I Miss the Cheap Paper Course Offerings Booklet

Course offerings came out last week, and something felt different.Fall break at home has roughly the same effect on my brain as high-caliber Novocaine, so the course guide had my full attention as soon as the website was up. I had never gone on the website first - it was always the place I went after I had my initial list of courses, gleaned from flipping through the thin, pulpy sheets of the paper course booklet. But how different could it really be?Really, really different. I was completely overwhelmed. I tried looking at only one department at a time, but even then I was just staring at a list of numbers and course titles. Sure, more information was only a click away. But something about the process seemed too active - I was not browsing, I was power searching.Why I care (and you should too!) after the jump.And there's something to be said for browsing. I talked to a friend who lamented that she could no longer take her time to ritualistically circle interesting courses on her first pass through the booklet. I loved being able to look through the departments I would never normally take a course in, just to see if anything caught my eye (it's also really fun to imagine an alternate reality where I'm an ELE major).The conspiracy theorist in me wants to point to the recent switch from textbooks to kindles in some classes, and suggest that the university is trying to recoup the losses to the endowment by crippling the paper industry and shorting paper companies. But the reality is probably much more benign. The move online saves paper, and money, and if this is one of the little things that students have to give up while the school cuts $170 million, I'm okay with that. But, I do think there's one big change that could really help the current system.Bring back the joy of browsing. Add an abstract to each course, so as we scroll through, we get a little more than a course name - give us a short summary, prerequisites, days and times, maybe even a little reading list. Something has been lost in the move away from the cheap paper course offerings, but it won't be that hard to find.(image source: wikicommons)