Slashdot Mirror
Coursera Partners With Chegg To Offer Gratis, DRMed Textbooks for Courses
An anonymous reader writes with news on Coursera partnering with publishers to give students access to more textbooks. From the article: "Online learning startup Coursera on Wednesday announced a partnership with Chegg, a student hub for various educational tools and materials, as well as five publishers to offer students free textbooks during their courses. Professors teaching courses on Coursera have previously only been able to assign content freely available on the Web, but as of today they will also be able to provide an even wider variety of curated teaching and learning materials at no cost to the student."
Zero cost, but not without cost: "Starting today, publishers Cengage Learning, Macmillan Higher Education,Oxford University Press SAGE, and Wiley will experiment with offering versions of their e-textbooks, delivered via Chegg’s DRM-protected e-Reader, to Coursera students. We are also actively discussing pilot agreements and related alliances with Springer and other publishers. ... The publisher content will be free and available for enrolled students for the duration of the class. If you wish to use the e-textbook before or after the course, they will be available for purchase."
Since DRM costs me money I would pay more for the DRM-free version.
I once rented an online book from some company for a statistic's course. Much like this company I had to download an e-reader which was released by the company itself to read my DRM enabled book. The problem was the e-reader app was horrible and only worked on Windows and Mac. Now I can accept the fact a Linux version wasn't available and I'm okay with that but even with in Windows large portions of the book just wouldn't render correctly, I was left with incomplete formulas and totally unreadable paragraphs. Not to mention if my date wasn't set PERFECTLY I couldn't even open the stupid reader in the first place.
If this company can pull it off and manage to release ebooks that have good readers attached, that render perfectly and are supported on Window, Mac and possible Linux then I'm totally on board with it. Other wise it really is more of a hassle then buying the book in the first place.
As much as I complained about buying books when I was in school, I usually use them for reference now. I find myself opening old Micro-controller books to get over a weird glitch or I open the calculus book to figure out a small issue. So well I did hate textbooks initially, I'm rather glad I kept most them now, 8 years later.
DRM enforces licensing, it doesn't and can't stop you from stealing. It allows a middleman (like iTunes, Amazon, etc) to say "Ok, we've rented your title XYZ to buyer for 2 days, so we will pay you X under our agreement." Without it Amazon is left with "Ok we gave your title to XYZ he promised to erase it in 2 days, but we all know that won't happen." Amazon doesn't really care if you steal it, the publisher slightly cares, but in reality they are happy that people are renting it and they are getting a steady stream of money. The rental model of digital content would be non existent without DRM, even if it is fundamentally flawed.
Meh.
I guess all those articles and comments talking about how Linux is also gratis are really just advertisements, too. You still need to buy a computer to do anything with it.
Students signing up for a course generally expect that there will be overpriced textbooks required. An arrangement that promotes a wider array of textbooks free of charge is notable.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
The college text book business has been a racket for generations. The vast majority of information has been public domain and lets not pretend the text books are superbly written or edited. They have the study material students pour over as quickly as possible so they can pass the next round of tests... rinse and repeat.
Shifting to ebooks that will increasingly be public domain is the future.
The only reason I could see to remain with copyrighted books is if they offered something the open source books didn't.
Write them better so the students actually learn more or are less bored by them. Or offer novel insights, methods of approaching problems, or research. Something you're just not going to see anywhere else.
If you have nothing in your text book that isn't in the free text book... what exactly is its purpose for existing at all?
And why would students spend their limited resources on your book?
It needs to stop. The worst are the science and liberal arts books. In the science books you get science knowledge from 100 to 200 years ago sold for 400 dollars a book. And in the literature books you get compilations of public domain books sold for 80 dollars a pop.
Why exactly are we doing that?
Hopefully this and a few other innovations will suck the fat out of education budgets.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
— Commissioner Pravin Lal (Alpha Centauri)
Fuck you and your DRMmed knowledge. I only rely on reference material that I know I can always reference.
DRM'ed textbooks...more and more it looks like we're headed for the world RMS envisioned in The Right To Read.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Just a couple examples.
1) A student is out sick and plans a make-up final exam 2 weeks later. Oops, his textbook access died the day of the scheduled exam.
2) The ebook vendor accidentally kills off access on the last day of classes instead of the last day of finals.
Any time you let someone else control your access to information, you're headed for trouble. Or for world-wide distribution of python de-DRM scripts, I suppose.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Free for students to use means that the students' page-by-page use of the textbook will be tracked by Coursera, with the analytics flowing back to course instructor and the book's author. "If something is free, you're not the customer, you're the product."