Championing education in its purest form plays an ever more important role according to Cunningham. He sees a growing chasm between the goals of faculty and university administrators. The number of faculty available to connect with and inspire students is shrinking, while administrative staff managing grants and other federal funding gets larger.

The impact on students is clear and distressing. As the cost of tuition skyrockets and the focus on developing intellect declines, students are increasingly pressured to think about their university education solely in terms of career and job – an idea that reduces learning to a question of return on investment. And without an environment of lively debate driven by a passion for knowledge, students “seem like they’re sleepwalking,” observes Cunningham.

Cunningham’s outlook informs his strategy in the classroom, where he works to counteract listless minds and to provide a payoff in sheer intellectual exercise: “The cheap trick to get them engaged is to go for politics, but I try to get them fired up about mental work.” Indeed, in Cunningham’s classroom, students press beyond simple answers to look at deeper, more nuanced “what ifs” that challenge their minds.

That focus on stretching and challenging gray matter puts a high priority on reading, analyzing and discussing the raw materials of history: its documents. Cunningham assigns two document readings per week along with some questions for thought. To assess students’ understanding (and diligence), Cunningham periodically collects notebooks in which they record their work. However, students are expected to come to every class prepared to discuss what they have read, what it means and its impact on history.

That can be a tall order for an undergraduate student, but Cunningham has found a unique resource that bolters his students’ ability to think critically about history. For the past four semesters, he’s used Milestone Documents, an upstart digital primary source reader that combines 1,200 key historical documents with expert analysis from a global network of scholars. Milestone Documents provides full text of virtually every work in its expanding collection, but it’s the analyses that change the dynamic of the classroom discussion and spur his students’ appreciation of these historic artifacts. “The students love the analyses. They’re the most comprehensive out there and they bring the students into the minds of the authors of the documents,” says Cunningham.

The quality of Milestone Documents’ content is supported by extraordinary flexibility. Via the online environment and an intuitive interface, Cunningham creates his own custom reader, built from only the documents he wants to teach in any given semester. While he likes the ability to create the perfect fit for his classroom, he finds students are responding to the simple access and have adjusted easily to reading a screen rather than a printed page. And overwhelmingly, they like Milestone Documents’ price tag (under $20 for a semester’s worth of unlimited access).

Cunningham relies on his lectures and Milestone Documents for the heavy intellectual lifting, but he also assigns a no-frills, concise and reliable survey textbook – Robert Strayer’s Ways of the World: A Brief Global History, published by Bedford/St. Martin’s. The combination of lecture, strong emphasis on document readings, and a framework provided by a survey textbook sets the stage for meaningful discussion (rather than sleepwalking) in class.

Cunningham’s pursuit of traditional values of higher education requires a willingness to buck trends driven by publishers relying on an archaic development program. He describes the standard textbook model as “gasping for survival. Publishers are going the wrong way. Prices are going up, they’re flooding the market with too many new books, too many new authors, and a new edition every six months. They have no real vision.”

Cunningham strictly avoids the expensive, colorful, and monstrously big textbooks that are produced by that 50-year-old model. He feels the combination of lofty price and wads of content that are inevitably left untouched by classroom discussion create aggravation among students. A recent study by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and Bowker Market Research shows the aggravation in real terms: more than 40% of students now don’t bother to buy the textbooks – new or used – assigned for their classes. About 11% rent their books, but the balance skip the text altogether or purchase a cheaper, older edition. It’s a stunning indictment of many publishers’ failure to serve the ultimate users of their products.

Just as faculty can keep the pursuit of intellectual prowess alive in higher education, they can pressure publishers to produce works that better fit the student in the digital age. For his part, Cunningham chose Strayer’s textbook not only for its high quality content and utilitarian format, but for its size as well – fewer chapters than the number of weeks in the semester, ensuring that Cunningham can cover it all. Further, he moved past print readers for one that reinvents that traditional classroom sidekick into a vastly superior core work that leverages the benefits of its online environment. The small price tag for Milestone Document makes its model of vast content a bargain in the students’ eyes. “They’re dazzled by the price. There’s no disconnect between what they pay and what’s used in class,” says Cunningham.

Ultimately, Cunningham has created a classroom format that he finds more fulfilling and moves him closer to his goal of helping his students become assets to society. He encourages his fellow professors who are reluctant to change their habits to give up their suspicions of new models and try something new . . . try something that champions the cause of intellectual growth in higher education and saves students from a four-year nap.

Rees feels skills are built through interpretation and discussion, requiring a fluid approach in the classroom. Tethering to a textbook – even an excellent one – demands one of two options: keeping the class where the text is (rather than where the students are) or assigning reading that may not be covered in the classroom. Rees opted for the latter for much of his teaching career, and it posed a constant aggravation. “How can I make someone read something I don’t have time to teach?” he wondered.

Rees had already begun a gradual movement away from texts when his colleague revealed her abandonment of them altogether. It was the impetus he needed to go rogue, taking a path he feels many want to explore but hesitate because they feel bound by tradition. “I think it’s uncommon to chuck the textbook completely,” says Rees. “Assign one textbook and one reader.… You’re supposed to do it that way.” But for Rees, it wasn’t good enough for him or his students.

A textbook market in flux

Rees isn’t the only one questioning the viability of the traditional model of a text for every class. Among students – and their checkbook-wielding parents – there’s growing resentment about the hefty price tags that texts often bear. According to a 2006 Government Accounting Office study, the cost of college textbooks rose at twice the rate of inflation in the previous twenty years, amounting to what nonprofit activist group StudentPIRG estimates is an average of now more than $900 per student/per year. Publishers blame high costs on increasing demand from professors for teaching tools that support the text and ease classroom burdens, but students are often caught in the middle: a captive audience with little power to drive down the cost. A report from the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library characterizes the rising cost as a “textbook problem” that warrants examination to find “low-cost instructional materials for students, making education and resources more affordable.”

Many are watching the emergence of the e-text as the ballast that will bring the market back to equilibrium, but there’s little evidence to suggest that. “People in the industry and general public love to focus on e-textbooks – are they here, are they coming, do students want them, and on and on,” says Neil Schlager, publisher of Milestone Documents, an online primary source reader designed for history and social studies courses. “But in many ways that misrepresents where the battle lines are. There isn’t much reason for a student to choose an e-textbook over a print textbook when the price is about the same and the e-version is basically just a PDF of the print.”

Schlager and his team conduct ongoing research with students which has shown that students are happy to have a digital solution if it’s less expensive and provides a different way of learning – one that leverages the use of digital technology. However, price is a key issue, and Milestone Documents’ research points to an increasing number of students who, when faced with a high text price, simply opt out of the purchase.

“Professors may not focus as much on the cost issue, but it’s a big underlying reason for the disruption in the industry,” says Schlager. “Students are choosing not to buy and clamoring for other options. Once the professors begin to grapple with those questions, then the decision to find an alternative to using a text becomes more compelling.”

Indeed, for professors such as Rees – those who continually work to become better teachers – student frustration with texts may just accelerate them on a path they have already established for themselves: a new model that better fits their classroom style.

A movement away from tradition

Rees began teaching his own courses in 1997, after training as a TA in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. As a new teacher, he carefully developed notes for each class. In retrospect, he says he was teaching “at” his notes, looking at what he had written to himself rather than at his students to see how they were absorbing the information. Student and professor don’t work together in that pattern; rather, they take separate paths over the same ground. Then, PowerPoint provided a breakthrough: Rees began moving away from notes to a shared focus on a screen at the front of the room. He began integrating pictures, primary sources and just a little text to label the pictures – a method he continues to use.

“I can throw a document up on the screen and look out at faces,” he says. His ability to read those faces enables him to see what’s engaging students or confusing the issues, which in turn builds greater opportunities for conversation in class. “I’m always happiest when a discussion breaks out.”

PowerPoint addressed one connection issue with students, but the imbalance between classroom and textbook continued as a friction point. Because Rees was moving with the flow of the classroom, textbook material that was assigned was often not covered in the class.

To add an additional headache, textbooks began to appear on smart phones, providing students with a legitimate reason to be looking down at small screens. Rees lamented in his popular blog “More or Less Bunk” about the inability to distinguish between a student looking at assigned text material and one updating a Facebook status. Again, student and professor were on different paths. It was time to make a change.

Ditching the Text

Inspired by his colleague, Rees simply eliminated the text from his class, opting to rely on his PowerPoint-based notes and a digital reader – Milestone Documents – with unique, comprehensive access to primary sources. Rees compares the move to the Sugar Act of 1764, when the British reduced the breadth of an unpopular but easily evaded tax on colonists. “I reduced the amount of reading but stepped up enforcement,” he says.

Indeed, now Rees and his students are in step with each other. He’s teaching what they’re reading. Further, students no longer had to pay up to $100 for a paper textbook. They pay less than $20 for complete, semester-long access to Milestone Documents. Rees feels there’s significantly less frustration among students. “No one asks me ‘why do I have to read this?’” he says.

With three textbook-free semesters under his belt, Rees says he’s a happier teacher. He likes the freedom to pick and choose the contents of each class and teaches directly on the screen – face to face with his students. The a-la-carte approach allows him to customize, moving the pace faster or slower… the level of discussion up or down, depending upon the students’ fluency in the material.

The use of Milestone Documents has been a pivotal element in Rees’s success with the text-free option. While students may be initially smitten with its affordability, the resource leverages some significant advantages of digital technology. Without the limitations of print, it’s able to provide far greater breadth of coverage – currently containing more than 1,200 historical documents – delivering tremendous flexibility that support Rees’s interest in a custom approach that moves with the class. The resource also includes in-depth analysis by respected scholars from around the world, connecting students with a diverse network of historians and their perspectives. The analysis boosts the level of class discussion, but also evens the playing the field among students – those who need extra help in understanding primary documents are able to consult the analyses, giving them ample preparation for class.

For Rees, the satisfaction comes from the content he’s teaching: the raw material of history. Rather than rote memorization of facts, he and his classes explore primary documents together, sharing thoughts, interpretations, and impact. “This isn’t Jeopardy. If we make them just recite answers, we’ll turn more people off than on,” he says. “We need to prepare them … teach them how to think for themselves.”

Sharing the model, avoiding the angst

“I was open to Milestone Documents because I was unhappy,” says Rees, and he’s helping others find their teaching bliss. He shares insights in “More or Less Bunk,” rails against models that can force educators into lock-step paths, and fights for quality education that eschews slick tech gimmicks that deliver little value. His twitter feed connects followers with bold, unblinking views of the state of education that will inspire even the most complacent professors to protect the core values of higher learning. In short, he’s a voice worth listening to … especially for those who find the traditional structure of text+reader boxy and limiting.

And fresh dynamics in the textbook market may push even the most risk averse professors to seek new models. As digital versus print – and packages of the two – fight for presence, traditional suppliers and online retailers will be drawn into the battle. In his article “The New Economics of the Textbook Business” (The Deal, October 2011), Richard Morgan predicts an outcome that is “a dizzying array of enemies and alliances … of a complexity not seen since keiretsu characterized business in postwar Japan.”

But, in Rees’s classroom, there’s little drama. He teaches. The students engage. They share a path across history and they all learn together.

Learn more about Jonathan Rees by visiting his website.

About Milestone Documents

Milestone Documents is an online primary source reader developed for use in history and social science courses. Pairing the most significant primary documents of all time with award-winning analysis by a global network of 300 historians and scholars, Milestone Documents has an expanding document collection of more than 1,200 primary sources. It is accessible via the Web, the iPad, and any smart phone.

Visit MilestoneDocuments.com/evaluation to learn more or launch a free trial.

• May 21: The Celestial Hierarchy, part of a Greek body of writings attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, contains elements of Neoplatonic philosophy and controversial issues of Christian theology, along with components of mysticism.
• May 22: The Book of Rites, sometimes called Ritual Record or Classic of Rites, is one of the Five Classics making up the central canon of Confucianism. The series of books was first brought together as a collection in the second century BCE.
• May 23: The Upanishads make up a collection of Hindu sacred texts exploring the nature of reality and the soul of the human being. The majority were composed in Sanskrit between 500 BCE and 200 CE but likely had their roots in earlier oral traditions.
• May 24: The Emerald Tablet, composed anonymously at the end of the Greek alchemical tradition in Egypt between the years 500 and 700 CE, became a key text for the development of alchemy in the Western world.
• May 25: The Pilgrim’s Progress, written by John Bunyan and first published in 1678, is a Puritan sermon in the form of a novel, using storytelling to teach the lesson that the world is the venue for the battle of spiritual forces and that victory comes only through denying the world to seek salvation.
• May 26: The Wiccan Book of Shadows, attributed to Gerald Gardner, contains the rites, spells, and ceremonies of a pre-Christian religion that taught a magical worldview and worshipped ancient gods. Wicca has grown into many different denominations of modern pagan witchcraft.
• May 27: The Noble Eightfold Path, one of the principal teachings of the Buddha, is a chief text in the canonical scriptures of Theravada Buddhism. Its primary purposes were to help followers end suffering and achieve enlightenment and self-awakening.

• May 14: The Bodhicaryavatara was composed by the Indian monk and poet Shantideva sometime in the eighth century. It is both a practical guide outlining meditation practice and proper monastic conduct and a philosophic treatise arguing for the importance and validity of the Mahayana Buddhist perspective.
• May 15: The Humanist Manifesto, written in 1933, outlines a new religious movement that rejects the dogmas of traditional deity-based religions and focuses instead on the concerns and values of the human community and on the social and ethical development of the individual.
• May 16: Pirke Avot is one of the sixty-three tractates of the Mishnah, the oldest document of classical Jewish (rabbinic) literature, which was composed at the beginning of the third century CE. Containing almost no religious commandments, it is classified as wisdom or ethical literature.
• May 17: Snorra Edda, attributed to the chieftain Snorri Sturluson and composed around 1220, is part of a body of Icelandic myths about the Norse gods and legendary heroes.
• May 18: Sahih al-Bukhari is a collection of Hadith—stories about the prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam. The Arabic word sahih means “sound,” and the Sahih al-Bukhari represents an attempt to collect those stories that the compiler considered to be sound, or authentic—ones that could be traced back to Muhammad through an unbroken chain of trustworthy narrators.
• May 19: Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875) defines the core principles and healing practices of one of America’s most distinctive indigenous religions: Christian Science.
• May 20: The Discourses are a compilation of the teachings of the Indian mystic and spiritual master Meher Baba, given to his inner circle of disciples in the 1930s and 1940s and meant to serve as a coherent set of guidelines for the spiritual advancement of humanity.

• May 7: Originally compiled in the eighth century in response to an official call for a history of Japan, the Nihongi (Chronicles of Japan) was for over one thousand years perhaps the most authoritative work on the origins of Japan and its deities.
• May 8: On the Nature of Things, the only surviving work of the classical Roman writer Lucretius, is an epic poem featuring a wide-ranging exploration of physics, the nature of the soul and mind, sensation and thought, the origins and evolution of the world, and a variety of natural phenomena.
• May 9: The Praise Poem to Sango extols the Yoruba god of thunder and lightning, one of some two hundred Yoruban deities. The poem, recorded in the late twentieth century, is used to offer praise, request aid, and remind worshippers that acknowledging Sango is essential to their well-being.
• May 10: The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a funerary text and a guide for the dead and dying. It is among the best-known texts in world religious literature on the afterlife and the process of reincarnation.
• May 11: Possibly the single most important religious text of Mesopotamian culture is the Babylonian hymn Enuma Elish (ca. 1500 BCE), which tells of the creation of the universe by Marduk, the chief god of Babylon.
• May 12: Raag Gond is a part of the Sri Guru Granth Sahib, compiled in 1604 and considered to be a holy living book that preserves the spirit of the worldview of the ten gurus, or founders, of Sikhism.
• May 13: The Holy Piby, an early document in the Rastafari tradition that became known as the “black man’s bible,” was compiled by Robert Athlyi Rogers from 1913 to 1917 and was intended to provide instructions to guide and direct the transformation of global Pan-African society.

• May 1: The anonymous “Hymn to the Nile,” dating to the early twentieth century BCE, was sung or recited at festivals in honor of Hapy, the Egyptian god of the Nile River and its flood.
• May 2: Composed sometime between the fifth and third centuries BCE, the Jain Sutras represent the system of thought crystallized by the Indian ascetic and teacher Mahavira, laying out a worldview based on the ancient doctrine of karma.
• May 3: The Rig Veda Americanus, compiled in the sixteenth century by a Spanish priest, Bernardino de Sahagún, is a collection of hymns addressing the pantheon of Aztec gods and presenting a small fraction of their mythology.
• May 4: The Persian Bayan was written by the Bab, a pivotal figure in nineteenth-century Shia Islamic history. The text is one of numerous mystical, prophetic scriptural works the Bab wrote as the leader of the religious movement Babism, the forerunner of the religion called Baha’i.
• May 5: Kumulipo, a 2,102-line Hawaiian chant published in 1889 by King Kalakaua, describes the creation of the world.
• May 6: The City of God, written by Augustine of Hippo in the fifth century CE, offers a theological view of history, using events narrated in the Bible along with events of Roman history to demonstrate that the arc of history leads to the highest good, founded in divine law.

• April 16: In 1953, the Communist Fidel Castro delivered his now famous and lengthy speech History Will Absolve Me while on trial for having led Cuban revolutionaries in an attack against the military headquarters of the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.
• April 17: In his 1947 Testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, J. Edgar Hoover outlined his beliefs about the spread of Communist ideology and specifically about the threat that Communism posed to the United States in the early cold war period.
• April 18: Future leader of Communist China Mao Zedong wrote his “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan” in 1927, to persuade the Chinese Communist Party leadership to redirect their revolution to the countryside or, at the very least, to give the peasantry a larger role in the revolution.
• April 19: In 1937, Leon Trotsky addressed the opening event of the Dewey Commission on the Moscow Trials by telephone from Mexico City in a speech that became known as “I Stake My Life!” The Moscow Trials were a set of “show” trials orchestrated by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to eliminate political challengers to his authority.
• April 20: In his 1954 Radio and Television Address on Communism in Guatemala, John Foster Dulles claimed that Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, the reformist president of Guatemala, was a stooge of international Communism and that, following the “domino theory,” his rule opened the door to Communist infiltration of the Western Hemisphere.
• April 21: In 1964 the Argentine Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara gave his Address to the United Nations General Assembly, stressing that the economic inequalities that afflicted Latin America were the result of imperialism, colonialism, and exploitation, primarily by the United States, and that the only solution to these problems was Marxist revolution.
• April 22: What Is to Be Done? (1902) is a political pamphlet written by Vladimir Lenin, the architect of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and one of the chief founders of the Soviet Union. In it, he focuses on questions of political agitation and proper revolutionary organization.

• April 9: Former British prime minister Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” Speech of 1946, outlining his postwar hopes for the United Nations and world peace, became famous for its proclamation that an “iron curtain” had settled between Western capitalist democracies and Eastern European Communist dictatorships.
• April 10: In 1962, President John F. Kennedy gave a televised address, Report to the American People on the Soviet Arms Buildup in Cuba, to reveal that U.S. intelligence had proof that the Soviets were building nuclear missile bases in Cuba.
• April 11: In a 1951 radio address on U.S. foreign policy in the Far East, Report to the American People on Korea, President Harry Truman defended the U.S. military presence in Korea, saying that the action was being taken to meet the growing Communist threat of aggression and would prevent a third world war.
• April 12: The Brazilian Marxist revolutionary Carlos Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla (1969), offers advice on how to use guerrilla tactics to disrupt and overthrow an authoritarian regime.
• April 13: The Warsaw Security Pact of 1955 solidified the Soviet Union’s control over its Eastern European satellite states, specifically Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Hungary, Poland, and Romania.
• April 14: In his book Evolutionary Socialism (1899), the prominent German Socialist Eduard Bernstein outline his views on the nature and future of Socialism as a reformist movement, rejecting authoritarian rule and violent revolution.
• April 15: In his Farewell Address, given on December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as the president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, declaring the post defunct and recognizing that the Soviet Union, established in 1922, had dissolved.

• April 2: In 1945, the leaders of the Allied Powers—U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill—issued the Yalta Conference Joint Statement, establishing the principles of postwar cooperation and setting the terms for the coming cold war between East and West.
• April 3: In his essay “How I Became a Socialist” (1902), the American trade union leader, orator, and Socialist Party activist Eugene Debs traces his path toward growing class consciousness and final embrace of Socialism.
• April 4: The Arusha Declaration of 1967, principally written by Julius Nyerere, outlines policies that together constituted “Ujamaa”—Tanzania’s unique version of African Socialism—and explains how he believed the citizenry and state policies should work to address the challenges of development and modernization.
• April 5: As first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev delivered his Secret Speech in 1956 to a closed, unofficial session of the party congress, condemning the crimes and terror of the regime of Joseph Stalin.
• April 6: In 1946, George Kennan, the chief architect of U.S. cold war strategy, wrote his Long Telegram from Moscow, in which he laid out his understanding of the Soviet state. The telegram, in part, was the basis for what became known as the U.S. policy of “containment.”
• April 7: In 1946, the Provisional People’s Committee for North Korea was formed under Kim Il-sung, to govern the northern portion of the Korean Peninsula following its post–World War II partition. In September, Kim delivered his speech ”On the Establishment of the Workers’ Party of North Korea,” praising the establishment of the party through the merger of the Communist Party and the New Democratic Party and calling for similar unity in South Korea.
• April 8: Joseph Stalin became General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1922. Eleven years later, he lauded the successes of the Soviet system in “Results of the First Five-Year Plan.”