Stop UCI professors from forcing students to buy newest edition textbooks and/or expensive online programs.

Update: Thank you everybody for the support. Please share this if you can and/or talk about it with your friends. Also, I have a request. When signing the petition, please sign in with your UCI emails. It sends a stronger message to the higher-ups when I show them this petition due to it showing that everyone signing is part of the UCI family. Once again thank you very much! I have emailed a member of ASUCI so that they can help me with this and make this a petition that has a path to success. Let's hope that every student can save money on textbooks and online programs.
Update 2: I plan on going to the ASUCI senate meeting and talk in the public section. They take these issues very seriously and I hope that we can plan something out. I have big plans and I hope that more people can be behind me on this.

Preamble
I am a first year student of UCI and I am here to say that I am already extremely disappointed by some of the UCI professors forcing students to buy extremely expensive programs and/or newest edition textbooks. There are many problems with this.

Expensive programs: In UCI, professors use many programs, but the two I know of currently are Connect and Aplia. Connect cost me $93 for a quarter because I was able to find a cheaper price on the Internet. However, for the people that were not able to find a cheaper option, the cheapest option is to spend $100+ to use Connect for 1 quarter. Aplia is a bit better. For 1 quarter, it would cost me for my specific class $53 and for 2 quarters it would cost $78 (Those two are the cheaper prices due to the school negotiating price). These amounts that I have mentioned are huge for thousands of students attending UCI including me and the fact that they can only be used for 10 weeks (20 weeks for Aplia if you spend $78) for 1 class is absurd. Now I would stay quiet if these programs are so useful that it is necessary for professors to force every student to spend huge amounts of money for a quarter use. However, this isn't the case. I believe that the best evidence in these sorts of cases are personal experiences. My professor stated that Connect is optional for the class, but it is highly recommended. My friend who did purchase Connect received an A in the class. I, who didn't purchase Connect, received a B. Now while this shows that Connect is helpful, it isn't a program that can drastically increase one's grade. At best, it is a supplemental tool that can put a person on the next level. By studying the power-points professors create, videos on Youtube, and doing problems on sample exams and homework, anyone can receive a high grade even without tools like Connect or Aplia. It simply isn't necessary to make every student buy it. Every professor should give students the option of purchasing programs like Connect to help increase their grade, but they should not force every student to get expensive programs and develop their lessons to revolve around these programs.

Newest Edition Textbooks: Now there isn't a lot to say for this one. Newest edition textbooks are extremely similar to their previous edition counterparts. The only differences are the chapter number, some new problems, slightly different examples and other minor things that would not really make a difference to the actual content of the textbook. It's not as if for every edition published, there was a major discovery such as a person discovering the cure for cancer. However, in contrast to these minor changes, the price is huge. It costs at least $70 to buy the newest edition textbooks and the cheapest that I know of is the Anteater's Guide to Writing and Rhetoric, 7th ed for $30 that is also very similar to the 6th edition. It is bizarre to have students buy the latest editions for a huge price when the previous editions cost less than half of the newest edition with the same content. Every professor should require students to have the textbook, but no professors should force students to buy the latest edition of that textbook.