I am working in a Mobile Ed course. When I come to a suggested reading or "see also" how important is it that I purchase these additional materials? Thanks for your help.
Miles Custis had posted some useful information about the course readings, which I'm including here:
Miles Custis: Our intention with Mobile Ed course readings is to provide people who are taking a course with the opportunity to dig deeper into a topic if they want to. We do this by providing links to A) the most useful/relevant books for a course and B) books that widely owned so that most users can explore at least some readings without additional purchases. In the past we have used the Platinum base package as a baseline for choosing some of the resources, but since the resources included in Platinum change with each new edition we have stopped prioritizing that as such. Since the content in Mobile Ed courses is broken down into focused 5–10 minute segments and since we try to provide some links for each segment, each course ends up having a lot of reading links. We don’t necessarily intend for people to purchase each and every resource linked to in a course. They aren’t “required” parts of the course, and since we try to provide links to a variety of useful resources in Logos there may be several resources that are only linked to once or twice in a course. We provide these links not because we expect people to purchase every book linked to from the course, but because we want help ensure that people have access to at least some readings in their current Logos library. We also provide links to related Logos guides and tools like the Passage Guide or Factbook. These links will draw from resources you own, so you can use them explore the topic in whatever library you have. Each course is different depending on the type of course and the content, but typically a course will have a handful of very useful or relevant resources that are linked to frequently. These would be the ones we would recommend purchasing. As pointed out above, you can find this information in each course’s Faithlife group. It may be helpful to think of these frequently used books as the books that a professor in a traditional college or seminary class would recommend as primary texts in his or her syllabus. Professors often also provide a long bibliography of helpful resources related to the class topic. He or she wouldn’t expect the student to buy all those books or even track each one down in the library, but they are listed for reference if a student wants to dig deeper into a specific topic from the course.
Our intention with Mobile Ed course readings is to provide people who are taking a course with the opportunity to dig deeper into a topic if they want to. We do this by providing links to A) the most useful/relevant books for a course and B) books that widely owned so that most users can explore at least some readings without additional purchases. In the past we have used the Platinum base package as a baseline for choosing some of the resources, but since the resources included in Platinum change with each new edition we have stopped prioritizing that as such.
Since the content in Mobile Ed courses is broken down into focused 5–10 minute segments and since we try to provide some links for each segment, each course ends up having a lot of reading links. We don’t necessarily intend for people to purchase each and every resource linked to in a course. They aren’t “required” parts of the course, and since we try to provide links to a variety of useful resources in Logos there may be several resources that are only linked to once or twice in a course. We provide these links not because we expect people to purchase every book linked to from the course, but because we want help ensure that people have access to at least some readings in their current Logos library. We also provide links to related Logos guides and tools like the Passage Guide or Factbook. These links will draw from resources you own, so you can use them explore the topic in whatever library you have.
Each course is different depending on the type of course and the content, but typically a course will have a handful of very useful or relevant resources that are linked to frequently. These would be the ones we would recommend purchasing. As pointed out above, you can find this information in each course’s Faithlife group. It may be helpful to think of these frequently used books as the books that a professor in a traditional college or seminary class would recommend as primary texts in his or her syllabus. Professors often also provide a long bibliography of helpful resources related to the class topic. He or she wouldn’t expect the student to buy all those books or even track each one down in the library, but they are listed for reference if a student wants to dig deeper into a specific topic from the course.
In my experience, 90% of what I learn comes from doing the readings.
As for purchasing importance, one approach is to look at the link counts located in the course synopsis (or downloadable Recommended Readings spreadsheet).
Some resources may be referenced 50-100+ times. Purchasing that resource would generally be more valuable than a resource which might only be used once in the course.
The curated readings are the whole 90% of the reason I buy a course.