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University of Minnesota Launches Review Project For Open Textbooks
New submitter Durinia writes "Minnesota Public Radio is running a story about the University of Minnesota's Open Textbooks project. The goal of the project is to solicit reviews of college-level open source textbooks and collect those that pass muster onto their website.
The project will focus first on high-volume introductory classes such as those for Math and Biology, because as David Ernst, director of the project, states in the interview: 'You know the world doesn't need another $150 Algebra One book. Algebra One hasn't changed for centuries, probably.'"
Requirements for inclusion include: Open licensing (Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike), complete content (no glorified collections of lecture notes), applicability outside of the author's institution, and print availability.
Everybody should read this before commenting on whether school text books are any good...
No sig today...
Maybe you should have talked to a future professor. :)
People might have said the same thing about software. Plenty still do, but free software does quite well these days. Some of it is terrible. Some of it is spectacularly good. The bottom line is enough of it is good enough.
This also ties in with a story last week or so about Florida (I think) not wanting to be bothered with correcting their tests where students were directed to pick the right answer out of four, but in some cases three of them were technically correct. The stuff we pay good money for isn't very good, either.
Fair enough, so we get a new edition of a textbook every 50 years. Let's be generous, and say every 10. Is that what happens now? No, it isn't. When I was in college not THAT long ago, using last year's edition was generally frowned upon but not quite forbidden. Not because the meat of the course was different, but because things like page numbers might be different, problems might be different, et cetera. Now, does that speak to a massive increase in didactic power, or precisely what you, the publisher, would do if you wanted to force students to buy new books instead of used ones?
A college education is getting very expensive. This is okay, because a college education is enormously valuable. Nevertheless, we are entirely right to want to crush waste out of a very expensive system. I learned from my expensive econ textbooks that this is going to happen whether you like it or not because rich profits attract competition, and competition drives prices down. Switching around the pages, updating the examples in ways that doesn't change the content meaningfully, and changing the practice problems around is simply an artificial price support. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Math textbooks are basically just a listing of basic proofs.
It sounds like you were educated in the 60s - 70s, because that is what textbooks were at the time. No decent math textbook today just lists basic proofs. That would be a reference book, intended for someone who already knew the math and needed to look-up the steps. A good textbook is more explanatory, breaks out the steps, includes historical anecdotes, footnotes, examples of applications, etc. Since the 60s we have learned that drilling proofs into people's mind is not the optimal way to teach math.
Not that education or textbooks today are perfect, but there have been advances.