States are moving to cut college costs by introducing open-source textbooks
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It really astounded me that we had to pay a third-party for-profit company to get access to our homework.
The full professors don't have any such excuse, though.
You're left with underpaid adjuncts, under qualified TAs, and research professors that don't want to teach another-goddamned-section of Calculus 1 (as one of my profs referred to it).
this is the kind of crap that administrators (as a class in society) force on faculty and then use it as justification for "our role is necessary" and "see, they couldn't be that busy".
Personally, all the academic code I've used has been written by EE people or Applied Math people and had nice enough style/documentation/accessibility for me to have minimal issues.
Contracts vary. In both universities I attended (one mediocre, one in the top 5), in most departments, professor salaries were purely for education (9 month salary - get paid extra if they teach in summer), even though all the expectations for tenure, etc are research.
They are expected to do research, but the funds for that come from grants, not from their salaries.
So the contract was: Their salary was a 9 month salary, and they get to pay themselves the extra 3 months by getting grants for research. This is why many professors will say they can supplement their income by "up to a third" of their salary via grants. Which, BTW, also means that when you look up a public university professor's income (usually accessible to the public), you are seeing their 9 month income, and if they are active researchers, they get paid more.
So no, the university typically does not pay them to do the research. They pay themselves via grants. The university pays them for education, even though they always act as if they don't.
>I can understand the motivation for having professors teach advanced subjects, but having them teach intro classes is just silly. It's worse for both the students and the professor. Teaching and research are completely different skill sets after all.
All fine and well as long as the university does not try to attract students for undergrad by highlighting the great research they do, and indirectly imply that they will get an education from the best in the field. If their prospectus merely said "Come join us. You'll get a great education taught by adjuncts and outsourced to other companies", then your point would have more merit.
Speaking from the part-time professors perspective: occurring in parallel to this is a steady growth in course section sizes. 30 students used to be the norm for some courses, but 80-90 is the new normal just a few years later. Some of these tools are designed to help manage this. But the actual process of planning and delivering a lecture, providing individual feedback on written assignments (like exams), etc. is suffering.
Teaching effectively to a large section is harder than you might think, especially when teaching is only a fraction of your job & you have no TAs. But half-assing it is actually not too hard I guess. And you are seldom rewarded for the former. Thankfully for me and for my students, it is mostly a side hobby for me and not a living.
That seems to be the plan, instead of hiring more professors they grow class sizes, cut corners, and hire more admin.
That's not true. They're getting paid to publish research in third-party journals you have to pay to read.
Likely that was the mistake. I've been to both a small and a large university. If you care about education, go to the small one. Much more likely the professors will put in a lot of effort to teach properly. Fewer students per class also motivates them.
A small group of us got together that first evening and found enough typos, spelling and punctuation errors that we all passed the class with a high "A" without needing to do anything else.
He wasn't happy about it, and I think he later dropped the "unlimited" part. He was less upset when most of us went to class anyway -- The way I saw it, I paid for the class, even if I didn't have to worry about doing the work for a grade, I still wanted to learn something.
Another economics professor produced her own reader/workbook which was provided for the cost of photocopying and binding.
That kind of thing would be a free download today. Can you imagine paying thousands of dollars in tuition for a course, and then getting the entire textbook for free?
Those who do it are truly saints among scoundrels.
Not trying to tell you that there aren't some jackasses who do this for extra loot, but one good reason to rotate the problems is to prevent students from showing up with an answer key. ie: When I was in college our IEEE club had a more comprehensive question bank than any single prof at my uni.
I think he wrote the book so that students didn't have to spend money on a huge textbook containing information they don't need. This book had everything you needed for the class and not much more.
Why don't we just allow Pearson to bypass universities altogether and award degrees for cheaper than the 40,000 current universities cost.
Why don't we just cut out the extremely expensive middlemen, universities and professors ?
Isn't a publisher a third-party for-profit company? If you need to buy a book for a class to read and do homework in order to pass the class, that's okay right? So, why is it wrong to expect someone to do the same thing digitally?
The only way to complete MyMathLab homework is to pay out for a poorly-written Flash app.
I've often wondered whether a legal case could be made against universities for price gouging.
But the execution is so half-assed that it not only turns off students from the platform, but it runs the risk of turning them off to the actual subject matter as well. The whole thing had the stench of static requirements doc to a sub-contractor to a sub-contractor development pipeline with little to no end-user (that is, students, not department administrators) feedback in the development cycle.
It's a bit like self-driving cars in a way. The execution is everything, and the half-way hybridized situation is the most dangerous for the end-user. And the missed execution to me smells a bit like an arms race between Pearson, Wiley, etc. to get their platforms out and entrenched with individual departments before each other.
That is exactly what this is. Old fashioned conservatism.
The focus universities have on homework is absurd. If you want to practice 100+ math problems, you can invent them yourself, or even find plenty on the internet. It only takes one or two problems to show that the student understands the subject matter. Any more required homework is a waste of everyone's resources.
At my university there were campuses hundreds of miles away from each other so I imagine the department also had to pay for the travel and other arrangements needed to get these collaborative textbooks written.
One of these textbooks that I had to buy for the usual massive price was one of the collaborative efforts. However, for the purposes of the degree at the campus I was on, only needed the bits written by our head of department were needed for the syllabus, the rest of it was out of scope.
To use a software analogy it was like buying the student version of MS Office when you only needed Word and not the other bits of the bundle. That would mean carrying 43 discs around instead of just the 7 discs around. So you see the problem of carrying a huge textbook up and down a hill every day.
I never understood why the lecturers did not produce, update and polish proper course materials that did not require outside materials except for pure reference. They had expectations on us to do homework but I wasn't seeing the results of theirs.
I went to undergrad in the 90s & it was true for me then as well.
Most textbook companies are for-profit, and I needed the texts to complete the assignments.
My physics class on the other hand had a book that was 'customized' for us (chapters were rearranged to prevent resale), and we had to purchase access to webassign.
In fact when I studied there was no real requirement to buy books at all. Of course most of us did spend a lot on books but it was nothing compared to the amounts I regularly see mentioned on line in discussions about US unis. It was simply convenient to use the recommended book so that lecturers could refer to chapters, formulas, and figures and so on and so that when you asked your fellow students for help that you would all be on the same page so to speak. In theory you could have got by with your own lecture notes and visits to the library.
I'm quite sure that my old copy of Lorrain and Corson would be just as good for EM part of a bachelor's in physics now as it was in 1975. In fact I think I'll dig it out and start to refresh my skills.
The solution to that is to not revise the textbook, it's to pass out different homework handouts each semester.
IMHO, the textbook problems sets should be for student practice and all the solutions should be in the back of the book (vs. just the odds).
That sounds like work, we are talking about academia here.
I suspect, however, that academic publishers would attempt to sue the pants off anyone that built such a service if it relied on user submissions of content (e.g. a professor uploads their homework assignments to the library of content and that content can be utilized by anyone else on the system).
Better look into old Russian textbooks for interesting (often very hard) calculus problems.
How does a proprietary textbook solve the cheating problem? Even a new copy yearly doesn't do much of anything, students can still share answers or pay a third party to answer the questions on their behalf.
They're only hurting themselves. If they happen to get a job, they won't last long. They'll be destined to float from company to company, changing jobs when they're found to be frauds. Or, they'll actually pick up enough knowledge to hide away at some larger company.
Interviewing a bunch of incompetent applicants to find the competent one is not cheap.
That is something you could literally write once and continue to use for 100 years, tweaking only when the course requirements change. Even if you're lazy, and write all the questions and solution guides by hand, you could still select from every such question that you had ever written, and by your 20th year on the job, memorizing from the bootleg study guides would be harder than just learning the course material.
Do not all colleges have some form of honor code? Where I attended (two schools), it seemed universally understood that the Honor Code had meaning — I may have had blinders on, but I never saw evidence of cheating.
I readily admit my school's (while highly selective) were not known as cutthroat, "keep up or get out" institutions, which I'm aware is a de facto state at some places. Sadly, such rank competitiveness fosters a "need" to cheat.
Except one. This guy had been teaching for like 10 years, and put EVERY SINGLE PAST PAPER HE HAD out there. He provided students with a massive, massive stash of questions and answers.
For any given problem, you could either solve it, or you could just navigate thousands of PDFs trying to find the solution. And when you wanted to do some solo practice, you had endless options.
He reused questions from those papers in midterms, but the chances of you actually picking the right question from all the possibilities was very slim.
It's one of those situations where, paradoxically, by being completely gregarious, he achieved better results than by being ultra guarded and secretive.
Do you mean that students who choose to cheat don't learn as well? (That doesn't garner much sympathy from me.)
I'm quite confident that no one at Exeter Uni. in 1977 could have cheated their way to an honours degree in physics because defending your final year experimental report (120 typed pages of data, charts, conclusions, explanations, and procedures) required answering live questions from two very smart faculty members.
He said that he did so in order to make sure the publishing company would keep printing them, intentionally and openly ensuring there wouldn't be a used book market. His justification is in the syllabus here https://economics.byu.edu/Documents/Syllabi%20-%20broken/201....
Looking back, and having printed a book, I'm 99% sure that's BS. Or, at best, you could print the book much cheaper yourself.
Didn't you read the PDF!?
> Photocopying of Assignments from someone else’s text is a violation of copyright laws, so please purchase your own text.
You could have been sued!
My best guess is he is trying to argue that if you disallowed used car sales, you'd get better economies of scale on new cars, as more would need to be produced to fill the void left my used car sales. While it might drive the price of a new car/textbook down, I still think it would drive the average amount paid by drivers/students up, which is what we really care about (as students, at least; obviously the textbook companies would love to sell more books).
In fact, this seems to a case of the broken window fallacy[1] — a textbook case, one might say. ;-) (In that, if you essentially destroy the used text book's value by not using them, that this is somehow beneficial.)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
tl;dr The guy is both a tool and an idiot.
Creating things that last years, decades, generations, doesn't keep the economy "moving" in this sense. It can cause some sectors to fail (a sort of boom-bust). If you create a near perfect product that lasts decades, you have an immediate need to ramp up production (to meet demand). Once the demand tapers off due to market penetration, growth slows, and then you shrink--potentially rapidly. If the product doesn't expire frequently (break, wear out, get lost, something) and is a non-consumable good, then your production needs to drop off or you need to make different things.
I worked for an employer once that was in that situation. I saw it coming, but they straight up lied to the staff about what was coming up, how the future was great. Then we went from $500 million/year in revenue to $150 million/year because our massive ramp-up for production succeeded, now our product was in every system it needed to be in. New systems are made relatively slowly (big things, like airliners, but also smaller like military ground vehicles), and only needed our parts for maintenance (breakdown after ~10 years; maybe not break but need replacement/servicing) and the less frequent new production.
By some metrics, this was a failure of the company (in fact, the division was sold off some time later). But it actually succeeded, it needed to pivot to maintenance and divert other resources to engineering other solutions (or let them go, which is what happened to many of them). They actually have pivoted, I'm told, at least some parts of it. They're doing more diverse sets of safety critical systems, including getting into the consumer ground vehicle market now. That need to pivot should have been obvious, but for some reason it wasn't to many of my peers, and the management ignored it (willfully) at least in their presentations to us.
I had to take an economics statistics course my senior year due to some confusion over the then-newish AP Statistics exam -- I received credit, but couldn't apply it to my computer science major. The class was ridiculous, it was basically statistics 101/102, but used the first few chapters of the professor's Econometrics textbook, which sold for $150 circa 1998.
He handed out the assignments at the beginning of the semester, and you didn't need to show up except for the tests. The test used textbook questions, and asked questions that referenced passages in his stupid book, including charts in chapters that weren't covered as part of the actual class.
So Internet articles are unacceptable because "they suggest that [you are not] reading the good financial press on a daily basis" ? Is that one of the stated goals of the course -- to force you into a daily habit of reading the print version of the Wall Street Journal?
> Photocopying of Assignments from someone else’s text is a violation of copyright laws, so please purchase your own text.
Apparently he has never heard of Fair Use.
There's very little excuse to create new versions of a calculus textbook. My decades-old Thomas still works just fine.
Why don't people just scan or photocopy a textbook, if the price is too high? Do American students give even higher value for their time than the cost of a textbook?
My main complaint is that their books are (intentionally) completely traditional in content and format: they're designed to be maximally easy for a "standard" existing course to switch to (since professors are often reluctant to throw out years of work in polishing their lectures). That means in particular that if you want a more modern textbook redesigned from the ground up based on (e.g.) physics education research, you're still stuck asking your students to pay big bucks for it.
Also, one negative observation I've seen as a chapter reviewer, at least for this particular text: by their very nature, these textbooks aren't the result of one passionate author with a cohesive vision and voice. They're written chapter by chapter by a variety of authors under a central project management team. So while the content winds up being solid (I hope), the text itself isn't really much fun to read. (Not that most textbooks do especially well in that department! But there are some good ones that do, and that can pay off for the class.)
Another favorite of mine that might be especially interesting to the HN crowd is Chabay and Sherwood's Matter and Interactions text. One key feature is its tight integration of simulations using "VPython", which students start to use within the first few weeks of class. That makes it viable to have students study realistic forces rather than just the simplest cases. (E.g. adding air resistance to projectile motion is just one more line of code, rather than requiring a course in differential equations.) That also makes it more reasonable for their book to give true equations from the start (like the equation for relativistic momentum rather than just p=mv) and then state the more familiar forms as approximations.
Randall Knight's Physics for Scientists and Engineers is a much more standard text than those two, but it's still worlds better than most traditional texts that I've used: it changes the old standards in smaller ways, but still incorporating lots of research-based improvements. (Knight's little book /Five Easy Lessons: Strategies for Successful Physics Teaching/ was a great introduction to Physics Education Research for me when I first started teaching, too.)
Eric Mazur, one of the real leaders of the Physics Education Research community, wrote a book not long ago called /Principles and Practice of Physics/. I haven't had a chance to really go through it in detail yet to get a feel for everything that makes it unique (one big structural change from tradition is that he focuses on students getting rock solid on 1D physics before introducing the complications of vectors), but he's such an expert in this stuff that I wouldn't want to leave his book off of the list. (It's organized in a bit of a weird way, mind you.)
I'm sure there are others that I haven't thought to list. Debora Katz has a new book that I just heard about that emphasizes case studies, for example. But yeah: almost any of these books are fundamentally different than the classics in some way, and worlds better in my opinion.
More links to other OER sources: https://www.oercommons.org/ http://www.collegeopentextbooks.org/textbook-listings/textbo... https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/SearchResults.aspx?subjec... http://campusguides.lib.utah.edu/c.php?g=160393&p=1053364
I also know of at least a dozen absolutely amazing free textbooks published by the authors, sometimes even with .tex sources available on github.
Perhaps it's not a question of availability but of discoverability? Also, it would be nice if teachers could mix content from different sources of OER in order to create custom books.
Every single item that contributes to the learning objectives of this course is incredibly Google-able, but as new students to the field, they do need at least some curation and direction to keep from getting overwhelmed. They need a reference resource that they can trust which is academic enough to be true, yet reasonably conversational. Textbooks used to fill this role, but publishers priced and walled-gardened themselves out of relevance.
Side note: if you're an professor who has done something like this in the past, I'd love to compare notes with you.
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/course/cs2510/Lectures.html
The NEU course assumes that students have taken How to Design Programs in Racket, so the early notes refer to Racket syntax. I'm working on notes for a Racket-less introduction that uses the same tools for my course right now:
https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/classes/sp17/cse11-a/Lectures.html
These notes also rely on a particularly good testing library that is capable of doing things like comparing objects for structural equality without requiring that students define a .equals() method first, which can be incredibly helpful for getting off the ground.
"Algorithms with Sanjoy Dasgupta (Christos Papadimitriou) and Umesh Vazirani, McGraw-Hill 2006. Note: until recently, we had here the pdf of an early version of this book, for the convenience of the students. Unfortunately, our publisher demanded that we delete it. Advice to authors: (a) make sure you keep the copyright, and (b) do not publish with McGraw Hill."
As mentioned by /u/darkengine Pearson and Blackboard have their claws in as well.
In my experience, most faculty simply take the lowest friction route.
The problem with universities is that the $50K price tag means the costs of books isn't that relevant overall. Additionally, lots of professors use books they wrote because it is about publishing not teaching. Universities want to point to all of their faculty who are "known" and "published" so they are not incentivized to cut this cost. Also, they want to be different and unique to justify their fees. The only schools who can afford to give away curriculum are the Ivy Leagues that have so much endowments they don't even need the money. Plus it helps their reputation for the (mostly) online schools that use their classes.
Regarding state universities, while true many subsist on tuition there are some notable exceptions -- for example, the UT system has one of the largest endowments of any university (public or private). I would argue however, that it's the small and modestly endowed schools that can take the lead here. If one doesn't care too much about cracking the elite rankings of the Ivies etc, then it's not so much publish or perish. The schools can afford to hire teachers as well as more commercially successful researches who attract grant money. For example, I took freshman calculus at Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY. The professors at the time primarily used a weekly photocopied handout to teach calculus, and it worked quite well. I later attended Columbia ($$$) which had some great researches but did a terrible job teaching calculus (b/c the teacher was not interested in teaching) and used a shiny textbook plus a half-assed "lab" that mostly involved fixing typos in Matlab programs under severe time pressure.
We need some kind of schools that care about learning and not maximizing cash. We also need a lot more trade schools and more apprentice style learning.
We get a lot of awesome free material as a result.
College professors (collaboratively) write teaching materials that are copied and bound by the print shop of your school. Nowadays they're typically freely available in PDF, to registered students at least.
Nothing like American textbooks sold over $100 by big publishing companies.
The current-1 edition of a textbook, purchased used on Amazon, is often 25-50% of the cost of the new textbook in the college bookstore...
Of course, open-source textbooks would be even better.
Not everyone needs or should go to college, but we need good alternatives for those people.
I'm seeing more and more of my peers care less about a degree and more about quantifiable experience. I'd rather have a mid talent coder that's flexible and understand the larger problem set we're solving than someone highly skilled in algorithmic design (which is something i've seen).
Of course, you would also reduce learning by an equivalent amount...
Can you justify this claim? It's easy to observe that current students who take the same classes differ in the amount of learning they do.
I see no reason to believe that different students taking the same class schedule consisting of 0 classes would suddenly all learn the same amount. It seems more likely that they would continue to differ in the amount of learning they do.
Writing a text, well, is a major piece of work. The text body takes a lot, writing good exercises takes every bit as much, the answers to the exercises are important, and so also are ancillary material such as classroom slides.
People respond to rewards and unless they get rewarded for this it is not going to happen nearly enough. If you are an alum, and have some contact with your college or university, please urge them to give people credit for this. Say its important.
This was in the UK; I can't speak for how common this system is in the UK, but it sure feels like some people are getting massively ripped off. Clue's in the title, surely; you're a professor? Profess things :) A few years ago, I did a Masters in Maths in my evenings and weekends, for the fun of it, and that was to a large extent "get this textbook, make sure you can answer all these question, see you in nine months for the exam" with a few phone calls and weekends face-to-face thrown in. Whole thing cost a few thousand pounds. If you're just learning from the books, the actual cost of the education is so much smaller.
I guess they might have enough leverage with professor/universities to force exclusivity contracts, but I would like to hear about examples.
What are your ideas for products that might someday have a successful open source version?
imo, Pearson is really evil, I live in Taiwan and still lots of classes in the top universities use Pearson textbooks, and lots of students pay for their solutions on Chegg, which makes it all more absurd.
Textbooks were a minor, tiny part of the total cost of attending college. When you put the cost of books next to tuition, room and board and opportunity cost of not attending college, it's barely noticeable. I probably spent no more than $250 on books per semester (less on average, thanks to used books and online materials).
This is almost as comical as a hypothetical scenario of putting public terminals in health clinics that point you to WebMD, in an attempt to cut medical costs in the US.
Books were up to $300 per class. Sometimes I could find a used one, but often it was a previous "edition" which didn't quite match the teacher's latest edition.
I spent around $500/semester in books, sometimes less, sometimes more. Which is about 1/4 of my total cost(yes I know the actual tuition was subsidized)
A good ~30% of the classes didn't even require books (lectures and chapters were available online), and the other 60% you could easy get used books for half the cost.
The last 10% were classes where you had to buy a "workbook", which were only available new, but they didn't come anywhere close to $300, maybe 80-100.
Even if you attend a college with an absurdly expensive tuition, there are plenty of students who attend with a scholarship that covers it, and nothing else. Textbooks are, for the vast majority of college attendees, a major expense.
Required textbooks are simply immoral. They only benefit the publisher.
2. It's somewhat a matter of principle. People have long had the expectation that if they are paying the university tuition fees, then those fees should cover all of the tuition. What if they suddenly decided to charge $50 per course to let you take the final exam? Or an additional $25 per course to give you access to the class web site? Or a daily $5 entrance fee to access the grounds of the college?
I think it's fair for people to ask why they are paying tuition fees if they don't cover their education.
They also mention Amazon's text book rental (but I haven't done any price comparisons on that).
Why start at college? I am amazed that we don't have open source textbooks and materials created cooperatively across the entire education system.
1) We continue to need new textbooks: Despite relative little change in core materials for subjects like Calculus, there is a need for adaptation of texts to include current applications and methods.
2) The best use of interactive media to complement and enhance learning is yet to be determined.
3) The worst crime of textbook companies is lack of innovation.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -Upton Sinclair
A more common goal is acculturation and networking, which sending them to a foreign school will actively work against.
You could argue living in another country brings the similar benefit.
Though i agree that united states is pretty diverse from schools pov.
By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.
- https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-r...
Exploitative textbook pricing is also a problem that needs to be solved, and its unproductive to pass up lower-hanging fruit just to focus a higher one.
Way more personal pressure to increase budgets than decrease them at schools, I'd think. Cut something and anything sort-of related to it goes wrong whether or not the cuts caused it you will be in for a rough time. It's really easy to point at spending levels and increases when someone asks if you've "done anything" about some issue.
[EDIT] because this is the Internet I guess I should state explicitly that no, I'm not against psychological counseling for students or anti-diversity or anything like that, that's just the kind of thing that sometimes makes the news and if there's anyone we can justify blaming for any reason, we definitely will, so I picked those as examples.
You have the causality backwards.
An increase in # administrators isn't responsible for the increase in students' costs (primarily through tuition fees). An increase in administrators is enabled by an increase in tuition fees received by schools.
It's the same argument that sports tickets cost so much because the players get paid so much. That is backwards. Ticket price rises to the level that the audience will pay, and then that determines how much money is available to pay players.