Open Textbook Initiative
aimath.org
aimath.org
American Institute of Mathematics is a research non-profit ran by one of the Fry brothers (of Fry Electronics).
At least until recently, it's been run out of the back of the office space of their headquarters location on Brokaw road in San Jose.
Now that the store (and the company) is defunct, I'm happy to see that AIM is still kicking.
Can't vouch for everything that they do, but they have been running pretty solid geometric group theory workshops on the reg. I got to attend one, and have good memories of it.
I'm still sad that the store has shut down. They cite COVID as a reason, but they've been in liquidation mode long before that (at some point, I couldn't even get a USB flash drive there!). I hope that AIM will go on as a legacy.
It's a computer algebra system, of which Mathematica is an example.
But the real power of Mathematica lies in its language.
SAGE wraps many libraries in a Python syntax, so the core language is different.
Anyone have any insight to this? I only have a sample size of two... which leads me to believe not all departments worry about this so much.
Edit: see these MAA guidelines: https://www.maa.org/programs-and-communities/professional-de...
One suggestion is "there should be established procedures for periodic review of the curriculum... should include careful scrutiny of course syllabi, prerequisites, and textbooks."
As much as I hate to say it, there are legitimate reasons for carefully controlling the curricula in lower division courses. A big one is: transfer credit. People get pissed when it's difficult to transfer their cheaper CC credits to a larger university.
The easiest way to solve these problems is by dictating curricula. But, unfortunately, the Pearson's of the world feast on the resulting homogenized market.
This is similar to my problem with Common Core. Everything in Common Core is perfectly reasonable. But now we have one giant textbook market where Pearson dominates with their products which now bear a "Common Core approved" label on the cover.
> "Common Core approved"
This does not exist, so you have no problem with Common Core. Common Core is an open standard, not a certification. Any book can be Common Core aligned, and any school board can choose to certify a book within their jurisdiction.
Common Core is a standard (checklist of abilities students should learn), not a curriculum.
Ilustrated Mathematics ( https://illustrativemathematics.org/math-curriculum/ ) is a curriculum, which is Common Core aligned, that fills in details of the standard. IM certified partners who each publish books. (Both open and proprietary partners exist) This is closest to the accredidation you mention.
Yes, accreditation is an expense. That expense can be paid by donations, grants, or government payments.
There are currently 3 textbook publishing partners of Illustrated Mathematics.
https://openupresources.org/frequently-asked-questions/open-...
Cengage and McGraw-Hill are major textbook publishers, who are not Pearson.
Illustrative Mathematics's publishing partners are also not Pearson.
Illustrative Mathematics (used in various school districts) is based on Open Up Resources, a Creative Commons -licensed curriculum https://openupresources.org/math-curriculum/ that includes teacher/home/student lesson plans (not exactly a text book, but K-12 school curriculum is designed to be led by a teacher, not self-studied.)
Yes, I understand what CC is... most states already had very similar standards. I should have said "New and Improved! Meets Common Core Standards!".
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mollyhensleyclancy/pear...
CC was definitely used as an excuse to push unnecessary materials and not just by Pearson (I was using them as a bit of a bogeyman).
Sorry, I'm not sure what point you're making with the Illustrated Mathematics link.
Perhaps I muddled my point by bringing up Common Core (I have no experience at that level, I just expect there's a similar dynamic). And to repeat... my point was that some departments dictate the textbook choice and curricula of their lower division courses (often with good intentions!)... but when they do it's often easiest to standardize courses using a big publisher's materials. Good old fashion vendor lock-in.
That way we didn't have to lug our books back and forth to school and could just use the shared books in the classroom and our own books at home.
It seemed to serve us well and not stunt our growth!
So it's the schools that are in on it and the primary target to put blame on. My university (in eastern EU) had majority of textbooks available for free. We could print them ourselves, have them printed at school, or just buy used. I'm sure it wasn't the case for all curriculums, but probably for many. Writing textbooks is one of the things teachers (professors) do after all.
Huge props to them and I hope more do this, but we also need to recognise that most OER today serves the basic classes that more people will take.
Its when you get into the higher level, more specific courses where OER is currently under-serving. OER for most of these courses just plain don't exist, I hope someone figures out a way to serve these student and instructors in the near future.
At one class at my university (an early chem class) the author of the book was also the professor of the course. And each year it was a new version which didn't do a whole lot more than fix some typos, introduce some new ones to be fixed next year, and change (probably automatically through software) the problem sets.
Then you'd be forced to buy new copies at full price from the campus book store. And at the end they'd then buy them back for you for a few dimes on the dollar so long as they were in "like-new" condition. And while I don't know what they did with them then I expect at that point they were sold to other universities at a discount for them to start the racket all over again with a set of now "like-new" text books.
Really nobody has any motivation whatsoever to change the system besides the student. Though even there most students seemed frustrated but simultaneously pretty apathetic. Everybody of course realized it was a racket, but didn't really care to make too much of a fuss over it since endless loans and the like all make it feel somehow like the money involved is not really real. And, after all, in a decade or two we'd all be millionaires.
These were mostly electrical engineering (and a few software eng) courses, dunno if that has anything to do with it.
This is not completely true. I have long avoided using any textbooks the students have to pay to access. The only exception currently is my intermediate macroeconomics class. I have not found a suitable no-cost supplement that covers all the topics of the class. My motivation is that it's easier to teach a class if you can offload certain topics to a reference, and you can't do that unless everyone has access to said reference.
Beyond all that, universities have an incentive to reduce cost as much as possible. Whether university administrators ignore that incentive is left for the reader to determine.
My employer offers small grants to support the creation of open teaching materials: https://lib.k-state.edu/services-support/scholarly-communica...
The cherry on top, was that his book was chock full of errors. We were constantly receiving emails from the professor letting us know which problems HE HAD ASSIGNED had errors and which numbers to change in his own book, etc. How this is allowed to happen is beyond me and was beyond frustrating for all of us as students.
Worst experience I ever had with a teacher and textbooks.
This wasn't even advanced linear algebra, just the basics. You could literally assign/use any book published in the last 20-30 years and nothing would change about our learning experience. Math doesn't fucking change so often that a new book is needed every 6 months and everybody knows it.
I came to the comments to make this point. I had several professors with massive egos that made you buy their crappy book for their class. I remember on at least a couple of occasions the book wasn't even used!
At the other end of the spectrum, we had professors which used regular tech books for the textbooks and supplemented with lectures as appropriate. I much preferred this approach.
Frankly, the entire US higher education system is a racket and is long overdue for disruption.
Perhaps he was forcing you to buy brand new so that he didn't overpay the royalties back (i.e. they may have had a simple formula based on the number of students, regardless of whether you bought or not).
So the exact page layout of the text books doesn't matter, and you can use any edition.
In general text books just seem to be less of a big deal in the UK. I remember reading all the classic text books, but the course didn't revolve around them. You could often pick which text books to read out of a selection.
And you just get them from the library.
Bad news: they are pushing hard for ebooks that are drm'ed to hell so you can't resell them. And if they do still have paper books, increasingly they are moving to "loose leaf" editions which are "cheaper" because they are just loose pages which means they are much more likely get damaged so you can't resell those either. Or if they do offer actual books, they do "rentals" which means you pay most of the price but have to return them and so you have zero chance of being able to resell them.
But that's ok, I'm sure your local bookstore can help you. Oh wait, most college bookstores are now owned by Barnes and Noble and so they are just another corporate business...
At my university, students who didn't buy the book would simply make photocopies from the library's copy or from a friend's. But then the photocopiers were modified so that they only operated using credits from "copy card" that was tied to the student ID.
I never knew anyone who got into trouble, but heard that you'd be called in if you were making "too many" copies.
edit: an extra word
My college has used the government covid money to pay for all students' textbooks and we hope to be able to include textbooks in tuition price from now on but they are ebooks only.
Checking the situation now, some are even available online, eg:
http://antena.fe.uni-lj.si/literatura/ed.pdf
Some are even unchanged from my times: https://www.fe.uni-lj.si/mma/Osnove_elektromagnetike_2016-02... (1999)
Basically, noone really cares.
"The reason was that the books were so lousy. They were false. They were hurried. They would try to be rigorous, but they would use examples (like automobiles in the street for "sets") which were almost OK, but in which there were always some subtleties. The definitions weren't accurate. Everything was a little bit ambiguous – they weren't smart enough to understand what was meant by "rigor." They were faking it. They were teaching something they didn't understand, and which was, in fact, useless, at that time, for the child."
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/11/07/inclusive-acc...
More recently I was required to purchase an ebook that included online tests and homework hosted by the publisher. There is no 3rd party marketplace for that content. There is no way to get a refund if you do not use it. Publishers are allowing professors to outsource basically all of their lesson planning and content development responsibilities and pass the cost off to students. To add insult to injury, that product is setup to allow each institution to be the sole distributor of the license to their students and charge an additional markup to mail you a physical card containing the product activation code and offer no digital delivery option.
I’m going back to school.
My networking course recently changed from CCNA to CompTIA network plus content.
I complained that I pay tuition and my coursework labs and tests for over 85% of the marks, are all done via CompTIAs cloud service. And this costs over $200.
On top of this, CompTIA charges the school thousands of dollars a year for the right to teach their content.
So I quit. If I wanted my network + cert, I’d self study and take the tests myself.
Wow, did the school just decide that they didn't want anyone taking the networking course?
The cost of certifications that you earn along the way are included in the $3920.
Here's a page about their IT degrees from WGU Washington [2].
As an example of the certifications included, here is what they bachelor's degree in network operations and security includes: CompTIA A+, CompTIA Network+, CompTIA Security+, CompTIA Project+, CompTIA IT Operations Specialist, CompTIA Secure Infrastructure Specialist, Axelos ITIL®1 Foundation, LPI Linux Essentials, Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA), Amazon AWS SysOps Administration-Associate, and Amazon AWS Cloud Practitioner.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Governors_University
[2] https://www.wgu.edu/online-it-degrees/it-certifications.html
Think long and hard about doing an online degree, and what you think it’ll do for you.
I don't really get why this is even a hard thing, surely there is some wordpress/whatever "quiz" plugin that the teachers can use to copy/paste multiple choice question/answers in and the school can pay the minimal fees to host for all their classes.
Textbooks were a scam 25 years ago when I went to school, but many of them were sub $40 or so, and could be picked up for ~$20 used. A few of the science engineering texts were closer to $100 but it was rare to spend more than ~$200 a semester on books.
Frankly, students can organize for all kinds of social issues, I'm shocked they can't organize to force the school to assure that prof's aren't playing into the textbook scams that seem common now. A bit of student fee to host a couple year old quiz server, and download PDF copies of class notes/etc seems like it should be doable. Particularly considering all the schools which have been providing online courseware for 20+ years now, frequently complete with free textbooks/lecture notes/etc.
Course notes are typically posted by the prof if they want on services like Blackboard or Brightspace or Moodle. My university student union had a random PC with an old exam bank.
I think high prices for textbooks are fair (although compared to the field Pearson et al seem to have extortionate prices), they contain high-value knowledge. I think it's more ridiculous that universities don't provide students with textbook copies, given the incredible cost of degrees.
So, my mom is in grad school, and in the second quarter of a class, and the professor announces, "I'm sorry, but there's a new version of the textbook, so you'll need to buy it," and my mom, without thinking at all, muttered, "BASTARDS!"
Everyone turned in shock to stare at my mom.
Education in the US absolutely has issues, including the textbook pricing racket shown in this very thread. But at the same time, there's no question that the US has some absolutely fantastic universities and that the quality of education you can receive here is very high. I say "can receive" because obviously not all universities are equal, or even all programs within a given university. Still, all of those people flock here for grad school for a reason.
Note that I'm mainly talking about post-secondary education. Primary and secondary education in the US has a very tremendous degree of variance from state to state and is generally not seen as being in the upper echelon internationally.
I mean almost every class is available to be audited online for free. Most professors are average when it comes to teaching ability. There is no reason a foreign school can not mirror any program or class in the US.
Of course, the value of the credential is a totally different story. We are really talking about the education equivalent of Louis Vuitton bags and not the general function of a bag.
When I was more up on issues in education years ago, I read that people come here for an education because they can. In their country, there may be barriers to education that we don't have.
If you are an adult who wants an education and can pay for it, the US will let you pursue it. That isn't always true in other countries.
i mean after that, and when everybody looks on the project, that would be done? and at least that works for the entry level courses? why does nobody do that?
There are so many good textbooks for Algebra, Analysis, Topology and the most commonly taught ones are (Dummit&Foote, Rudin, Munkres) are nothing like what you describe.
My dad used to be dept chair at the college where he worked. Because of his title, textbook publishers would send him copies of their books for consideration. He would give them to me and I would sell them on half.com.
He was also able to order the answer books for my calculus textbook. I could do all the practice problems and look up the answers (not just the odd # questions which were in the back of the student book). At the end of the semester, I gave the answer book to the chair of the math dept to keep in the student math lab.
Also, one day in my physics class, some textbook sales reps came to demo this new RF remote with numbered buttons like a TV remote. Each student in class would get one. Their sales pitch was that it would allow our teacher to put a daily quiz up on the projector screen, and each student would use the remote to submit their answer, and then his TA wouldn't have to grade 150 quizzes. Also it would track attendance (which I thought should be optional for college classes). Students were expected to pay for their own remote, and I think there was a license fee per semester. Yuck.
They're about $30 used and there's a large supply of them because you don't use them in higher level classes. IMO not the worst scam in academia compared to $200 book and homework combos
I _have_ heard them being used to try and create a more interactive, engaging environment for the students. Typically they're used something like this:
The teacher explains something, then asks a question that you can correctly answer if you understood the explanation. There's N answers available; the question + multiple choice answers are on the current slide.
Students then group up into small-ish groups (4 people or so, maybe less) and each group discusses the question & comes up with an answer, and then they use the clicker to make their choice.
Once all the groups have had a chance to answer the teacher displays a bar chart / histogram showing how many groups chose each answer.
The next part I'm not 100% clear on the details, but the bar chart points the students in the right direction AND provides feedback for the instructor. For example, if pretty much everyone got the right answer then the teacher can give the groups that didn't choose the right answer a couple minutes to re-discuss and/or ask questions. If lotsa' students got the wrong answer then the teacher can go back and clarify stuff, etc, etc.
So yeah - the point of clickers is to transform a passive "listen to the teacher lecture" experience into something that is more interactive and engaging.
In terms of apps - I don't use clickers myself (I teach smaller classes), but if I wanted to I'd definitely use an app for this. I suspect that people still using physical clickers got started with them and are continuing to use them. Personally I'd get my college to buy a classroom set for the students to borrow each class (or to checkout for the semester/quarter/term) but there's overhead with that, too
Most important: if lots of students give the same wrong answer, the instructor's explanation was probably misleading (or even wrong).
An app would actually be a lot better for this, since it's not like you're going to give your phone to your friend for several hours. On the other hand, I agree that tracking attendance in college is a bit pointless.
• The principle / agent problem - Instructors naturally select the course materials for their own courses but typically never need to pay for their own instructor copies. In essence instructors are making decisions for which they generally bear no cost, but which do impact costs for students. Compounding this problem is that, surprisingly often, instructors did not actually know the cost of the materials they selected.
• The cost structure problem - Instructors will sometimes select a textbook to use for a course for only a year, but often they'll use a textbook for longer than a year. Using the same textbook for two to three years for a course isn't uncommon. This has implications re: how much revenue is at stake for a publisher for each textbook sale.
For example - if an instructor is teaching a particular course twice a year (once in the spring and once in the fall), and they use the same textbook for 2 years in a row, and each course has roughly 30 students - then a publisher selling an instructor on a $200 textbook has a value of:
4 courses * 30 students * $200 = $24,000
Or, roughly the cost of some cars. With this kind of revenue on the line for each sale it makes sense for publishers to develop a nation-wide, high touch, hands on, sales force. And a friendly, knowledgeable sales person can be more persuasive during the course materials selection process than a worthy (but distant) affordable textbook initiative that doesn't have an in-person advocate.
• The content discovery problem - Part of the reason why publishers resort to sales teams is because they don't really have any good alternatives. There isn't a great platform for higher ed content discovery. Instructors who want to survey what content might be available for their course have a limited amount of time to make a decision, that decision has large consequences (their entire course might have to be redone for example), and there often isn't very good info about higher ed content (what are the learning outcomes associated with this content? what is the resale value of this content for the student? what do other instructors think about this content? etc.).
• The transient pain problem - Most students complete their college education in 4 - 6 years, which means that (for most) the pain of high textbook prices is temporary. In other words - the pain is temporary for the cohort that would probably be most motivated to solve the problem.
One expansion on the principle agent problem: college bookstores handle. Many bookstores rent their land from the college with the agreed rent of $X +Y% of gross. This creates a disincentive for the institution to spend time negotiating with publishers (or ensuring faculty are getting enough use for the materials they assign).
Some really boring old radar books I own, have the most beautiful silky paper that the equations practically glow, whereas now you get stuck with the toilet paper edition for not much less than what that old one would've cost.
I'm trying to get people interested in developing a model for an open, digital, printable, free textbook, that anyone could access online, download, in full or in part, share, or print if necessary.
The general idea is to create dematerialized textbooks, organized in modules: an officially approved minimum basis, and additional optional modules. Redundancy would be allowed for easy adaptation to local needs. Learning and teaching communities could also make contributions.
Bundles could then be customized or made available in presets. Schools could have their own official bundles, and students could get them in print in libraries, online, and the digital versions would, of course, have open formats.
The best example is that of a Math textbook, that allows for direct translation, and which main contents never get old.
So, for example, LaTeX modules would be made available online, and compiled into one document as needed. Indexes would, of course, need to me made universal in some way. And bundles would get their own UID, for easy sharing.
Today, the available digital textbooks are heavily copyrighted walled gardens, and their licenses expire after some time, so they're broken by design. But their contents are, for the most part, already Commons. So what gives?
When I started writing this comment, I had in mind that the Portuguese Ministry of Education had spent around 40 M€ buying textbooks from large publishers that are distributed for free to students in need, in a voucher system. While checking this, I found recent news reporting that this value, in the Portuguese national budget for 2019, had underestimated the cost by 100 M€ (and that year's budget had a surplus of 0,2% of the GDP...). I expect that an annual sum this large would be more than enough to fund a long term project.
[1] Professors are critically punished for poor research, mildly punished for poor teaching
[2] A base level of teaching acumen is required. Improving teaching at all is costly, so teachers are willing to pay up to the opportunity cost of lost research impact for course materials
[3] So they systematize and outsource necessary non-core components -- course content, course grading (via TAs and PhD candidates), and where permissible test and homework creation and evaluation. Since they have no real impact to them for the costs involved, such as purchase of texts, they proceed forward purchasing into the racket
How to fix? Make teaching reviews (student and outside observer) factors for keeping tenure. Don't include as part of tenure review beyond what is already there. This gives you the best of all worlds: world-class professors invested in quality teaching.