Thanks to Tom Lauer for his feedback on an earlier version of this paper.

Information technology sometimes creates new ethical questions. The digital divide, information privacy, and intellectual property come to mind. These are important issues with far reaching consequences.

Other issues are smaller, with less impact on fewer people. Still, they deserve some attention. A problem might affect fewer people, but it might be important to those individuals.

This paper examines one of these smaller ethical questions: should university faculty sell virtual textbooks to students in their own courses? For many years, faculty have been writing paper books, and requiring students to use them. However, Web technology has changed how this is done, and makes the issue more complicated.

I’m writing about this because I face this situation myself. I created CoreDogs, and I would like to make some money from it. I am also an associate professor of management information systems at Oakland University. I teach Web development courses, and ask students to use CoreDogs.

After some thought, I came up with a policy I would use. I thought I would share my reasoning and conclusions, as they may help other instructors form their own policies.

There are some philosophical assumptions here. First, instructors have a duty to help students learn. That seems obvious enough.

Second, instructors should demand nothing from students that isn’t instrumental in their learning. Each act that instructors require students to perform consumes resources, like money or time. Acts that do not contribute to learning are wasted, in the context of the relationship between students and instructors.

This is a slippery requirement in practice. Often it isn’t clear whether an act will contribute to learning. For example, will a trip to a computer museum help people learn Web development? I think not, so I wouldn’t ask students to make such a trip. Other instructors would think that the trip would be worthwhile.

However, there are some acts that are clearly not relevant. Washing the instructor’s car, for example.

Let’s start by talking about traditional practice. Then we’ll see how things have changed.

The old practice

University faculty write textbooks for courses they teach. This makes good sense. Those who teach a course are in a good position to know what should be in the course’s textbook. Students benefit when they use textbooks that fit course requirements.

Naturally, textbook authors typically require their own textbooks for the courses they teach. Again, this makes sense. Students benefit when their instructor knows the textbook well, and who would know a textbook better than its author?

It could be argued that there is an ethical problem here. There is a power imbalance between faculty and students. Faculty decide what books students will buy. However, faculty who write textbooks benefit financially when those books are sold.

An instructor who is also a textbook author has a conflict of interest. When s/he chooses are text, two forces are at play:

• What is best for the students.

• What is to the financial benefit of the instructor.

It is possible that an instructor will choose his/her own textbook, when a different textbook would be better for students.

The problem was limited to a large extent by the marketplace for paper books. Authors usually write textbooks under contract with a publisher, like Prentice-Hall. A publisher who wants to make a profit will not want to publish low quality books. Publishers use editors, peer review, proofreaders, and other means to establish quality.

This system limits the ability of an instructor to make students pay for low quality material s/he created. It is unlikely that publishers would want to print such material.

Of course, this system is not perfect. For example, an author might be assigned a class for which his/her textbook is not precisely suited. S/he might still assign the textbook. Or an instructor could publish a book him- or herself.

Still, the system has worked well enough for many years. It has become part of standard practice.

A new situation

The Web has changed things. Authors are no longer forced to work with publishers. They can distribute their own virtual textbooks over the Web, and charge people for them. Authors can run decent sites for a few hundred dollars USD per year.

Not everything is different, of course. Authors still (hopefully) know their topic, know their courses, and can write material that suits. Students still benefit from good textbooks, virtual or not. An author writing a virtual book might want to do quality work. There is then the chance of selling to students in other universities, or, more correctly, selling to their instructors.

But the publisher is gone. The publisher’s interest in the broad marketplace is gone. The cost of serving a large market is no longer a barrier to the distribution of low quality material.

An ethical problem

An instructor could make a handsome profit by writing low quality material, putting it on-line, and requiring his/her own students to buy it. Even if no other instructor used the material, the author could still make money, especially from a large course.

This is definitely not in the students’ interests. The instructor is taking advantage of a power imbalance.

Of course, in reality few situations are so black-and-white. Consider some complicating factors. First, an author might be making a genuine effort to create a high quality virtual textbook. The book’s quality might increase over time. What is the text really worth at any one point in time? What is too much?

Second, some Web sites make money from advertising and affiliate relationships with companies like Amazon. There is no direct charge to students when they click on ads or buy through an affiliate. However, some students may feel obliged to click on ads, or buy in certain ways, if they know the instructor will benefit.

Even when the instructor does not require or track ad clicking by his/her students, the social atmosphere in a class might encourage it. Students might like an instructor, and want to help him/her by ad clicking. This is not a clear violation of the instructor’s duty to require only instructionally relevant acts, however, since the instructor did not require the acts.

There’s another issue as well. Suppose the instructor is getting ads from Google for his or her Web site. Advertisers create ads and send them to Google. Google sends the ads to the instructor’s site. When a user clicks on an ad, the advertiser pays Google a fee. Google keeps part of that fee, and gives part to the Web site’s operator – the instructor in this case. This is called pay per click (PPC).

Advertisers pay in the expectation that the user clicked on an ad because s/he might be interested in whatever the advertiser is offering. PPC is subject to a problem called click fraud:

Click fraud is a type of Internet crime that occurs in pay per click online advertising when a person, automated script or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having actual interest in the target of the ad’s link.

Wikipedia

When a Web site operator signs up with Google or another ad distributor, s/he accepts a terms of service (ToS) agreement. Naturally, ToS agreements disallow click fraud.

Suppose a student clicks on an ad because of the benefit to an instructor, not because of an interest in the ad itself. Is this click fraud? I think so. It fits the definition above. Students “without having actual interest in the target of the ad’s link” click on the ad “for the purpose of generating a charge per click” for the instructor.

Now, I’m not a lawyer, and have never played one on TV. I don’t know whether any crime has been committed, as a lawyer would define “crime.” Further, the economic impact of students clicking on a few ads may be no more than the impact of an employee stealing a pen from his/her employer’s office supplies. Still, it is click fraud, and it is stealing.

Whether there has been a crime, even a tiny one, may depend on whether the instructor intentionally sets up an atmosphere that encourages students to click on ads they are not interested in. Again, I don’t know enough about the law to be sure about this. Proving it might also be difficult, unless the instructor is exceptionally stupid and puts it in writing.

My policy

So, what did I decide for CoreDogs?

CoreDogs makes money in two ways at the time of writing: advertising and affiliate agreements. Advertising is with Google AdSense. The current affiliates are Amazon and Hostgator.

I decided to suppress all advertising and affiliate links for students in my own courses. This avoids any pressure students might feel to use these services. Students won’t click on ads they are not interested in, because there are no ads to click.

I may charge a subscription fee for CoreDogs. I have no immediate plans for this, but it could happen. Students in my own courses will not pay that fee.

The technology

How to actually do this? I need some way to:

• Identify a user as a student in my own course.

• Suppress ads for those users.

• Suppress affiliate links for those users.

CoreDogs uses Drupal, a powerful content management system (CMS). One reason I choose Drupal is that I can add my own code, customizing the way Drupal works.

There are several ways to customize Drupal. One way is with modules. A module is some code that extends Drupal’s core feature set (other programs call such things “plug-ins” or “add-ons”). Drupal is good for module developers because of its powerful API. “API” is geek-speak for a mechanism that lets custom code use the features of a program.

Identifying students

Drupal uses roles. A role is a flag that can be attached to users. The flag is often used to set permissions. For example, on a magazine site, the roles Writer, Editor, and Proofreader might be created. Different users would be given different roles. Users with the Writer role could edit their own content, but not that of other users, and they could not publish content (that is, approve it for release on the site). A user with the Proofreader permission could edit other users’ content, but could not publish it. A user with Editor permission could publish other people’s content. Users can have multiple roles, so someone could be a Writer and an Editor.

I created role called skipad (that’s “skip ad,” not “ski pad”). I then arranged for users with this role to be treated specially.

But how can Drupal know which users should have this role? At the time of writing, I do this manually. I compare user names with my class list, and give users who are my students the skipad role. My classes are small enough so that this is not a burden. However, in the future I may give my students a code they enter during user registration.

Of course, if a user does not log in, there is no reliable way for Drupal to know whether that person is a student. I decided to make completing CoreDogs exercises part of each student’s grade. Students enter exercise solutions directly into CoreDogs lessons. They can only do this when logged in.

You can read more about exercise solutions and user portfolios.

Suppressing ads

Suppressing ads was simple. CoreDogs uses the AdSense module. It has a feature that lets Drupal administrators hide ads for users with a given role:

Figure 1. Skipping ads

Suppressing affiliate links

This was more difficult than suppressing ads. Affiliate links are inserted into a page’s content. Here is a typical Amazon affiliate link:

Figure 2. An affiliate link

This tells Drupal’s Amazon affiliate module to show information for product 1430209895. This is a book on Drupal module development. full means to include author name, title, image, and a link to Amazon.

Here’s what the code looks like when rendered in a browser:

Figure 3. A rendered affiliate link

Drupal uses input filters to process page content. An input filter is part of a module. For example, the Amazon module has a filter that converts code like the one above into HTML.

What I wanted was a filter that would show different content to different users, depending on their role. The restricted text module was close to what I needed. I adapted it to my needs.

Here is what I replaced the code in Figure 2 with:

Figure 4. New affiliate link

restrict-from means that the input filter will restrict users in the skipads role from seeing the Amazon link. So lines 1 to 3 prevent my students from seeing the link.

But what are they to see instead? That’s what lines 5 to 9 do. They present the same information, but without the link to Amazon. (The syntax is defined by the textile module.)

What does the code in Figure 4 look like to a user? It depends. For users who are not students in my classes, it looks like Figure 3. Users who are students in my classes see:

Figure 5. Rendered new affiliate link

The image in Figure 5 has no Amazon link attached to it. The book’s title links to the publisher’s site. I do not have an affiliate relationship with the publisher, Apress.

Summary

New technology raises new ethical questions. This paper asks: Should university faculty sell virtual textbooks to students in their own courses? Should they show them ads, or affiliate links?

The answer for CoreDogs is “no.” My own students do not see ads or affiliate links. And the site is free for everyone right now.

I want to emphasize that this reflects my own reasoning about my own case. Reality is complex. There may be situations different from my own, in which an instructor selling to students is ethically permissible. I am not wise enough to establish a general rule.