Rent-a-textbook
July 7, 2009
That’s right, instead of purchasing $600 of textbooks each semester, students can rent textbooks, often at 60-80% less than the original purchase prices. Inspired by Netflix, sites like chegg.com (shorthand for “chicken and egg”) and other services that have been popping up to help students save money on one of their largest college-related expenses. The New York Times has the full scoop here:
Ping: We Rent Movies, So Why Not College Textbooks? [New York Times]
Here’s a list of book-rental sites I’ve found:
Another site which may help you if you’re in the used-book market is SwaBoo. It allows you to type in your campus, post books for sale, and meet up with others in your area to ’swap’ them.
And while I’m on the topic of books, I’ve been using a book search engine called FetchBook.info for years — since I was in college! FetchBook searches Amazon, Half.com, eBay, and other booksellers to find the best prices on used and new books.
Update: I rented a book from Chegg for my News Writing class this semester. I was going to write about the experience and notable facets of the site, but someone on the site factoidz has already done a great job here. I picked Chegg because they had the best price for my textbook for the semester (around $35 for an $80 textbook — $40ish with shipping and tax), they had a generous definition of a “semester” — I wouldn’t need to return the book until 12/24 (long after our semester has actually ended), and they plant a tree for each book you rent.
If you click the above image, you can see exactly how much I saved by renting instead of buying “Reporting for the Media.”
I also got a 30-day free trial, which started the day I ordered the book. If I decided to drop the class (don’t worry, professor, I won’t!) I can return the book and not have to pay anything. That’s a great guarantee for a student who may be uncommitted to a course, or students enrolled in a course threatened to be cancelled.
Here’s another Chegg review from CampusGrotto.
Duke releases largest university image collection formatted for iPhone
June 22, 2009
This is big news for educators! Duke’s Office of Information Technology and Office of Public Affairs and Government Relations worked with TerriblyClever Design to create DukeMobile 1.1, which contains possibly the largest historic image collection formatted for a mobile device.
Applelinks reporters say:
Duke University Libraries offers mobile users digital materials from 20 collections — about 32,000 images overall — covering women’s history, early American sheet music, Duke history and other topics. The libraries will add new collections regularly as they become available.
Read about it here. You can install DukeMobile by visiting its page in the iTunes store.
An Apple a Day…
June 17, 2009
Should an institution of higher education dictate a particular technology for student use? This is the question arising around the University of Missouri School of Journalism’s decision requiring all majors to purchase and iPhone or iPod Touch. The school’s rationale for this decision is to provide students with lectures, allow the student immediate access to the Internet for fact checking and for watching instructional videos. Coming against strong pressure, the school clarified its policy to say it recommends the use of iPhones or iPod Touches but that students could use “any web-enabled, audio-video player” which meant Microsoft’s Zune or RIM’s Blackberrys.
Read more
Ology: Wake Forest conducting webcam interviews
March 11, 2009
What’s the next big trend in higher-ed recruting?
Wake Forest recently began a pilot program to interview students for its incoming freshman class — online. Its admissions officials are using a version of Skype to conduct half-hour virtual interviews to members of its prospective class of 2013. Webcam interviews can differentiate those students are serious about attending but might not have the financial means to or time to travel to faraway colleges during a busy senior year. Then again, as David Hawkins of the National Association for College Admission Counseling reports, cash-strapped students may have difficulty finding access to a webcam-enabled computer.
Though UR does not interview incoming students, what do you think of this initiative? Will it become the wave of the future? Could a successful interview tip a student toward attending a higher-education institution?
