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The Diamondback student-run newspaper at the University of Maryland reports:
The Textbook Cost Savings Act of 2017, sponsored by Maryland state Sen. Jim Rosapepe, could help students save a lot of [...] money.
The bill would provide a $100,000 grant to the University System of Maryland's William E. Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation to promote the use of open [knowledge] materials in place of traditional textbooks. The money would be used to foster the use of open education resources, or OERs, among the system's 12 institutions, said MJ Bishop, director of the Kirwan Center.
[...] If passed, the act would provide funding for the center to scale up the Maryland Open Source Textbook Initiative, a project that began in 2013 to promote OER use in classrooms. Between spring 2014 and fall 2016, the initiative has involved faculty teaching more than 60 courses at 14 public institutions in Maryland, saving students an estimated $1 million since the project's inception, according to the system website.
[...] Bishop said the grant will be used to create a central OER repository to share with all system institutions, as well as provide mini grants to universities to promote adoption of OERs in classrooms. The grant will also help to fund project management and instructional design staff, allowing faculty to create their own open source textbooks and design their courses around OERs.
[...] Some professors at this university have already made the switch to OERs. Lecturer Scott Roberts made an online textbook for PSYC100: Introduction to Psychology in 2010 after he became annoyed with new editions of the published textbook--which he said essentially contained the same content with different page numbers.
[...] Bishop admitted the $100,000 grant is not enough to accomplish all the center's goals at such a large scale; however, she said the act would be a sign of support from the Maryland legislature and be helpful when the initiative tries to get funding from national foundations, such as the Hewlett Foundation or the Gates Foundation.
Nonprofit MarylandReporter adds:
Open [Knowledge] Textbooks Could Save Students a Bundle
"The state is moving rapidly towards free textbooks online", said the bill's sponsor Sen. Jim Rosapepe (D-Prince George's) in an interview. "If the bill passes, it will be state policy that we want to move in that direction as much as possible."
The bill, SB424,[1] passed the Senate in an overwhelming 44-2 vote [March 9], with only two Republicans voting against it. The House version, HB967, cleared the Appropriations Committee, 23-2 [March 9], and heads to the full chamber for a vote.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in 2015 that textbooks prices had jumped over 1000% since 1977.
[1] Incorrect link in TFA corrected.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday March 14 2017, @12:03PM (4 children)
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in 2015 that textbooks prices had jumped over 1000% since 1977.
In all fairness the original star wars novel was a buck something in the 70s and your stereotypical programming oreilly manning class of book is also about 1000% higher. Textbooks however are even more expensive.
To some extent textbooks are a legacy of "great books curriculum" from centuries ago where everything you learned came from the only book you owned which might be a copy of the bible or maybe plutarch's parallel lives or who knows.
In the real modern world everything you learn OTJ comes from combining like 50 google searches.
I seem to recall as a kid in a pretty good school district not having math textbooks in elementary school because we were issued disposable workbooks, read a little write a little. A bit later, maybe a mere 30 years ago, Dr.... whoever it was teaching the RF EE class claimed none of the textbooks were worth the money so we paid him a crispy $10 and he gave us perhaps a thousand photocopied pages thru the semester. "OK outta my whole library here is the one best single page explanation of S-parameters in microwave amplifier design" or whatever. He was a character, I vaguely recall a midterm where he handed out a photocopy of some 1980 Motorola microwave bipolar power transistor and the single sheet spec sheet that was the midterm was something like "50 ohms in and out, 2.4 GHz ISM band, try your best and try several matching techniques". Now if you want five decimal places of optimization you need computer simulation but if you're just trying to flesh out L-network vs whatever, its good enough.
Another interesting memory WRT textbook costs is as a kid we had "reader" books which were vast collections of short stories and poems and stuff and in the old days it was probably a financial benefit although kinda like the first hit of crack is free I'm sure those textbooks are now like $200 whereas purchased individually the cost would likely be $100. Anyway as I got older readers disappeared maybe around the elementary to middle school transition and in high school I remember "Romeo and Juliet" was a paperback novel. At university we got to read "The Killer Angels" for a civil war class because the prof claimed the value was higher than any civil war textbook he could find (he assigned a couple novels, including Uncle Tom's Cabin and they all sucked compared to Killer Angels). Anyway a more likely conclusion that "F commercial publishers" is giving up on textbook publishers and college students get an oreilly safari login and they're done.
I haven't subscribed to safari in about a decade... any long term users have a comment about them?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 14 2017, @12:31PM (3 children)
A jump of 1000% is a factor of 11. Since a 1977 dollar is approximately 4 of today's dollars, this makes an effective factor between 2 and 3.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 14 2017, @01:04PM (2 children)
Since a 1977 dollar is approximately 4 of today's dollars,
That's an entirely arbitrary measure that varies wildly depending on what you are buying, and even within a market like clothing, food, energy, construction or whatever, depends on what type of thing within that market are you buying: wonder white bread, or organic stone ground free trade whole grain designer bread? Some of today's luxury goods simply didn't exist in 1977, and in the case of organic foods - many of 1977's commodity products were effectively non-GMO and even organically grown whereas today you pay a premium for that.
100 dollars of 1977 electronics, or especially computers, is just a few dollars today. 1 dollar of 1972 gasoline is about $10 today.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by rondon on Wednesday March 15 2017, @12:23PM (1 child)
Are you disagreeing with the idea of inflation, or with the current measurements for inflation. Because I will assure you that inflation is a thing that happened, and continues to happen. Conflating technological advances with inflation does little to explain the issues, imo.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 15 2017, @01:34PM
Inflation happens, but it is not a one-dimensional number.
🌻🌻 [google.com]