Modern textbook supplements

It's the 21st Century, and textbooks have changed a lot since the last one.

When I graduated in 1999, the publishers of the textbooks we used didn't offer nearly as much stuff as is available now. Three of my four business courses are using books published by Thomson South Western, who (in addition to the textbooks) provides CD-ROMs and websites that includes interactive online quizzes, extra cases, key term dictionaries, web tutors, and powerpoint presentations.

No joke -- check out the sites for Finance, Cost Accounting, and Organizational Behavior

This brings up an interesting point: if publishers are doing all the work to prepare for classes, should the instructors be doing anything else with their time? In cost accounting, for example, our professor (who is also the head of the accounting department) gives publisher-generated quizzes, publisher-generated midterms, publisher-provided PowerPoint presentations, case work direct from the book, and gives us homework answers as explained by the publisher.

The only grading work he's had to do is collect answer sheets and mark the multiple choice questions. Not a bad racket, if you ask me.

And yet, I can't help but wonder if we're paying too much for a professor who's so well-qualified that we're, in essence, wasting his time with this elementary stuff. Yes, we're an MBA class, but there are plenty of people in the class who didn't come from a business background, and we could just as easily learn from someone who's really good at explaining the book and has a lot of free time to tutor individual students.

As advanced as the book is, we're still constrained by our need for a good explanation.