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Quartz reports
Seven Rhode Island universities, including Brown and Rhode Island College, will move to open-license textbooks [1] in a bid to save students $5 million over the next five years, the governor announced [September 27].
The initiative is meant to put a dent in the exorbitant cost of college and, more specifically, college textbooks. Mark Perry, a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan Flint, and a writer at the American Enterprise Institute, estimated last year [Cloudflare protected] that college textbook prices rose 945% between 1978 and 2014, compared to an overall inflation rate of 262% and a 604% rise in the cost of medical care.
That is not the result of a general trend of higher costs in publishing, he notes: the consumer price index for recreational books has been falling relative to overall inflation since 1998.
[...] Open textbooks are defined as "faculty-written, peer-reviewed textbooks that are published under an open license--meaning that they are available free online, they are free to download, and print copies are available at $10-40, or approximately the cost of printing", according to a report by the Student Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) (pdf). They are part of the move toward Open Educational Resources, which has roots in the open-source software movement, it says.
Open licenses allow for content to be shared, unlike traditional textbooks which limit the use of their materials. [Richard Culatta, the chief innovation officer for Rhode Island] remembers teaching and replacing a section of a textbook with more relevant information for his class, only to be informed that he was infringing on international copyright law.
[1] A very bloated (webfonts) all-script-driven page.
Note: If you are thinking of using "begs the question" in the same way the state official did, that is a bad idea.
Our previous discussions of student materials and adoption of openness.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by lentilla on Tuesday October 25 2016, @12:22AM
instead of spending that $5M on textbooks, the students will spend that money on other things like pizza, beer, new clothes, music, etc.
A more likely result:
Students will still spend money on pizza, beer and clothes - it's just that the putative $500 saved on books this semester is unlikely to equate to $500 sales in other stores. Students are more likely to adjust their income accordingly.
From my perspective, the best part about this initiative is that that the world will be more "just". We get students; the intellectual cream of the crop fresh out of school; and the first thing we tell them is that have to work mindless jobs (diverting time from doing what they should be doing) in order to buy textbooks. Textbooks that are exactly the same as last year's versions except that the pages have been renumbered. It's a pretty insulting slap in the face after everything we have taught them at school about playing fair.
(Score: 2) by e_armadillo on Tuesday October 25 2016, @12:30AM
Absolutely agree.
"How are we gonna get out of here?" ... "We'll dig our way out!" ... "No, no, dig UP stupid!"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday October 25 2016, @06:05PM
Or, university administrators raise tuition by about the amount that textbook costs dropped. Their pay packages rise accordingly.
I like the move to open textbooks. But I fear that unless we watch very carefully, the savings will be appropriated by others and students won't benefit. Greed is the problem of these times.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday October 25 2016, @06:10PM
We need a new moderation, "Sigh". I moderated this interesting, but that's not quite right, and neither is insightful. The real mod should mean something like "unfortunately probable, sigh".
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @12:54AM
We get students; the intellectual cream of the crop fresh out of school
What? That doesn't even remotely describe 99% of the people in universities and colleges (or people in general). Only in a delusional paper-worshiping society could this possibly be seen as true.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday October 25 2016, @02:18PM
Some sort of approximation of the top half of people graduating high school then. I've spent time working in academia, and you can be absolutely sure that good colleges are looking for the smartest people they can get their grubby paws on. I'm not saying that all smart people manage to go to an Ivy League school, but if you got into Brown odds are you're pretty darn good at academics.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.