' approach.

It doesn't matter if their computerized 'stuff' is useless, as long as they have it that's one more checkmark for your instructor.

I have a confession to make -- I spent some time producing these sorts of resources for two of the three major publishers. I know what motivated the folks I worked for, and tried like hell to make the 'stuff' I produced actually be of use (despite their efforts to the contrary).

Now that I'm with College-Cram, I am finally able to produce useful resources. Our Cramlets aren't meant to convince the instructor to use a textbook because we don't publish textbooks.

Our Cramlets have to be useful, and over the past six semesters we've heard college students tell us loud and clear -- they are!

New newsletter is out

The latest College-Cram newsletter is out. It has some interesting articles like test-taking tips, why college algebra is such a challenge and what you can do about it, and a Cramlet review for Factoring Trinomials.

I also included a bit of introduction for your amusement. Enjoy!
Professor Cram

Rocking all over the world, part 2

The party continues to grow! Since my last RAOTW post two weeks ago, we've added students from Canada, Jamaica, and Turkey. Including the U.S., that makes over 200 colleges in seven countries.

Ride the wave,
Professor Cram

"Midterms," or "Do We Have a Test Today?"

My worst experience in college was taking the final exam for a Geology class. I was working full time and was only taking one course for the semester. With my mind on other things, I showed up for the final exam at the regularly scheduled class time.

I walked to my seat and sat down, when the instructor motioned to me. I walked up with a smile on my face and he looked rather baffled. He asked, "Are you here to take the final exam?" I replied, "Yep!" The instructor then looked at me again trying to remember me as one of his students and then said, "You do know the exam started an hour and half ago and you only have thirty minutes left?" I looked back with a blank stare; it was then I realized that the final exam schedule was different than the class time.

I picked up the test and started immediately. Only a few people had finished the test before I got started. I went through it like lightning, answering exactly what I knew and skipping the rest. Once I finished the first pass I had fifteen minutes left; the room was still mostly full. I took a second pass and guessed at the questions I didn't know. When I finished with the second pass I took it up to the instructor, smiled, and turned it in with five minutes to spare.

It wasn't the best grade I ever made but I did pass. So, remember to check your schedule and make sure you know when the midterm or final exam is scheduled and in what room. (I did have roommate who showed up in the wrong room for his final. Fortunately it was a departmental exam, and the room was for the same course just a different section.)

I have included two links that offer some test taking tips. I especially like the one that starts off, "It's already too late!" lol


Midterm Test Taking Tips
Studying For a Test

Just remember, it's never too late and if you need a little help with understanding how to read a Multi-Step Income Statement, then give us a try.

There's no Crying in Baseball,
Professor Cram

Rocking all over the world

Just wanted to give a special "hey" to our subscribers from New Zealand, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and all the other countries around the world.

Welcome to the party!
Professor Cram

Using the Bottomless Worksheets

As you may have noticed, many of our math and math-related Cramlets (such as Simple Linear Inequalities) have Bottomless Worksheets to go with them. Bottomless Worksheets are special Cramlets that randomly generate ten problems for you to solve, and provide an answer sheet too.

The best way to tackle these topics is to check out the original Cramlet to learn the problem-solving skills, then try them out with the Bottomless Worksheets, then go back to the original Cramlet to work out the ones you get wrong.

While many of the original Cramlets are only available to Premium Upgrade subscribers, the Bottomless Worksheets are available to all subscribers -- Premium Upgrade and Free Registration subscribers alike.

Good to the Last Drop!
Professor Cram

Tweak a Little Here and There...

It has been a few days since we launched the new site and like all things we have been tweaking. We appreciate your feedback; let us know what you think and how we can improve.

One of the first issues we've dealt with is the restriction of an .edu email address for the free registration. College-Cram.com is designed for University/College Students. We are working toward the development of tools to enhance the student's experience and build individual campus communities for academic success. This is why we are requiring an .edu e-mail address, to keep out those who want to take advantage of students.

If your university does not issue an e-mail account with the .edu exchange, e-mail us to set-up your school's e-mail exchange.

Keep Trucking!
Professor Cram

Algebra, Algebra, Why Algebra?

I was reading through the daily news relating to education, specifically concerning Algebra. It seems Algebra has become a major hurdle to college students even though it is considered to be developmental math. Students are struggling to understand the basic concepts and arithmetic necessary for the mastery of Algebra.

I am in no way a math major. I struggled some with math in college, mainly with Pre-Calculus. Honestly the first time I took the course I made a "D" by the skin of my teeth. I immediately re-took the course during summer school. It was a five-credit course that met during both summer terms. It was all I did that summer. I slept, ate, and lived math that summer. I would work problems late into the night, wake up and go to the study lab and continue to work problems until class started. By the end of the summer I had earned an "A" in the class. The other students thought I was a math genius, which I wasn't, I just worked hard and practiced that summer, it required time.

The following article excerpt written from the perspective of a community college math instructor, sheds some light on the problem in that we are not allowing students the time to digest and understand the concepts. A student’s time can be fragmented with extracurricular activities or even work leaving little practice time to understand the concepts and become proficient. Again, I am not a math guru but I did learn one thing that summer, math requires practice just like anything else.

Math anxiety plus overbooked kids equals no solution
The Free Lance-Star, Date published: 9/18/2005
What is important to understand is that mastery of algebra is critical to advancement--in both math and the sciences.

At the same time, syllabi in Algebra I and II--and other courses--are overburdened with extraneous material that is simply not essential to the next level. America's math textbooks are much too fat. Although teachers may admit that there is much in their textbooks they do not cover, many--in the attempt to keep pace with a required curriculum--feel rushed.

As a result, they talk fast and expect students to learn fast. A lot of impatience gets conveyed, resulting in frustrated students with unanswered questions.

What is being ignored in the attempt to cover material is that concept-laden mathematics needs time to be digested--time no one seems to acknowledge.

The problem, however, does not lie only with syllabi and teachers. Parents and students must bear their share of the problem. Students are overscheduled, and have been for at least one generation. Extracurricular activities have significantly diminished study time and personal time.

Many of today's students lack both the time and commitment to make math happen. Band practice, sports practice, and after-school jobs often absorb up to three to four hours of after-school time.

Unfortunately, this leaves fewer and fewer hours to make sense of those simultaneous linear equations, logarithms, and proofs. (Copyright 2005 The Free Lance-Star Publishing Company.)

It's this struggle student's have with Algebra that motivated us at college-cram.com to complete the College Algebra library first. We honestly want to help students to become successful in their academic endeavors.

A Study Management Site for College Students

We have been thinking hard at the College-Cram headquarters, which involves a lot of spade playing, about what we can build to help students beyond our Cramlets. We are entertaining ideas about building some of the following:

• quizzing and testing for basic content
• text-book swap
• academic calendar for students
• study group functionality
• quick reference guides

The list goes on and on, but we are open to ideas you might have. So, make a suggestion and let us know what would help you the most for getting through school by posting a comment.

It's a New Site!

We have been working hard the last three months, listening to students and subscribers to learn more about what would benefit students the most. After all the research and learning new programming languages we are happy to present College-Cram.com New and Improved!

There are a couple of site philosophy changes -

• The site is designed for university students only. We now require a university e-mail (.edu) address to register
• Each user has a customizable launching page

We have further plans for enhancement of the site. This is only phase one. The future design will include more capabilities for student customization, interaction, and test preparation. Our hopes are to see individual College-Cram.com communities by campus where students are empowered with their own academic management system.

Stay Tuned For More!

...and now a word from our sponsor

Can textbook publishers learn from television’s history?

In the early days of television, broadcasters turned to vaudeville and theater producers to create their programming. These producers simply created vaudeville and theater shows, and stuck a camera in the audience as an afterthought. They didn’t understand the capabilities of the new medium, and so did a minimal job incorporating it into their more familiar works. Eventually, it took an outside industry – Hollywood – to produce shows specifically for television, introducing techniques familiar to today’s viewers that made for a more effective medium.

College textbook publishers are experiencing a similar situation regarding the Internet. Like the early TV producers, today’s publishers continue to make textbooks, and convert them in some fashion into Internet components as an afterthought – vaudeville and theater are replaced by E-books and web sites that offer static illustrations and text. None of these are specifically produced for the Internet, and deviate only slightly from the traditional publishing paradigm.

By its very nature, the Internet is capable of providing far better (and less expensive) learning tools than those currently provided. College students are clamoring for these tools, but the textbook publishers have been inadequate to this task. Clearly, it is up to someone else to deliver on the Internet’s promise.

The Smartacus Corporation of Fort Worth, Texas is one company that delivers the goods. Their College-Cram.com website features a library of study programs covering college-level math, business, science, and languages. In many ways, these study programs are more effective learning tools than traditional textbooks.

• Lower cost – College students spend $120 or more on each new textbook. Publishers, who get no revenue from “used” book sales, regularly publish new editions every three years to force more “new” book purchases; often these new editions are little changed from the preceding edition. College-Cram.com offers its entire library of study programs for only $15 per month, with further discounts for longer subscriptions.



• Focused learning – Every study program in College-Cram.com’s library focuses on a single concept, such as calculating sales tax or the structure of the human heart. Students know which concepts they need to study, and need a way to get to them quickly without slogging through other concepts in the chapter that they already understand.



• Effective teaching techniques – Study programs in the College-Cram.com library are presented in ways that best convey the intended concept, often addressing multiple learning styles to ensure the best learning experience. For example, tab-tutor programs include a labeled illustration (for the visual learner), two different ways to work the formula (for the hands-on learner), and a glossary of terms (for reading-oriented learners).
  
  In addition, resources that are typically static are presented more effectively in this library. The Periodic Table and Logarithm Tables, for instance, come with instructions on how to use them, while financial statements provide explanations for each line item that are usually buried within the textbook, if provided at all.



• True interactivity – Unlike the E-books and such offered by textbook publishers, College-Cram.com’s study programs are truly interactive. Formula-solvers, for example, accept numbers from the student and walk them through the steps required to solve math and science problems. Similarly, financial ratio solvers show the steps and also where to find the proper values on financial statements.

Those early vaudeville and theater producers ended up being replaced by their more effective film producer counterparts, who went on to transform the industry. Will the textbook publishers learn from television’s early history, and change their ways before it’s too late? Tune in next week…

An edition by any other name smells as sweet

Every three years or so, textbook publishers release a new edition of a textbook. One has to wonder, though, why? Calculus hasn’t changed much since Sir Isaac Newton, so what’s the point? More importantly, what has changed from that last edition to the latest one?

In four words… not a whole lot. Sure, there are textbooks that change substantially from one edition to another – ones in dynamic subjects that actually change (like planetary geology, or current political science). Most textbooks, though, don’t change – especially introductory ones.

Let’s look at what does change from one edition to the next:

• New Cover – This is the oldest trick in the book. Put a new cover on an old book and it looks like new! It makes the new edition look nicer, but it certainly doesn’t help you study any better.
  
  
• Chapter Re-order – Another familiar trick is to juggle the order of chapters. This makes for a new book without bothering the authors, but it doesn’t help you a bit.
  
  
• New Examples – This one’s a bit of help. Instead of the two examples in last edition, you get two different examples. Umm… maybe that isn’t much help after all.
  
  
• New Pictures – Charts, tables, graphs, and photos, all appealing to our attention-disordered TV generation. The new stuff is no more effective than the old stuff, but once again they don’t need to bother the authors.
  
  
• Error Correction – Woah, here’s something useful – fixing the damned errors! We paid good money for the old edition, they couldn’t throw that in too?!?
  

So what’s changed here? Nothing much, except for the price.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

Some hidden reasons why college textbooks are so expensive

The National Association of College Stores has a breakdown of where each dollar goes for a new textbook. A closer look at their logic, though, reveals enough slight-of-hand to make Penn and Teller genuflect in awe.

First, let’s take their categories for the non-bookstore portion. (Face it, no matter what the publisher charges the bookstore is going to make their cut – at least they aren’t shy about telling you that.)

32.8 (42%) -- Paper, Printing, Editorial Costs
15.6 (20%) -- Publisher Marketing Costs
11.8 (15%) -- Author Income
10.2 (13%) -- Publisher General and Admin
1.0 (1%) -- Freight Expenses
7.2 (9%) -- Publisher Income

After removing the bookstore parts, we find that 78.6 cents per dollar go to the publisher. If we divide each number by 78.6, we get the percentage of textbook dollars attributed to each category.

(FYI, I’ve spent almost twenty years working in various capacities within the college textbook publishing industry, so I have more than a passing familiarity with what goes on behind the curtain.)

OK, let’s talk about these categories now:

Paper, Printing, Editorial Costs – Paper and printing are such a small part of the cost of a book that it’s embarrassing. Called PP&B in the industry (the ‘B’ is binding), this can run from $2 or less for a typical study guide to $12 or so for a high-quality art or biology text. So, pulling back this particular curtain, we find that the lion’s share of this category is editorial costs. I won’t address the relative worth of these editorial costs, but they are incurred whether publishers print a physical book or create an e-book. It’s easy to see, then, that the idea of going the e-book route is not going to do much to reduce the cost of the textbook.

Publisher Marketing Costs – Publishers send their sales people to your professor’s office to convince her/him to use their textbook. How do they do this? Certainly not by striving to produce the highest quality, most useful book imaginable. No, they give the professor armfuls of “free” stuff to help them teach the class – copies of the student text, instructor manuals, answer books, powerpoints, etc. They also dangle “free” stuff for the student to use, like student websites, bundled CDs, etc. Who do you think pays for all that free stuff? That’s right, you do.

Author Income – 15% royalties… are these guys on crack? Twenty years ago major authors were getting a 15% royalty, but not anymore. Go ahead and ask any of your professors who have written textbooks, they’ll tell you. The trend over recent years is to get royalties down to 10-12%, putting more profits in the publishers’ pockets.

Publisher General and Admin – All big businesses try their damnedest to avoid paying taxes using whatever legal means are available. (We’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on this one.)

Freight Expenses – Can’t do much with this one, except that recently at least one major college textbook publisher has begun charging the bookstores a restocking fee for returned books. This will reduce some of the freight expenses, but shouldn’t have much impact on the bottom-line cost of the book (although it is pissing off a lot of bookstore managers).

Publisher Income – The chart says this is 9%, but that’s too low. At the very least it’s got to be 12% or more, based solely on the reduced royalties being paid nowadays.

By conservative estimates, then, around half the cost of a textbook is attributed to the business practices of the publishing industry (editorial and marketing costs). E-books is not the way to bring down these costs, revamping the business practices is.

A Revolution for E-learning?

E-learning remains a concept yet to reach its full potential. Still, while there have been incredible strides made within the industry in the last few years the revolution is still to come. I believe that once e-learning is implemented beyond the creation of Content Management Systems (CMS) into the higher education market then the real revolution will begin.

Many may argue the revolution is already here, pointing at more students participating in on-line courses because of the abilities of the CMS. An incredible amount of time and money has been spent developing the CMS and its capabilities to improve the administration and communication process between instructor and student.

A CMS does an incredible job of improving the administration aspect of delivering a course on-line, but e-learning is more than administration. At its heart, e-learning is learning. Do students learn purely from a well-orchestrated roll attendance, test delivery, or group think? E-learning should be centered on the delivery of solid content. Where is the content in CMS? Content Management Systems are crucial, but unfortunately, in some areas the publishers of textbooks are driving them.

Typically, the higher education market has depended upon the creation and organization of content from textbook publishers. A publisher seeks out authors from among the higher education market, primarily to secure adoption rates, and only secondarily to delivery content. Textbook publishers have one goal -- sell textbooks. With the recent trend of declining individual textbook sales the industry is seeking new avenues to increase the sale of the products. Each year the prices of textbooks increase as the individual unit sales decrease.

E-learning from a publisher’s point of view is another avenue to increase the sale of textbooks. The tools and content they are providing to instructors for use in the CMS systems are developed to support the textbook and make teaching easier for the instructor. Most of the tools are PowerPoint slides, quizzes, or digital copies of the book, with a few linear-based content presentations. None of these are truly new or innovative in their approach, or are focused on using the full capabilities of the medium to delivery quality content targeting the actual user - “Students.” It is time to move away from e-learning content produced for the purpose of increasing the sale of textbooks and produce true interactive e-learning modules that empower instructors and students.

The instructors are still key to the classroom. They are the administrators of ideas, concepts, theories, questions, and thought processes for students. E-learning ought to be designed and produced to allow an instructor to custom design their approach to teaching a course. It also should allow for students to access specific learning modules when they need it, without working through a course. It is through the creation of College-Cram.com and the library of learning modules, “cramlets,” that I have been able to explore the concepts of e-learning for the higher education market.

The approach of College-Cram.com has been to identify the core concepts of a subject and build a small Flash™ learning module only on an individual concept. The library consists of individual learning modules organized by concept. This allows students to seek out what they need to learn and gives instructors the tools to customize their course. By concentrating on the core concepts, a library of generic content is created empowering the user to build their own knowledge base.

There are some limitations to this approach as generic content creation only works with those courses that are built upon an agreed foundation of principles, theorems, and laws. Subject matters within science, math, business, and languages provide the best opportunity for this approach.

Revolution will occur for e-learning when the approach for higher education is not based upon the sale of textbooks but in providing access to viable, and desired content. The content must be interactive, customizable, and granular in design and administered using advance technologies of the 21st century in place of digital page turning programs.