My Thoughts on Online Classes

I just dropped out of online college. I was going to a school that calls itself a university but was going for an associate’s degree. The associate’s degree is through a “college” subsidiary of the university. I consider this a glorified community college. The problem here is that the price per credit of the “college” is the same as the price per credit of the university. This doesn’t seem right at all. If community colleges did this, everyone would take their basic classes at the universities instead.

Monetary reasons weren’t the only reasons for dropping out, but they played a very large part in it. The online college I was attending had a class discussion forum with class discussions every other week. The instructor would interact with the students a bit during these discussions, but other than this interaction and grading papers, the instructors were not really involved in the learning process. I had to read my text “books” on my own, figure out how to do my assignments, and motivate myself to complete them and turn them in. If a student has a question about how to complete an assignment, they can submit the question in the class forums and hope the instructor reads it before the assignment is due. The instructors almost seemed put out by these questions. I can understand this though. These instructors are people with full time jobs who teach these online classes for supplemental income. Just trying to grade weekly assignments would be tough enough without having to answer questions.

The instructor for one of my last classes treated assignments like we were in graduate classes. Every assignment had to have a cover page, a reference page, and be written in APA format. They also had to include an introduction or abstract and a conclusion. I don’t think this instructor realized that we were taking classes toward an associate’s degree. Making sure each paper was written in the proper formats was more difficult than coming up with what to write. I did appreciate that this instructor actually seemed to read assignments and gave constructive feedback. The instructor for the other class did not put even close to as much effort into grading assignments. You could tell that this instructor had some preformatted feedback that was just copied and pasted into the grading forum. I received the exact same feedback on several assignments. My final assignment, worth 25% of my grade for the class, was graded and turned back into me within a day of turning it in. I was confused on this assignment and know that I made mistakes yet I got a perfect grade on it. Somehow I don’t think any time was actually spent looking at this assignment.

This brings me to the final point. Are online classes just buying credits and a grade or are students actually learning anything? Since students are basically teaching themselves and many of the instructors are just in it for a paycheck, I would argue that very little actual learning goes on. The only possible learning is what the students are teaching themselves. Do people actually expect to learn anything from online classes or are they just in it for the credits and/or degree? While looking at the forums about the pro’s and con’s of online learning, I noticed many people talking about how they just wanted a degree to further their careers. Perhaps this is the online point, the money. I enjoy learning and I’m sure there are others out there that do as well, but we are getting less common.

My dilemma with E-books

Along with the announcement of the Apple iPad today came the announcement that Apple will be opening an E-book store (iBookstore) to go along with the iBook app. If the examples Steve Jobs showed today are a good representation of prices, then the ebooks on the Apple site will cost between $8 and $15 each. This is similar pricing to Ebooks.com and I think Amazon is selling most of their ebooks for around $10.

This all seems very pricey to me for a book with no paper. It is a simple file stored on a computer and transferred through purchase to another computer. Pricing an Ebook at around the same price as a softcover book seems a bit excessive considering there is no printing involved and the consumer does not receive a tangible object. A book, once purchased and read, can be traded with friends, sold to a used bookstore, or even exchanged through some type of book exchange. You can hardly do this with an Ebook.

Barnes & Noble has a no refund policy on Ebooks.

Amazon has a no refund policy on downloadable software content. It does not specify Ebooks, but I would assume they qualify under this stipulation

Ebooks.com says refunds are given at the discretion of their management. That’s encouraging…

I’ve never heard of a book store having a no refund policy on new print books. If you get the book home and realize you don’t like it, you can return if for a full refund. Some may charge a small restocking fee or have a limitation on how long you can keep the product (30 days, etc.).

Authors typically get royalties from the publisher for book purchases. The average range for royalties for a hardcover is 10-15% of the list price. Ebooks have a similar royalty percentage. Let’s say a hardcover sells for $20. The author makes $2-3 off the sale of each book. If the Ebook only sells for $10, the author would only make $1-1.50 off each sale. Is there a difference in the amount of work involved for the author if the consumer buys an Ebook or a hardcover? No. Is there a difference in the cost to the publisher of producing an Ebook or a hardcover? You betcha. The publisher is making a hefty profit off that Ebook and passing none of that on to the author.

The publisher might argue that buy selling an Ebook they are losing a potential book purchase, thereby losing some money. Somehow I doubt this. The people that love and buy books are still going to purchase books. The option of purchasing Ebooks is most likely adding new consumers who would not otherwise be purchasing books.

Let’s discuss pirating. It is very difficult and costly for anyone people to reproduce an actual printed and bound hardcover book. For the individual consumer, it would cost a lot more money to reproduce a book than to just buy that book. I would suspect there are not many “companies” out there reproducing and selling pirated print copies of books. An Ebook is very simple to copy and distribute to millions of people over the internet. There is little difference between an Ebook and an MP3 or a video file of a movie. Music and movies have been being distributed over the internet for years now. It is only since the release of Ebooks that authors and publishers have had to seriously consider the ramifications of piracy.

So what is the solution? Who knows! Some authors are now offering their Ebooks for free in the hopes that readers will enjoy the book and choose to buy it in print form. This is risky to say the least. I would really like to see Ebooks as a bonus with the purchase of a hardcover or softcover new release book. I would love the idea of having a “digital copy” of my books. Another option would be an Ebook rental site similar to Netflix that would allow you to pay a fee and read Ebooks while signed online, but that would not allow you to save the files to your computer or Ereader. This site would have to somehow disable the Select All - Copy functions of the browser.

It is possible that Apple will come up with some way to disable the ability of pirating their Ebooks being sold from the iBookstore, and if they can that is awesome. The iPad looks fun, is fairly inexpensive, and is very attractive. That being said, I seriously doubt the average Apple consumer who is used to paying 99 cents for music (or stealing it for free) will be chomping at the bit to pay $10-15 for an Ebook. Something needs to change there.