The ONLY money I spent during my entire time at uni has been on these stupid Cengage and Connect courses. I blame the teachers, more than anyone, for using these awful services. I also blame the Uni for not advertising that it would be required for the coursework. The teachers are either too lazy or too overworked to make their own materials or teach from an analogue book which doesn't spoon-feed the lessons and grade things for them. It's a shit system and nothing made me madder than a required class using these services.

For a few of them, I just lobbied the department to pay for it saying I wasn't able to afford it, and they paid for my license or whatever.

Pearaon also has homework on their site these days. I've only used pearson for physics homework, because I didn't have the need to read the book. I needed to buy the book for the homework though