NEWS
EDITOR Mary Dahdouh EMAIL news@thedailycougar.com ONLINE thedailycougar.com/news
PARKING
Finding the right spot takes a lot Jacob Logan Staff writer
Parking on campus can be difficult, and depending on the time of day, the chances of finding a decent parking spot are low. “It’s a pain,” said art history senior Tory Maddux. “(Permits are) overpriced, and the fact that I have had to pay over $400 to park in a gravel parking lot more than 100 yards away is absurd.” With a student body as large as UH’s and ongoing construction projects, it is hard to accommodate everyone. Construction of the new stadium shut down lots 11A, 15F and 12B, eliminating more than 2,600 parking spots. “It’s kind of tough. … I scavenge for spots,” said business junior Collin Bartlett. Bartlett said he spends a lot of time following people in hopes of being able to take their parking spots. “(I) go about an hour early and spend most of that time finding parking,” he said. With the majority of the student population commuting to and from school, the common solution to parking problems is to get to campus early. “I don’t care if you don’t have class until noon, get there early. You can always go to the (Campus Recreation and Wellness Center) and work out, study in the (M.D. Anderson Memorial Library) or you can always sleep,” Maddux said. While getting to UH early is possible for some commuters, outside engagements like work or family can make
getting to campus ahead of schedule difficult. For late goers the last vestige of alternative parking may be the Energy Research Park. “I go straight to the ERP, because I’m 100 percent sure there will be no parking for me (on-campus),” said electrical engineering junior Zachary May. May is not alone. Many students simply default to parking at the ERP to circumvent the stress that comes from scavenging on campus. However, because of the ERP’s off-campus location, a shuttle must be taken to and from campus. Factoring in the extra 15 minutes it takes to make that bus ride is crucial to making it to class on time. The ERP, while being the cheapest solution, isn’t the only one. The Welcome Center Student garage, with its 1,500 new spaces, will make finding a spot less of a hassle. Auxiliary Services reports that when the new stadium is complete in Summer 2014, UH will net 3,190 more parking spaces than it lost. Of course, the last solution anyone can offer is to live on campus and eliminate the stress of parking and commuting altogether. “(Parking is) part of the reason I decided to move on campus, because there would be days when I was looking for parking for over an hour,” said civil engineering junior Ayesha Sohail. “You will still have to deal with it, but you’re not as likely to miss a class.” news@thedailycougar.com
Commuters battle bumper-to-bumper traffic not only on the road getting to campus, but at school as well, since the stadium construction took more than 2,000 spots away from students. | File photo/The Daily Cougar
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2 \\ Monday, August 26, 2013
NATION
Textbook piracy rising Laura Gillespie Assistant news editor
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After paying for tuition, housing, transportation and student fees, the last thing many students want to do is to spend several hundred more dollars on school supplies. Pens and backpacks may come cheaply enough, but college textbooks infamously do not. Rather than shell out the money on books at their college bookstore, many students are resorting to alternative methods, such as renting, borrowing, buying used books, or illegally downloading them.
According to The New York Times, students spend an average of $700 to $1,100 on textbooks a year, “representing one of their biggest expenses after tuition and room and board.” UH offers students $400 textbook loans available for the fall and spring semesters and a $200 loan for the summer. Some students choose to circumvent the cost entirely and pirate their textbooks instead. Students download PDF files of their textbooks online, or copy pages from friends’ books or library copies. PIRACY continues on page 4
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CONTACT US UH Health Center building, #525, Entrance 6 or call us at 713.22.SMILE (713-227-6453) As the cost of tuition rises, students are looking for easy ways to cut corners on school, one of which is pirating textbooks. | Kayla Stewart/The Daily Cougar
Monday, August 26, 2013 // 3
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CAMPUS
UH deals out new wheels to students Jessica Crawford Assistant news editor
UH has unveiled a fresh fleet of Cougar Line buses for the new school year. “Once they step on board, they will immediately notice how much of an upgrade they are to the temporary
shuttles that were in place last semester,” said Robert Browand, director of Parking and Transportation Services, in a news release. Groome Transportation, which has provided the new buses, began working with UH last spring. The buses used by the Cougar Line in Spring 2013 are being replaced by
the new editions. “There are 12 of the brand-new transit-style buses. In addition, there are eight 1-year-old shuttle buses to be used as backups and for charters,” said Richard Zagrzecki, a communications coordinator for UH. UH’s new buses can be tracked through the “Cougar Trax” service, which can be accessed through smart phones. Richard Zagrzecki/The Daily Cougar The buses feature monitors that will broadcast UH-related information and have seats embellished with the UH logo. Each vehicle is also decorated with large photos of UH students. The students were part of a UH marketing campaign that the university’s graphic designers came up with to make the buses fun and exciting,
PIRACY
continued from page 2
“At a theory level, under copyright law’s ‘first sale’ doctrine, once a student buys a copy of a book, she or
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UH’s new buses can be tracked through the “Cougar Trax” service, which students can access through any smart phone. | Courtesy of Richard Zagrzecki Zagrzecki said. Zagrzecki said that the new buses do more than just look good — they can also seat 35 students. If standing room is utilized, each bus has a 50-student capacity. “We think students will really
enjoy the experience of riding our new buses as they get around campus,” Browand said in a news release. The campus bus routes will remain the same as last year.
he is free to resell it without penalty. So resales are not thefts,” said UH law professor Craig Joyce. “I do question the ethics of any professor who receives a publisher’s complimentary copy of a book, clearly conditioned upon not reselling it, who then sells to (a) professional buyer to resell to students.” The Higher Education Opportunity Act, signed by former President George W. Bush in August 2008, was written in order to combat unauthorized file-sharing in colleges and universities. The requirements, according to a press release from Eastern Illinois University, were of “an annual disclosure to students describing copyright law and campus policies related to violating copyright law, a plan to ‘e f f e c t i v e l y combat’ copyright abuse on the campus network Joyce using a ‘variety of technology-based deterrents’ and agreement to ‘offer alternatives to illegal downloading.’” Still, piracy remains prevalent, and in a 2013 survey with the Book Industry Study Group, 34 percent of students reported downloading course content online, up from 20 percent in 2010. Similarly, 31 percent reported photocopying or scanning others’ textbooks, up from 21 percent in 2010. “Our copyright system is based on financial incentives to publishers to publish and authors to write,” Joyce said. “Perhaps publishers could establish better, cheaper alternatives for distribution. But it would seem to
be in everyone’s best interest, at least for now, for publishers to continue to exist. The future may be a different matter.” However, even if it became easier or cheaper to buy textbooks online or in person, many students could likely continue to pirate them. “The majority of the times when people pirate the books, they more than likely have it set in their mind that they’re probably not going to spend any money on it,” said mechanical engineering sophomore Tommy Lin. “It also depends on how much of a reduction of a price there is,” Lin said. “It’s just that in most cases when someone states a reduced price, it usually isn’t that huge of a drop.” As technology improves, so do legal alternatives to pirating textbooks. Websites like Amazon, Chegg and Textbookrentals offer the ability to rent textbooks for a fraction of the cost. The UH Bookstore offers digital and rental versions of many textbooks as well. “I kind of wish that textbooks weren’t really that much of a necessity,” Lin said. “I suppose websites would be a good solution; many professors currently use their websites for putting up covered materials and I think that’s a pretty good system.” Piracy is only getting more popular every year. Students may continue to find themselves unwilling to spend $200 on a math textbook that they will only use for four months — or not at all. Students are directing the growth of coursework technology. It is up to publishers whether to follow their lead.
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Monday, August 26, 2013 // 5
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ACADEMICS
MOVING IN ON MOOCS UH TO CONTRIBUTE TO ONLINE EDUCATION
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With new technology, everything you’ve ever wanted is available to you in just a few clicks — including your education. The UH System jumped on the massive open online course bandwagon in May, announcing participation with Coursera — one of the four prominent companies within the MOOC industry. The collaboration with Coursera gives students and professors access to the free courses. “This agreement allows the University of Houston to use the Coursera platform to offer MOOCs and to pay to use the Coursera platform to offer current UH courses,” said Jeff Morgan, interim associate provost for Education and Technology Innovation. “In the latter case, the Coursera platform simply becomes another learning management system, like Blackboard Learn or CourseWare.” UH isn’t the only university cozying up to Coursera. The 15-month-old company, founded by Stanford computer science professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, already has 84 universities and systems contributing content and more than 4 million students enrolled. At this point, there are no for-credit courses available to students at UH. Before the implementation of for-credit courses, UH faculty members are contributing in teams to create courses for Coursera for all ages all around the world, Morgan said. Universities are in the trial phase, as most are just dipping their toes in the MOOC water, either by having professors contribute or using the MOOC content as class supplements. However,
the University of Texas System is providing their first courses this fall. “I think everyone is keeping an eye on everyone else. Universities are learning and evolving, and new technologies are constantly being developed and explored. Online courses have taken shape over the past 15 years, and the Internet, learning management systems, streaming videos and online textbooks are now widely used in many forms of course delivery,” Morgan said. “When online courses started, few people gave them much hope, but universities have learned and continue to learn to teach in this and other venues.” Ioannis Pavlidis, director of the Computational Physiology Lab in the Department of Computer Science, is leading an instructional team that is contributing to a MOOC in ubiquitous computing and is supporting a team creating a course in science ethics. “I am not sure where exactly the MOOCs issue will settle, but it is not going away. It is changing the way academic instruction is done, and whoever does not take this seriously and does not join the process early is likely to face serious problems in the future,” Pavlidis said. “Things are moving fast in the 21st century and timing is everything. MOOCs are likely to globalize the academic instructional market, which is the only true ‘hard revenue’ universities have. The financial impact on universities that will lose competitiveness during the course of this transformation is likely to be strong and in some cases catastrophic.” news@thedailycougar.com
Monday, August 26, 2013 // 7
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08.28.13 Campus Recreation and Wellness Center 4:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Download the free GUIDEBOOK app or scan the following QR-Code to receive an interactive version of the 2013 UH WOW schedule directly to your phone/tablet.
Also available at guidebook.com/g/uhwow2013