The Plain Person’s Guide to Course Packs

Assignments are the basis upon which we evaluate the student’s ability to deal with course materials. It is those course materials which I wish to address, as their coherency has a strong effect on a student’s ability to proceed with tests, essays, and other assignments that evaluate their command of a class’s intellectual content. The delivery of this content depends primarily on three things—class interaction (lectures and seminars), screenings, and assigned readings. It is the last of these that I wish to discuss in order to point out the advantages of using a course pack.

Why a course pack at all, especially in an age that provides the possibility of web-accessible or e-Reserves of assigned material? Many of the intellectual property issues affecting hard-copy course packs also involve web-accessible materials, such as those using the popular Blackboard software. Initially, it was thought that the provisions of the Technology, Education, and Copyright Harmonization Act in 2002, developed to facilitate distance education, provided a loophole though which course packs could be made accessible online under Fair Use provisions. More recently, the status of electronic reserves of materials for students and other internet-accessible readings has been cast into doubt since the litigation between the Association of American Publishers and Cornell University in 2007. Although there has been a lot of discussion about open access course readings in the future, in the present there is still a very real threat of legal action, that, for many, makes the use of a course pack a more appealing alternative to electronic reserves. Even for those who opt for online readings, the same legal and pedagogical issues affecting the production of hard-copy course packs usually are involved, and the information in this article can be read as applying to both electronic and hard-copy versions.

Many of us have struggled with the positive and negative aspects of required readings for a course. Still, the most traditional approach to assigned readings is the textbook. The virtues of a textbook include the fact that it is readily available from a number of publishers. If the same textbook is used in subsequent years of a course, student costs can be kept down through the availability of used copies, or students who have bought their books new can recoup part of the cost by selling them the next year. If a course is taught in multiple sections by several instructors, the use of a common textbook ensures that students proceeding on to the next year of study will have a common intellectual background.

However, textbooks have distinct disadvantages. Publishers produce revised editions that are not always coherent with the previous editions, meaning that students are unable to recoup costs in a year following an updated version. Inevitably, some students wind up buying an obsolete version of your course textbook, with resulting confusion when assigned readings don’t match the pages in their books. But most importantly for the instructor, using a textbook in a course can be restraining, as either the course design closely follows the textbook (resulting in a teaching experience that is a bit like painting by numbers) or the course veers away from the textbook, leaving students wondering why they have paid for a text that is irrelevant to much of the course.

Another problem with textbooks is that they frequently are accompanied by other materials—a course syllabus listing screenings, dates of assignments, a glossary of terms, assignment questions, etc. All of this documentation can be hard for a student to keep together, and most instructors are familiar with the problem of students coming to you for additional copies of things handed out in class, either because they misplaced them, or because they were absent or late the day those things were handed out in class. Finally, many instructors supplement textbooks with additional readings, which are put on reserve in the library or in departmental resource centers. These present problems of their own, with students lining up to get access to readings, either at the reserve desk or at copying machines, or in...