As the fall term approaches, faculty members are finalizing which course materials — books or articles and the ways to find them — to include in their syllabi. To do so, professors sort through their preferences about what format course materials should take, whether they should be optional, and how many materials to assign per course.
Those choices are captured annually in the “Faculty Watch” survey, conducted by the research arm of the National Association of College Stores. The latest version of the survey provides data on nearly 1,700 faculty members at 19 two- and four-year colleges during the fall of 2021, which kicked off an academic year that was generally conducted in person more than had been the case in the previous year.