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When Dean Kathy Shailer meets with first-year students Thursday, her main priority will be to explain why a mandatory $180 art history textbook doesn’t contain any art.

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The open discussion was arranged after a petition was started by OCAD University students wanting their money back for Global Visual and Material Culture: Prehistory to 1800.

Nearly 300 students had signed the petition.

The course, which shares its name with the textbook, is a first-year history course studying art, beginning with the earliest recorded creative expressions of human culture to the Industrial Revolution, according to the course description on OCAD’s website.

In a letter to students, Ms. Shailer says the joint use of the textbook and an online component, which contains the artwork, was needed to keep costs down. She says a printed version, including art, would cost $800.

“I really dislike the fact that we need to go online, and move back and forth from two different eBooks, in order to get images for one physical copy of a book that has no images in it,” says a student named Asim in a post on the OCAD petition. “It is definitely a waste of my time and money as a first-year student!”