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38 Community Colleges Launch Entire Degree Programs With Open Educational Resources (washingtonpost.com)
Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, writing for The Washington Post: A community college reform group has selected a handful of schools in Virginia and Maryland to develop degree programs using open-source materials in place of textbooks, an initiative that could save students as much as $1,300 a year (could be paywalled; alternate source). Such open educational resources -- created using open licenses that let students download or print materials for free -- have gained popularity as the price of print textbooks have skyrocketed, but courses that use the materials remain a novelty in higher education. Achieving the Dream, an education advocacy groups based in Silver Spring, Md., aims to change that by offering $9.8 million in grants to support the development of open-source degree programs at 38 colleges in 13 states.
What is the reason, beside greed, why the public school core curriculum text books are not fully open source? Seems to me the public would be best served with open source subject material and simple competition between publishers to print what is needed at lowest cost.
Would seem to me a pretty simple National Education Initiative to develop and keep up to date a set of core curriculum texts and videos. With the content public domain school boards could then have the right to edit them to their own "standards".
Here come another few thousand more unemployable college graduates.
Unless you show me how much money your education costs, your education cannot be anywhere as good as mine!
We should make education be as expensive as possible so only a few snotty super rich kinds can get an education!
I mean we cannot have everyone educated or else poor people may rise up and be smart, get jobs and even be productive members of society!
-- the one percent.
I'm trying to sort out books that cover all the material in fewer pages, lower book cost, and appreciable organization. I'm finding that some books for things like programming language design or computer science cost $20 or $50 and have clearer, more concise explanations than 1,000-page McGraw Hill tomes that cost $348.
Education incurs cognitive load. Bad education curriculum and bad materials increase cognitive load. Good study strategies decrease cognitive load. Approaching material using strong study methods--Cornell notes, SQW4R/OK4R study methods, self-testing, group discussion--increases the rate of learning and memorization while reducing cognitive load. Using better material decreases the cognitive load incurred by using those study methods (or not using any study methods). With better study strategies, better material, or both, education is faster and more successful.
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Well, as an old-timer who participates in a University of Hawai`i program for "kupuna" (seniors), I was shocked last fall when I signed up for a two-semester sequence in Abstract Algebra, and found that a used copy of the textbook sold for just under $140, and a new copy was close to $200. For one book.
Books were expensive when I was an undergrad, and publishers churned editions just as they do now, but it seems greed has reached epic levels.
Only 38 exploiters??!!
Why should we shovel loads of cash into the pockets of greedy booksellers! The price of text books has gotten way out of hand. Information does not really change as often as their book versions do. It is just pure greed and it is wonderful that someone wants to stop the nonsense.
For one book.
When I used to lived down the street from the university, I would sometimes browse the shelves at the bookstore. The required textbook for a graduate-level electrical engineering course cost $1,000 (new), written by the instructor (of course) and no used copies were ever available ($200 for buyback). That was nuts for the mid-1990's.
My last semester (a long time ago) the books were nearly as expensive as the tuition. I had a class that required 16 books (it was a lit class). A friend of mine didn't buy a single one of them and still aced the class. The teacher barely referenced them at all. I was so pissed off.
Yeah, I mostly quit buying textbooks somewhere around sophomore year (other than the very few classes where they were truly necessary).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
How many of these courses require the purchase of an online assignments management system such as WebAssign or ALEKS. If they do all they did was swap one cost for another.
16 years ago, when I was teaching, the book for two semesters was $90... then the publisher got wise, they chose to sell it by 'topic' so that you needed 10 'topics' for the 2 semester class... each 'topic' was sold for $25. I told my students to use last years edition, it had the same content, just not the new, spiffy graphics. Most ignored me and then bitched about spending $250 for all the 'topics' to complete a 2 semester course. Clearly publishers would rape their own daughters if there was a nickel in it.
My not responding to your flame is in no way indicative of my submission to your statement, it just means I don't have t
Since you are learning the material anyway, and don't have a college degree, have a look at Western Governors' University. For most courses, you only need to pass a test to complete the class, and where applicable they are industry certification tests. For example, I'm currently doing a networking course which consists of passing the Cisco CCNA .
You can study as much as you want before enrolling and paying the (low) tuition. It's a really good setup for people who like self-study. They ALSO include study materials included with the tuition, such as Cisco ebooks and the Cisco simulator for the networking class. You end up knowing the material, having a degree, AND having a stack of industry certifications.
Yes, well...when I was in school, we had a lab session (not even an entire course), and we needed to buy a whole shelf full of books, written by the TA, and it cost more than a year's tuition.
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
I hated when instructors did that but I had very few class that were that shitty and the ones that were were all liberal arts classes. Thankfully the literature class I took was "Intro to Shakespeare" which was just reading 1 play a week for the semester. So I got off easy with the project Gutenberg texts of them granted that was back in the 90s before things got silly expensive but even then gollege wasn't cheap. Even my compilers course used the standard dragon book but the instructor had the remarkable idea of also requiring the practical book O'reilly's lex & yacc since it would actually help with the project.
Time to offend someone
Were there any on remedial English?
Were there any on remedial English?
Sorry, English was my second language after Commodore 64 BASIC.
The best thing is they send free versions of the books to instructors in order to sweet-talk them into upgrading to their newest text, then stamp all over them that the book is never to be resold and that the resale market is killing the textbook industry.
Well, I hate to tell them, but it's a sham industry to begin with and their own shady practices are the only thing that inflate the costs in the first place. Their shipping tons of these books nationwide does NOT help the value, because there's absolutely no legal basis to their claim that the books can't be resold.
Go on Amazon and buy used - hell, even to a used bookstore - an there's a good chance you'll get one of those instructor copies, just all covered up in black tape to hide the publisher's FUD.
Yeah, it was created by 19 state governors . In some (all?) participating states, it's a state school just like University of Texas or Texas A&M.
Something unusual is that they don't charge per credit. Instead, you pay based on time. If you complete 24 credits in one term, it doesn't cost you any more.
Their technical courses are fairly rigorous. Using the network (CCNA) example, the new CNNA covers most of what CCNP used to cover.
The "general education" humanities type courses are more easy credit. I happen to like that. I'm more interested in tech than the arts.
You can transfer in certifications. If you already have your CCNA, congrats you just passed Networking. Had I planned better, I would have delayed enrolling (paying tuition) and got a few certs first, to transfer in.
And you had to walk uphill both ways in a snow storm to get to the book store.
$140 in 2015 was $45 in 1980
Photocopying a book is lame. De-bind the book and run it through a photocopy machine that converts it to PDF with OCR.
And you had to walk uphill both ways in a snow storm to get to the book store.
How did you know? And don't forget the part about "uphill into the wind."
Article about freely-available textbooks is pay walled.
Yeah but they're all just IT, not computer science, so nothing interesting to me.
IT people are the fast food workers of the future.
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I hope you enjoy your studies and get some good use of them. For me, my degree is in the field with the fastest-growing salaries of all, information security. Each of my last two job changes doubled my salary, so I'm not worried about the future of my field before I retire.
> You get people who are overly concerned with audits and compliance
In experience (20 years in the field), that's more coming from management. It frustrates those of us in the field, and we laugh at it, but we do have have to provide the executives documentation that they can use it court when the company is sued. Plus of course PCI and such is required by external contracts.