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.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(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.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 14 2017, @12:06PM (5 children)
Do the textbooks teach the controversy? If not, they'll be rejected in 3,2,1...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 14 2017, @12:33PM (2 children)
It's Open Source. You can add the controversy on your own.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 14 2017, @03:14PM
Do they come with a compendium 10 times thicker which contains the edit war?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 15 2017, @08:57AM
It's GNU/Textbooks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 14 2017, @06:56PM (1 child)
Maybe some controversies have made it in to satisfy people who don't like history glossing over the negatives, but make no mistake: big education companies are shaping curriculum for the worse.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 14 2017, @07:57PM
Howard Zinn is best known for his 1980 book "A People's History of the United States". [historyisaweapon.com]
In writing it, he used references not normally used.
He mentions e.g. how Europeans invaded (not "discovered") the Western Hemisphere and immediately started enslaving, abusing, and murdering the indigenous peoples.
(His works are a major contribution to the movement to stop celebrating Columbus Day.)
In Arkansas, there is currently a bill to ban his works from the libraries of public schools.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 14 2017, @12:52PM (2 children)
10x inflation tracks many things: a suburban home, a new car, many smaller items like hardware, wood planks, etc.
On the other hand, it's time for textbooks to be replaced with e-versions, whether free or not - and I'm not convinced that non-free textbooks offer much over their more affordable kin. Certainly the lack of DRM makes free e-books much more accessible than anything you have to install lock-down software to access. $100K is a pittance toward this goal, seems like they actually don't want it to succeed.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday March 14 2017, @06:41PM (1 child)
it's time for textbooks to be replaced with e-versions, whether free or not
While I agree that electronic versions are helpful, they pose a few significant problems. The first is that e-readers often deal poorly with layout for graphics-intensive books, and many publishers haven't figured out reasonable ways to deal with graphics either. A lot of textbooks in a lot of disciplines require significant amounts of graphics, images, etc. Heck, a year ago I ended up buying an e-book edition of an 18th-century science book (well, actually a 20th century English translation of an 18th century book, so the translation wasn't public domain) which had very infrequent figures, and even that was basically rendered unusable because of the inability to read the text and consult the figures at the same time in a reasonable fashion.
I'm not saying it can't be done -- but a lot of publishers don't yet do a good job at it. And that's the professionals. Ask an amateur to make an e-book that incorporates graphics in a reasonable and useful way, and it could be daunting.
Another practical issue for college use is that electronic devices are often a significant classroom distraction. It's often hard enough to get students to take an hour away from checking social media and participate in class without their phone, tablet, etc. If you use the textbook in class at all, now you have the difficulty of dealing with students whose academic material is frequently on the same device as Facebook or whatever. The temptation to just "check in" becomes greater.
And before someone comes along and complains about "useless lectures" or whatever so students are bored and not listening anyway, note that the above is potentially an even greater problem in a non-standard college classroom where students are doing other in-class activities rather than listening passively to a lecture.
Again, I'm not saying there aren't really good things about electronic textbooks, but there are some obstacles too.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 14 2017, @10:50PM
As Bill Gates once said: paper has several hundred years of development, computers are still playing catch-up.
As for layout of graphics, that's all done on computer, the problem is formatting for small screens, and some content just doesn't lend itself that well to small screen display. As for that, it shouldn't be long before every dorm room comes equipped with a standard 4K 36" screen... and as for in-classroom distractions, that's a maturity and respect problem - something we're not teaching as well as we used to.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mmcmonster on Tuesday March 14 2017, @01:38PM (1 child)
Isn't there a project (or ten) to make high school level open source textbooks?
I can't imagine it would take much effort to cover all the sciences at the very least.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 14 2017, @08:15PM
N.B. It bugs me when I encounter the term "Open Source" applied to things which don't have source code.
I do wish that people would stop trying to glom onto the term and its increasing popularity and would instead find the correct term for the project being described.
("Open License" is broad enough to cover a bunch of stuff.)
.
Isn't there a project...?
Yeah, we've previously discussed similar topics. [soylentnews.org]
One would hope that the university-level efforts would have more depth than the prep school projects.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday March 14 2017, @06:25PM (1 child)
From the summary:
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.
It's often a lot more insidious than that. If all they did was renumber the pages, it would be easy -- you could still just say "read chapter 6" or even if they changed chapter/section numbers, you could shift those.
A lot of the issue is often within exercises/problems. Textbooks frequently renumber and randomly move around exercises with each edition, just enough that it's a pain to continue using the old version. In the old version, you assigned #1-10 and #15-20. Now, to use the same problems, you'd assigned #1, 2, 5, 7-10, 12, 16, 21-23, or whatever. Some exercises disappear entirely. A few new ones are added. Occasionally (particularly in the first couple editions), the editing of exercises seems to be for a pedagogical purpose -- correcting errors, reordering things to flow better or group difficulty better, editing ambiguous questions, etc.
But after the 3rd edition or so, it's often mostly about making it too annoying for both professors and students to have a mix of old and new editions. (Same with other seemingly random moving around of content.) And if a prof even wants to continue to use an old edition to save students a few bucks, after a couple years, it often becomes harder and harder to get be sure you're getting the right used copy of an old edition.
As someone who has taught at colleges, I agree that textbook prices are mostly outrageous. And when it's been up to me, I frequently work without a textbook and just use my own materials, perhaps supplemented with a cheap "handbook"-like book or whatever as a written summary of some material. (Some students just want that reliability when studying, etc.) On the other hand, textbooks are sometimes a necessary evil when classes are prerequisites for other classes in a department, and you need standardization across all sections. It's generally easier to just rely on a standard text in the field than try to collaborate with your colleagues to write a text (or try to force everyone to use Prof. X's materials, when half of the other profs in the department think Prof. X is an ass.) And in some cases where textbooks are used for a multiple-course sequence, their prices become a little more reasonable.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 14 2017, @10:53PM
It's an old, well developed, deeply entrenched game, one that should be nearing the end of its run. Already in my professional life I have gone from having 50' of library shelves in my office to being 100% reference "book" free, but with easier access to far more than 50' of curated library content both on my desk in 30" 4K resolution, and in 3 megapixel small format in my pocket wherever I go.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 14 2017, @08:08PM (1 child)
The fact that the cost is going up faster than inflation is not a big deal.
The real problem is the content.
You would think that the education world would have figured out the best way to teach some things like math.
But if this were true, then an old textbook would be as good as a new one.
Which would dampen the market for new textbooks.
Soooo, we need to have new ways of teaching things.
The bad news is that it causes a devolution of our ability to teach things.
The good news is that it sells more textbooks at inflated prices.
Also helps rank our school kids down in the world.
Which makes a great excuse for more education spending.
These folks in Maryland just don't understand.
They have the strange belief the Education is about teaching kids.
Hopefully somebody will set them straight.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday March 15 2017, @11:04AM
The most helpful thing I had while learning math ( especially Algebra, Linear Algebra, and Calculus ) was having my copy of what was, at the time, DOS MathCad.
Now, MathCad came way after I paid my dues. I sure would have liked to have had those tools. But MathCad did allow me to investigate in far more depth a lot of thermodynamic math behind a lot of heat transfer and shaft work stuff I was playing around with in some oil refinery stuff.
The tools did not have to be fancy. But they did have to understand integration, differentiation, and matrices.
Like a programmable scientific calculator, it freed me to pursue the concepts of math by relieving me of the tedium of so much arithmetic.
If I was to do the same today, I would probably look at "R", as from first examination, looks like a quite enhanced version of what I had. I had got my copy of DOS Mathcad off the net at an abandonware site... +Fravia used to point out where a lot of good stuff was and how to get it.
I was helping one neighbor's kid with this... I took the computer the family was tossing out ( an old '286, no less! ), and reloaded it full of all the old stuff like GWBasic, Borland C++ for DOS, Mathcad for DOS, Borland Eureka, VisiCalc, and showed him how to use them, as well as a copy of the tutorials that +Fravia had showed me. I told him to think of it more like a super powerful hand calculator than a computer. It wasn't going to do his work for him, but it would handle the tedium of all the arithmetic, as well as neatly print on paper what it was told to do, and what it resulted in. Really nice printing calculator. I sure wish I could have had that setup when I was taking Thermodynamics and other advanced maths.
Probably the most useful program I ever had for showing him what Algebra was all about was GWBasic. Its a shame its not on computers anymore. That scientific calculator on the WIN7 machine, while useful, doesn't come close to the usefulness of GWBasic for horsing around with some numerical concepts with a kid.
Giving him an app which did not require him to know what he was doing would not have helped him much, just as all those modern programs to solve HVAC problems would have helped me know what was really happening under the covers in the condenser and evaporator coils.
MathCad was my favorite, as it was quite happy letting me put equations on the screen and it had plotting capability. It understood matrices, integration, and differentiation. But it only relieved me of the tedious arithmetic. I still had to know what to ask for.
I know there are newer programs out there now, but I would find it very hard to find tools for the purpose of teaching a kid as good as the ones I shared. Although they are not freely available anymore, at least the ones I have had no DRM on them and will run as long as I can find machines to run them on - and sharable.
I thought for a while I might become a tutor for kids, but it did not go beyond the one neighbor's kid. It was one of my intentions to start up a tutoring center at the church I was attending, but that did not go anywhere fast. I really don't have the energy to do a helluva lotta stuff anymore - and jumping through all the hoops to become a corporate tutor is not my bag.
Right now, I want to get my transmission controller for my van done. After that, I may try to teach microcontroller programming at the local community college, using my own van's transmission controller as the example of how to do it. I mean when I teach someone to do it, I mean *do* it, not take somebody else's thing and put one's name on it. I easily feel it would take two years of study to do it right... including PCB layout, SPICE simulation for the analog stuff, how to build the interface boards, how to program it... hell it took me fifty years to learn this stuff the hard way.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]