Here is an exercise that will keep you on your toes a while: take a basic set of undergraduate lecture notes, go through them and take out all the references to books and journal papers. Then, revise your notes so that all the information your students would have read up about is all in the lecture in the first place. A nightmare? Read on.
As a science lecturer in Nigeria I found this an everyday problem. I was forced to dictation pace by students who hung on my every word in the absence of textbooks in a library that had, to all intents and purposes, stopped buying new books when the currency was devalued in the mid-1980s. But what was the alternative?
Book shops did stock imported textbooks - mainly low-cost editions of standard British textbooks sold under the imprint of the Educational Low-cost Book Scheme (ELBS), which the British ...
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