Posts Tagged ‘Professors’

New Federal Textbook Rules Already In Use At MC

Who loves following federal law? I don’t! But I recently found out about new federal regulations that effects Marietta College students and their textbook purchasing decisions.

The Higher Education Opportunity Act goes into effect July 1st, and contains many different things (thanks to Disruptive Library Technology Jester for the breakdown of the law).  One part that is important to students is that there are new textbook disclosure rules to help make class selections and book purchasing decisions a bit easier.

According to the law, colleges are now required to show what books and materials are required and/or recommended for each course at the time of scheduling.  Back when you scheduled, you should have noticed a book icon listed for each class.  Clicking on the icon will tell you what is required for the course, the price, and the ISBN.  Not all classes have books listed, so you may see “To Be Determined” and “No Required Materials” notes instead.  Textbook bundles must also be sold separately, with bundled and non-bundled options listed – including pricing breakdowns.

Ed. Note – According to a rep from the National Association of College Stores, which commented on the article, books are allowed to be bundled still.  Writing on the Mall apologizes for the error.  Here’s what they said:

Under the law, institutions do not have to sell or list textbook bundles seperatly. Publishers need to disclose such information to faculty, but faculty are free to continue to adopt bundles as required. Publishers do not have to offer unbundled for any package they determine as “integrated”.

Another change is that publishers are required to tell professors more information about books they may use for classes.  Professors will now know how much the book costs, what revisions have been made to the book, and other editions of the book in different formats (including their prices).

HEOA also asks for book options to be publicized better by the institution, including renting textbooks, buying used books, and digital textbooks.

Like I mentioned earlier, Marietta College has already adopted the new requirements in its online scheduling system.

Follett Higher Education Group, the company that owns the Marietta College Bookstore, has been advertising it’s own book rental program called Rent-A-Text.  Follett is trying to compete with Chegg (A person favorite!), a popular book rental service that has been around for a few years.  Half.com and Amazon are other great choices for used textbooks.

Top Professors at Marietta College According to Some Students

EDITOR’S NOTE:  Isaiah Creasap is a guest writer for Writing on the Mall.  He is involved with the Media Writing Two class at Marietta College, which has been submitting articles to us.  If you would like to see more like this, just let us know at patrick_h at writingonthemall dot net.

All students have their own opinion on what makes some classes more enjoyable than others; maybe it was easy, maybe it was interesting or maybe it challenged them and made them better.

The same is true for the professors of those classes. In my search for Marietta College students’ top five favorite professors, I found a variety of reasons why students like that certain professor.

Right away this was a challenge because the first 13 answers I received were all different professors which tells me something, we have great professors here at Marietta. Some push us, some make us laugh but they all care. In random order here are the top five Marietta College professors according to the students.

Read more…

Rate Our Professors

Allison Matas’s blog noted yesterday that Marietta College now has a page on RateMyProfessor.com

The site has ratings for 83 professors, and if you see that a professor is not up there, you can add them into the list and go from there.

Hit the link to see all of the professors listed.

I guess you could call it an unofficial way to keep tabs on professors, with the more official method being the new online evaluation program the college has started.  Note that participants will receive their grades the day after they are turned in my professors, instead of the usual two week waiting period.  Online evaluations should open up after Thanksgiving break if I remember correctly.