Textbooks are becoming more and more challenging to students and there are several reasons for that. First of all, todays textbooks are getting bigger and bigger with lots of materials crammed inside it. This is true most of the time. From my experience, I know that, me and most of my classmates, if they have a textbook ,could not finish the whole textbook and understand it fully in a six months semester. It is not their faults, if the teacher can not cover a textbook in a semester long period, how will a student able to finish it and understand it. Another reason is, in this country textbook market is in the monopoly of couple of big publishers. they are businessman, so it is natural that they want to make maximum profit out of selling textbook. SO, they force the writers to write the textbook in a way that will look heavy with information, looks nice only and without stirring any controversy. Which makes the book ultimately without any personality. They set the price high and does not care much if a student will be able buy a textbook with that price tag. Also, the publishers try to influence professors buy giving them secret incentives(Which I think should be banned) to recommend their published books to the students. Most of the time the professors do not try to make aware of the students that there are other alternative books they can learn from and the students feel compelled to buy teachers recommended textbooks even with a high price tag. These are some of the problems students are facing with textbooks.
From what I have learned from working in the OER seminar that they made buying the textbooks really affordable. they also let students freely access the digital version of the books which is a big relief to the students. Also, there are the flexibility of improving an OER textbook qualitatively with discussions and recommendations. One shortcomings of OER textbooks are, they are little short on making a textbooks interesting and more engaging to students. They should put more effort on adding more relevant pedagogical aids in their textbooks.
Students absolutely should evaluate their textbooks as part of their classwork. This way they can let their voice be heard about what they like in a textbook and what they don not.
If I am professor recommending textbooks to students I will feel the responsibility to evaluate the textbooks myself at first, than I will also consider about the price of the textbooks. But, most important is assessing the quality of the textbooks by self reading and also taking student surveys on the textbooks. last but not the least, a professor should not be persuade by the commercial publishers just for the chance of getting high incentives.
I Have learned how to evaluate a textbook based on some set criteria. This makes me in some extent an authoritative person to evaluate a textbook properly. Also, I am now more aware of copyright contents and my privacy right in terms of digital medias.
