So students have to pay over of $100 just to submit homework

When I first started college in 2012, I probably spent the same amount, if not more, on access codes to submit homework. A lot of the justification I've heard from professors is the fact that now we get access to the terrible, terrible, so called "eBook". As a CS major, I thought this was great, because I wanted to be on the next "evolution" of books and higher ed. I was thinking how great it would be to have vocabulary words and important ideas indexed throughout the book. Unfortunately, this wasn't the case.

What you get is an expiring version of the text that forces you to deal the the absolutely horrendous UI of this "book". The menus and header take up well over 50% of the page and then the actual text is loaded into an iframe which loads up a flash player.

My last year, many of my professors have moved away from this and started doing their own thing inside of Blackboard. I never would have thought I would be happier to use Blackboard but in this case it is so much better and there is no extra cost.

I guess it comes down to the question of why educational software must be terrible to use. I'm thankful my professors eventually realized this and solved the problem in other ways. Of course towards the end, I was in higher level, smaller courses but I still think there should be a way to open source these classes and the technology required for them.

The best on-line "courseware" I have had was one where the Proffessor posted the homework as .txt or .rtf files on his website. He gave the option of emailing the homework or FTP'ing it on to the folder he set up for every student. I would usually just SSH into this server and work on it remotely via nano or something. All of the other professors used Canvas or Blackboard depending on which year neither worked more than half of the time. This same professor tried to use as much free text as possible and made them available via .pdf and .html on his site. He also would pass along to trusted students .pdf copies of the more common text books for the other courses that he had ripped the DRM out of because he thought they were ripping the studnets off.

My favorite professor (in terms of homework submission) gave us a path to store out files on our school-provided share. We'd add his name with read permissions to the ACL of the file. Things that were better in text were submitted as e-mail messages. His courses either didn't use texts, or used materials that he wrote, had printed and bound at the campus print shop (average price: about $10).

I had a few textbooks with e-book versions on a CD in the back. I usually liked the book better.

I disagree with the premise of the first paragraph. In the US, we had to buy large books for all classes. At best, we studied 10% of the content. In France, all teachers create their own "book" containing the material we actually studied. We paid about $50 total for copies for ALL classes. This version was very condensed and everything was very useful. We did have to complete some parts (mathematical proofs, some drawings, etc.) during the class.