It really astounded me that we had to pay a third-party for-profit company to get access to our homework.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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".
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.
I've often wondered whether a legal case could be made against universities for price gouging.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
That is exactly what this is. Old fashioned conservatism.