What are your thoughts about the Netflix model of learning materials Cengage Unlimited is offering?
Cengage Unlimited
Cengage, the for-profit textbook publisher, just announced a Netflix-style service for students called Cengage Unlimited. For a low fee of $120 per semester, or $180 per year, you get access to all of your classes’ textbooks digitally.
Hypothetically, this is a win for students and for people who want to lower textbook costs. But there’s more here to concern ourselves with.
Our Rentist Future
In the book Four Futures by Frase, the reader is challenged to imagine our society’s future on just 2 poles:
- Abundance-Scarcity Will we have enough to go around? and
- Equality-Hierarchy Will inequality increase or decrease?
You can then combine them to come up with our 4 possible basic futures:
- rentism — abundance + hierarchy: we have enough, but ownership and the benefits thereof are restricted to the few. Those that own the property and the patterns reap the benefits of abundance
- communalism — abundance + equality: we have enough and we are organized in such a way that everyone can enjoy the bounty — Party on, Garth.
- socialism — scarcity + equality: We need to organize ourselves really well in order to deal with a deficiency of resources
- exterminism — scarcity + hierarchy: The only surplus we (those in control) need to manage is a surplus of humanity.
While our actual future will be a partial mix of the above, I can’t help but to see some mix of #1 and #4 becoming realized. And so whatever we can do to stave off those is a worthwhile choice.
Cengage Unlimited is a Form of Rentism
I’m deeply concerned about faculty in our colleges and universities rolling over and allowing Cengage (and the other publishers) to engage in this sort of rent-extraction from students.
Below are my thoughts and concerns on the subject. If you have an alternate view or think I’m off my rocker*, I encourage discussion on the topic.
* I might metaphorically be off my rocker, but I am literally siting on a pink, plush rocking chair as I’m writing this.
Immediate Concerns (Certain Outcomes)
Students will lose the choice of ownership.
Cengage owns the pattern, which costs next to nothing to replicate, and they seem to be grooming us and our students to accept the idea that neither we nor our students can own the pattern, only to send Cengage royalties.
We should consider give our students more pathways to owning content, not less.
Students will be restricted in how they can access and use the books.
DRM is a blight upon education and these rent-extraction models are predicated upon DRM to control the use of “their” content. Often, DRM schemes restrict the ability of ADA students to fully access and experience the source materials. (However, publishers have recognized this and have worked to overcome this problem.)
We should seek out models that open up ways to use learning materials, not restrict them to uses and methods of access that the publishers deem non-threatening.
Intermediate Concerns (Likely Outcomes)
The Introductory Pricing Problem
Once we, as faculty, acquiesce to this model of perpetual renting for our learning materials because the price is so low, who is to say that the companies won’t continually increase their prices, like they’ve done with paper books and ebooks?
There’s no real reason those modes should be as expensive as they are. They are only as expensive as the for-profit companies charge a captive market.
The Streaming Video Problem
Given that a model perpetual rent extraction is likely not to be limited to one publisher, one can see a development parallel to video subscription models, where one has to pay rents to several providers to get full access to the learning materials needed — rent to be paid to
- Cengage,
- McGraw-Hill,
- Pearson,
- et cetera.
Given this likely development, I’m also concerned with possible pressure on schools to adopt a sole provider regardless of whether their choices are the best choices for students.
Long-Term Concerns (Who knows, but possibilities of which we should be mindful)
Finally, given the effort Cengage and other for-profit publishers have put towards building alternate course shell structures,* one can imagine, down the road, a final push to have their online course content be the course content. Suddenly, faculty might find themselves in a situation akin to Western Governors evaluators.
* Try and export quiz materials from a Connect book for editing or use in Canvas itself. If you use Connect, you are increasingly locked into their ecosystem. We might find us as faculty locked out one day.
Final Exhortations
I encourage all faculty to carefully consider the immediate and long term effects of the choices in front of us when we decide to where to put our stone in.
If you play a role in selecting learning materials for students, I encourage you to consider how best to serve students and our society long-term, how to encourage
- ownership,
- freedom (of use) and
- quality of resources.
