course pack/reader woes

[hungry_ghost]

Please help!!

I use a course reader of material that I've collected. No similar published anthology exists. Some of the material is out of print, not owned by our library, and hard to obtain. This is for a literature course.

I have been using a local copy center for years, but they went out of business. There is no other copy shop within walking distance of campus. The campus copy center enforces rules about copyright fairly rigidly, and the course packs they produce are extremely expensive (I was told that the default is 25 cents per page for copyrighted material). They told me that they require a lead time of several months. I need this in six weeks.

I want my students to have a printed physical copy that they can write on. Students have consistently told me that they appreciate having a printed copy. They tell me that they read more attentively from the printed page. They have also acknowledged that if I made the material available electronically, they would take a shortcut and read online.
I would like it to be bound. If the printed pages are in a 3-ring binder, they will lose pages. We often refer back to earlier sections, so they need to be able to flip back and forth.

Does anyone have any advice?
I do not have time to re-design my entire course, which is structured around this carefully-chosen set of readings.

I need a solution for fall semester (a fast solution), and I also need a solution for this and similar courses from spring semester on (where I have a little more time).

For the fall semester, the only solution I see is to take the risk of making the material (which, I admit, probably does contain some copyright violations) available to students electronically, and asking them to print it themselves (I have it as a single file).
I am not sure I can require them to print it, but I can "strongly encourage."
They can put it in a 3-ring binder. It is about 125 sheets (double-sided). I wish there were some better way for them to keep it all together ("bind it") than a 3-ring binder. Maybe a report cover like this?
Any suggestions, alternative solutions, etc?

And, any suggestions for a solution for future semesters?
I recently got that spammy cognella email, see this old CHE thread:
https://www.chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,69693.0.html
I don't want students to think I'm making money from them, I don't want to make money from them. I don't want that spammy company to make money from them either. I want to keep costs as low as possible.

Like it or not, I'm going to have to deal with copyright issues. Has anyone tried to collect copyright permissions on your own, and what was your experience? I found this link, and it seems daunting, but might save my students money:
https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/academic-and-educational-permissions/academic-coursepacks/#assembling_your_own_coursepack

Thank you for sharing your fora wisdom, experience, and advice.

[Parasaurolophus]

Hmm. A few possibilities spring to mind:

• If you make it available electronically, you could allocate some grades for printing it--say, 5%. That's a pretty decent incentive to print it all.
• Rather than binders, perhaps duotangs would do a better job of keeping all the pages together? 125 is a lot of pages for a duotang, but it might doable; alternately, it could be in two duotangs, and the printing (and grade) split between the beginning and middle of the course.
• You could print them all yourself, from your faculty printing account, and sell them to students roughly at cost. If you want them bound, you could even take them all in to Staples (or its equivalent) one day when you feel like making the drive.

[Hegemony]

Yes, copy and print them yourself.  This is what I always used to do.  Then charge students a small premium to account for the fact that for whatever reason, a couple will remain unsold.  So for instance, if the class has 40 students, you will have to print 40, but still only 38 or fewer may buy them, despite all your emphasis that they are required.. So if each one costs you $5 to copy, charge the students $5.25 for each.  Then you lose slightly less money on the deal.

[pepsi_alum]

I think if I were in this situation, I would follow Parasaurotholus's suggestion and post the readings electronically, and then do a notebook check (worth 5% of their grade) in week 2 to make sure that students had the readings in a three-ring binder. At my immediate former university, that would raise fewer red flags about possible copyright violations than having students pay the instructor to print.

[hungry_ghost]

Thank you, everyone. This is all helpful. I was so flustered when I got the bad news this morning that I wasn't thinking straight.

I was thinking that I can't base their grade on whether they have purchased materials or not, but I could certainly do that with a regular textbook, so ... of course I can, right? And, I do have a "no electronics" policy AND regular open-book in-class writing assignments, so not having the materials printed out will harm their grades quite a lot over the course of the term.

I am pretty sure my school has a policy against instructors selling materials to students, so I had better not do anything like that. Wish I could. I've learned that if students print it themselves on campus, they get a much cheaper rate per page.

I still hate the 3-ring binder solution:
Someone will get a cheap binder and the mechanism will bust and it will pop open and pages will fly everywhere.
Someone will mess up and punch holes too close to the edge, and the edge will tear and pages will fall out. Etc.

So ... I have this fantasy where everyone brings their printout and $N to class and I take all the printouts and get far-away copy shop to bind them and bring them back the next class, but that sounds like a lot of fuss ... for me. And heaven knows this has already been fuss enough. But maybe I could get a bulk pack of report covers like this one and offer them for a few dollars, cheaper than a binder and probably will last longer.

Please keep the suggestions coming!

[Hegemony]

Just to add that in my suggestion, I had assumed that all the selections were free of copyright problems.

[Parasaurolophus]

So ... I have this fantasy where everyone brings their printout and $N to class and I take all the printouts and get far-away copy shop to bind them and bring them back the next class, but that sounds like a lot of fuss ... for me. And heaven knows this has already been fuss enough. But maybe I could get a bulk pack of report covers like this one and offer them for a few dollars, cheaper than a binder and probably will last longer.

Please keep the suggestions coming!

Those are good. Will they fit 150ish pages, though?

You know, rather than sell them to the students, you could require that they acquire one at the bookstore while they're off on their printing errands. It seems perfectly fine to me to be a little arbitrary, and require that the printed materials be in a report cover and not in a binder. Like: 5% of your grade, but you must follow the instructions to the letter. Until you do, you can't earn the 5%.

[summers_off]

I am in a completely different field, so forgive me if this reply is off-base.  In my area, there are publishers who handle all of the copyright issues and printing.  You just send them the list of materials you would like to include and they do the rest.  It may be a bit more expensive for your students, but it would avoid the appearance that you are making money off of them.

If that option does not work for you, perhaps you can see if your fears of exploding binders are misguided?  It is true that rambunctious third graders are tough on binders, but college students may be a bit more gentle.  In addition, it would be the student's responsibility to pick up and re-order the pages, not yours.  Thus, they would have an incentive to be careful, especially if you share a nightmare story with them.  (I am currently having a flashback to the olden days of computer punch cards, and dropping a whole deck....)

[hungry_ghost]

Thanks, all this has been very helpful! I think I have a good solution worked out.

Summers_off,  I have seen the exploding binder in my very own classroom. A take-out coffee was also involved. It was unforgettable.