Do E-Reserves lead to excessive paper waste?
I remember my freshman year core class and the first thing that comes to mind is the excessive reading that was assigned to us using E-Reserves, an option that allows professors to post the class texts online to be downloaded, usually in the PDF format. I also remember running out of my alotted “printing money” early on due to the amounts of pages that I had to print using this method. When students complained about this issue, our professor would suggest that we read the articles online. However, for me and many other students, this was not an option. In order to truly absorb the reading, it’s necessary for many students to be able to mark the pages either by underlining, highlighting, or using stick notes. For this reason, I was basically forced to print hundreds of sheets of reading which I felt was a tremendous waste even if recycled which I’m sure many students failed to do. I always wished there was something else that could have been done– perhaps by making the files interactive
