I am a lecturer in a math department. I also despise the textbook industry.
Would you please recommend what I might do, subject to severe limitations of (1) time and (2) political clout within my department?
Would you please recommend what I might do, subject to severe limitations of (1) time and (2) political clout within my department?
My point is, if a lecturer is really dedicated to providing the best possible experience to his students, he doesn't need a textbook. I'm not saying that it's easy, or that it doesn't require a lot of time and effort from his part. It does. Some lecturers chose to accept the load, while others go the easy way and just point to references and exercises in the book.
That could be an interesting solution, but is mostly practical if you already have tenure, since it is a quick way to not get tenure otherwise. If you spend your junior professorship time writing a textbook (in a field that already has many) rather than spending that time on more research and publications, tenure is unlikely. If you're tenured and have been teaching the same course for a while, on the other hand, you both have more leeway to spend your time doing that, and may have already sort of "naturally" accumulated years worth of notes from previous iterations of the course. Then it can be a good idea, and many senior professors do prefer this approach, because it lets them teach the course in a way precisely in line with how they feel the material should be taught, rather than having to buy into someone else's approach.
Universities could influence that outcome at all levels if they wished, though. Universities formally budget preparation time per course. Currently it's typical to budget quite little, because the assumption (and sometimes requirement) is that you'll be teaching using a standard text in the field. If they instead want extensive preparation to be done, along the lines of what you propose, they can: 1) budget sufficient time for it, e.g. specify that each course requires, say, 100 (or 200, or whatever) hours of preparation prior to the beginning of the semester; and 2) expect that the preparation time be used towards the budgeted end (i.e. expect extensive independent course materials to be developed for each course, in line with the amount of time budgeted).
[1] Note to the pedantic: I am taking license with the fact that I've only read a few first edition textbooks- and they sucked. "Most" in this case should be read as a rhetorical vehicle.
This isn't really true. A majority of my math text books at UW were written in note form by the professor teaching the class. They were just very efficient...and hey, its math where a glossy text book really gives you nothing.
> Currently it's typical to budget quite little, because the assumption (and sometimes requirement) is that you'll be teaching using a standard text in the field.
This is definitely not true in math and barely true in computer science. I think it is true in physics and chemistry, but only for entry-level courses. It also depends on the university.
Open sourcing material between professors could go a long way; each could simply collect what they want for the course and then easily publish it in electronic (free) or paper form (students pay printing costs). I think this is how it mostly works already in upper division courses.
Sometimes there is a very nice up to date book; but just as often, say in computer science, everything is out of date anyways (computer architecture, compilers, ...).
I haven't surveyed everywhere in CS, but I know the operations of quite a number of schools, and I don't know any that budget significant preparation time for "normal" classes. Some do allocate extraordinary preparation time if you're developing a completely new course that's never been taught at the school before. But in the common case, where it's a longstanding standard course, you're expected to use reasonably standard material, whether it's whatever was used in the previous professor's version of the course, or some moral equivalent that you're expected to be able to adopt within <10 hrs. You definitely aren't supposed to (officially) spend more than a minor amount of time preparing your own curriculum and pedagogical materials for the course.
You never learned to share?
I'd add that if cheating is a concern (whether from using books whose solution set is easily available, or using in-house solution sets that don't update with each year), then assign watching a previously recorded lecture (by the professor, or one of the excellent already available ones online) as homework, and use the in-class time to have quizzes, tests, or professor-assisted homework sessions. In addition to weeding out cheaters there's the benefit, if you believe Salman Khan, that such methods are probably better ways to learn the material.
Finally, it's not too time-consuming for a professor to scan the problem sets from the book and distribute them to the students. So long as the problems aren't highly specific to the text, the student ought to be able to solve them without the text. For many subjects there are lots of free resources out there to learn from.
We have a program to help educators quickly get up to speed using our content with minimal effort
Or find one of the many "released free for use" maths texts[1][2] that are "out there" and see if one is suitable for your classes?
[1]: http://people.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.ht...
Tried it. Those god-damned greedy SOB's buy up all the previous editions and shred them. It's hard to find copies even on the internet after a couple semesters. I still list previous editions of texts on my syllabi though, but students who are on fin-aid are herded toward the campus bookstore.
The sad reality of the situation is that a professor's student evaluations (which do matter for things like tenure) will be negatively affected by the decision to use an old edition. Yes, sometimes it makes sense to tell an unprofitable/annoying customer to go away, but professors don't have that luxury in the university environment.
Edit: Curious why this is being down-voted. The truth hurts?
This doesn't require any explanation other than inertia.
I recently taught a course on ODEs, and it took far more than "a few hours" to curate enough online resources to cover the curriculum. The sad truth is once you get out of calculus, the number of quality online resources for advanced mathematics decays rapidly, and the coverage gets spotty as well.
This is not to mention that those resources rarely agree on notation, which makes them more confusing to students (and therefore less helpful). There's something to be said for requiring a single edition of a single textbook, just for consistency's sake, even though that's caused all this publisher drama in the first place.
> No USF employee may receive any money in exchange for requiring a textbook. However, if the professor is the author, royalty payments may be received.
It references and quotes Florida Statutes 1004.085. "An employee may receive: ... Royalties or other compensation from sales of textbooks that include the instructor’s own writing or work."
Just in case you don't think FSU or USF are reputable, I found http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1985/10/4/sandel-donates-b... from Harvard, back in 1985:
> Harvard has no policy on whether professors can profit on the sale of texts to students in their classes. The University leaves that decision to the individual instructor, according to faculty officials.
or more recently (Harvard, 2008) http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2008/3/4/professors-find-d... :
> Since N. Gregory Mankiw returned to Harvard to teach the College’s introductory economics class, 2,278 students have filled his weekly lectures, many picking up the former Bush advisor’s best-selling textbook, “Principle of Economics” along the way. ... So, what has professor of economics Mankiw done with those profits? ... “I don’t talk about personal finances,” Mankiw said, adding that he has never considered giving the proceeds to charity.
Given that Florida law doesn't prohibit collecting royalties and that a Florida school and a Massachusetts school both allow collecting royalties from assigning one's own text books for class, I think the burden of proof is on you to show that "most reputable universities don't let you do that."
(In any case, I went to university about 20 years ago, and the laws and rules were different than. But it doesn't look like it's changed all that much.)
It's, admittedly, more work, but what good thing isn't?
With print-on-demand: https://www.createspace.com/Products/Book/#content6
Second, if you are grading homework then produce your own problem sets. You already have to do this for exams, which means you know what you expect your students to learn, so you may as well produce the problem sets as well. At the very least indicate what types of problems a student should practice on so they can follow along in the book they do have.
Third, thank you for lecturing. I know that lecturers hate the raw deal with textbooks as well.