Cost of printer paper: $5.

Cost of ink cartridges: $30.

Cost of printing off 10-12 page documents every other day for your literature class. Way too expensive.

Ed Board is tired of being required to print our class documents from Blackboard. The documents are entirely too long. They waste pricey printing supplies and cost students more than they realize. At this rate, we’d rather just buy the $40 textbook or sourcebook!

We realize that the intention of printing materials off Blackboard is to save the school money, but why should saving SMU money cost its students even more?

Some schools have tried to solve the costly printing problem by disallowing printing from dorm rooms and installing free-of-charge “print clusters” around campus to which your print job is sent and produced.

But this just led to more problems, such as impatient students throwing away print jobs to get to their own or a time delay that could be up to an hour, depending on how many students were printing at that time. Some students even felt compelled to steal paper from the print clusters to use in their own printers!

Furthermore, as fantastic as technology is, it’s not perfect. Computers crash. Printers break. And when that happens, you wind up unprepared for your next class. This is just another argument for buying the book or course reserves.

While Blackboard can be a real Godsend sometimes, it still has a lot of drawbacks. The Digital Dropbox feature can be finicky and it sometimes doesn’t work at all. The Your Grades feature is nice, but not every teacher uses it. Seeing Announcements from all of your courses on one screen is nice, but not when you still have announcements from last semester’s courses thrown in as well.

Since shorter course readings – and therefore print jobs – probably aren’t an option (not that we would want that…), Ed Board moves that all courses should provide the option of purchasing all of the course readings through the bookstore as opposed to making students waste their ink on a 20 page handout.