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Students At Lynn University Get iPad Minis Instead of Textbooks
Dave_Minsky writes "About 600 students will enter Lynn University's freshman class this year, the largest since 2007, and they will all be using iPad Minis instead of textbooks. The iPads will cost $475, saving students up to 50% of what a semester's worth of textbooks would cost, estimates Lynn. Students will be able to access core curriculum classes on their iPads that are 'enhanced with custom multimedia content,' and will come with 'at least 30 education, productivity, social and news-related iOS apps — some free and some paid for by the university.' This seems to be the beginning of a new era for American colleges. The Boca Raton university is not the first to give iPads to students instead of textbooks. Back in 2010, New Jersey-based Seton Hill University announced it would give students the tablets rather than books."
Yes I am. About what? Glad you asked - the fact that my apps are sold to edu at a discount and schools buy in bulk. Very glad indeed $$
This could be a good thing, but only if it reduces the price of the average content.
all prices subject to change if publisher feels he needs a bonus
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Seton Hill University is in Pennsylvania. It's more popularly known sister school, Seton Hall University, is in New Jersey.
My interest in science and technology was sparked by the college textbooks the prior generation left lying around. I'm not really opposed to ditching dead trees for digital, but I either want my access to the content to be permanent, just like a book, or I want the price to be WAY less than 1/2 the cost of buying the books.
you could read books for free at a thing called a Library.
i don't remember a time when i could refrain from spending hundreds of dollars on textbooks because they were all free at the library.
Richard Stallman cares http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Let's see, on class, anywhere from 10-30 students. Library usually having 1 or 2 of any single book. Possibly multiple classes, especially for common stuff. Homework and study requires you to spend more time with the book than a quick read in the library would allow. Sure, that'll work out real well. Shadowrat is right, you still have to buy the books.
They better have it on them at all times and not leave it in the car. The college industrial complex is overloading its classrooms, thus resulting in overcrowded parking lots. When I was a broke college student, I used to just leave my car doors unlocked intentionally because the assumption was always that if you have something in your car that thieves want badly enough, they're going to get it; even if it means breaking windows. I figured I might as well leave the doors unlocked because otherwise I'd have my stuff stolen AND broken windows to deal with. I didn't care because I had nothing of any real value anyhow, but now the parking lots will have more lure for would-be thieves ans seen as a treasure trove with the possibility of a $475 pawnable/ebayable item in every Nth parked car.
So no resale at all rather than the shitty 3% return most campus bookstores pay. No holding onto for future reference. Little ability to gloss notes. And with the money they "save", students will be able to cover almost half of the "general fee" increase this year.
For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in collegeâ"when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan...
--frank[at]unternet.org
That's a horrible choice. I don't know about the books you have to read, but that miniature screen is too freaking small for several of the textbooks I had to use.
Yes, I know you can enlarge the view, but you can't enlarge the screen, and when you need to see the whole thing at a size large enough to make out the details, a miniature screen is annoying and useless. The mini is a fail for that purpose.
or "The battery ran out and I forgot my charger" or better "The cloud was down so I couldn't save it"
Paul: Father... father, the sleeper has awakened! - Dune
Every time I look at my old engineering texts taking up shelf space I think, "I wish that someone could take all these, cut out about half of the valuable material, dice up the remainder between 30 odd sites and apps, and then tie it to a device with a 7-year shelf life."
As anyone who's dealt education-oriented online media (such as Blackboard) can tell you, the products are not always stellar. You get less text, its usually structured in such a way that it takes longer to read, the access is spotty, and it will probably not work as well as that in a year. Even the number one benefit of digitization -- search -- tends to be awkward or incomplete.
They say the iPad is about half the cost of books. I can easily believe that, but it also means you don't get to buy used books, or re-sell your used books. They've streamlined the process in a way that either offers no benefit, or benefits suppliers more than students.
It did convince the university to buy their student's books for them, provided you don't consider being forced to buy an iPad as being the same as being forced to "rent" used books. Or for that matter, so long as you don't consider going to a free library as an option. And so long as you don't consider that buying an iPad and getting electronic copies of textbooks was always an option for most books. All the ways they've streamlined the process are for the primary benefit of the supplier of the material.
Overall, it seems workable for books that you no interest in keeping beyond one semester (electives). But that is exactly the case where you can generally benefit from being flexible, buying bog-standard books from any store you please, buying a digital copy, or going to the library as needed. If you're talking about material that will actually continue to be relevant after a single semester, it sounds like a bad idea, putting a random-valued timer on your reference material.
201,0? What strange year is this. And is it really that hard to understand that Seton Hill != Seton Hall?
or "I dropped it"
How is this different from textbooks? You had to make an exception for some people by making a large print version, or a braille version. It seems to me that this transition, particularly if there's a text-to-speech option, should make the books more accessible, not less. Some extra tech required, but it seems much easier than creating multiple editions of each book.
More specifically
So it's not all the textbooks, just the core curriculum that Lynn has created. $475 is just the starting point and the iPad may not be useful for other classwork.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Now the textbook industry can join in on the rent-seeking business model for doing almost nothing.
1) This solves the problem of student access to class materials. See, with the eBook approach, licenses can be made to be enabled on the first day of class and disabled on the last day of class. This prevents students from having early access to class materials, which levels the playing field for those who, for whatever reason, do not care to start learning before the first day of class
2) This solves the problem of killing trees. Now, instead of using renewable, natural resources to print textbooks that last 50 or more years on a shelf and provide information over a person's entire career and even lifetime, we can start using non-renewable rare earth materials to make iPads, which last perhaps a few years and may or may not be able to give access to that same information depending on whether or not someone else wants you to be able to read it.
3) This solves the problem of organic learning. With the smaller form factor and lower density of information, as well as the appeal to a shorter attention span, we can stop all this organic learning stuff and resort instead to rote memorization of bulleted facts, figures, and equations, which can then simply be regurgitated on multiple-choice exams.
Hobbling more competitive students, more destruction to the environment and higher cost, and dumbing down our students. It's a hat-trick of WIN!
Seems awesome till you consider what's been going on with education in the US. Textbooks are a lot harder to change than electronic media. I know LU isn't in Texas, but Florida is almost just as bad. If you can rewrite a cultures history, or erase it, you can make up your own and a few generations later nobody will remember a thing... like the Constitution.
"Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathersâ(TM) commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light."[1]
[1] - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html
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Maybe 201,0 is a vector year.
Every term I put my personal copies of the relevant textbooks on 2 hour reserve in the library for the courses I teach.
What you're talking about is convenience for free. Usually that doesn't come so cheap.
I do. One of the courses I took read a lot of short stories from anthologies. The prof only wanted us to read about 5-10 pages per book, and felt that didn't warrant making all of us buy the book. So she reserved the 3 copies at the library for our class and gave us about 2 months to check it out and read it.
Unfortunately, some students checked them out and held onto them for a weeks to read the 5-10 pages. So the next such book, the prof just had the library reserve the book but not make it available for checkout (you could show your ID and request it, read it in the library, and return it). For good measure she also had the library run off a few photocopies of the pages (probably violating copyright) and also had those on reserve.
you could read books for free at a thing called a Library.
i don't remember a time when i could refrain from spending hundreds of dollars on textbooks because they were all free at the library.
Your school didn't have a "Reserve Book Room" which was required to have 1 copy of the textbook for every n students enrolled? I rarely bought the books and, if I had to do the homework from the text book, would just spend an hour or so in the reserve book room doing the assignment.
It's tough enough reading PDFs on a full iPad *with* a retina display. On a smaller form factor like a Mini combined with its lower resolution -- fagetaboudit.
And don't believe for a minute that non-PDF textbooks are an option. Books with equations, graphics, tables, or color render quite poorly and inconsistently as ebooks.
Clearly this school plans to graduate only readers of plaintext fare like novels and poetry. And in that case, why not use cheaper B&W Kindles or Nooks?
i don't remember a time when i could refrain from spending hundreds of dollars on textbooks because they were all free at the library.
I do! Spent a total of $50 on books for my entire college degree (1992-1995, Computer Science, University of Cambridge, England).
As soon as anyone, anywhere in the world, has written a useful textbook with a free license, the whole world gains that textbook.
I hope we will start seeing graduate students writing undergrad textbooks as projects, and releasing them with open licenses. Or seeing "publish or perish" professors satisfying the "publish" requirement by writing free textbooks.
Even if the world only got one useful textbook per year for any given discipline, it wouldn't take many years before students could get a degree using nothing but free textbooks.
Also, for subjects like math, once a textbook is done, it shouldn't take much to keep it current. Even for subjects like computer science where the state of the art is evolving, it would be relatively easy to keep the books up to date, and the basics don't change that much.
Free and available textbooks would be nice to have for people living in wealthy countries, but would be a very big deal for people trying to get an education in really poor places. Etexts are the reason I got excited about the OLPC project when it was announced.
There are plenty of people and companies who like the current system, but there are also plenty of people who have no stake in the current system and could release free books.
If most or all of the books are completely free, then using a tablet is a complete win over dead trees textbooks.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Exactly. This is your cue to find a new school, preferably one that cultivates the appreciation of building a professional library in their students. Some of my $100+ textbooks are still $100+ on Amazon, and they're still worth their weight in gold. Some could be mistaken for gold bullion based on their weight, too.
I'm long out of college, and the books that remain on my shelf instead of the ones I resold are the ones that are still worth $100 to me. You can be a cheapskate, but there's a cost of entry if you want to play the game. People griping about paying too much for books are the ones that will gripe later about having to pay all this money for computer upgrades because didn't we just buy new computers for everyone 5 years ago? Penny wise and pound foolish.
My wife was a non-traditional student recently. We bought an iPad because one term of books cost more than the iPad. Nobody told us the e-books were gonna be just as expensive as the physical books, and they expired to boot. Not the iPad's fault, but iPad-as-cost-savings is a pretty short sighted strategy.
She did like not having to carry 25 lbs. of books around in 100+ temps though.
Really? These will all be obsolete by the time the students graduate. Students always have to continue learning how to use technology after graduation, and the decades old parental fear that their children will remain jobless if they don't use the currently fashionable tech in school has been unfounded.
Personally, I'd rather have a book. It will last longer. Soon enough all the data on the books will be unreadable because the formats will have changed, the device crashes without a backup, some DRM scheme invalidates it all, no one can figure out how to transfer the data anymore, etc. Whereas I can still read 60 year old text books. Sure if the students are very diligent and every year convert all their data to the lastest formats it works, but if you wait 5 years you will screw up and lose something.
"...saving students up to 50% of what a semester's worth of textbooks would cost"
The devil is in the details, isn't it?
(1) Compared to the price of new, rather than used, textbooks.
(2) Access to the books will be time limited, and books can not be loaned or resold.
Please "save" me from having a permanent, loanable, non time-limited paper copy of Halliday and Resnik, which I have occasionally referred back to from time to time, including when doing patent filings, over the last 30 years.
What is it they say these days? Was it "Do. Not. Want.", or was it "Get off my lawn!".
Wow, just think how much more they'd be saving if it was a lower grade tablet that cost 1/4th the price like the Galaxy Tab 2 or Avatar Sirius or AGPTek anything or basically anything else that's at least better than Kocaso quality. Giving them a fragile, easily shattered, lucury premium overpriced tablet like an ipad is ridiculous. Plus, have you ever tried running itunes on a domain? It's basically a boat anchor.