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."
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.
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.