Slashdot Mirror
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.
When I went to college, one person would buy a textbook, make five copies for himself and his friends, and returned the textbook for a refund. Some instructors were sympathetic, others were not (especially if they wrote the textbook). The book buyer at the bookstore sometimes refused to buy back brand new books with broken spines that got stretched out from photocopying.
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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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.
Hopefully these educational materials are free and open to the USA and friendly countries like Canada, Australia, Japan, and South Korea. However, I hope the licenses make it illegal to distribute in Europe. After all, making our educational materials available in Europe will be viewed as American imperialism by many of the Europeans. Seriously, I'm fucking sick and tired of European bastards claiming every international treaty, American company doing business in Europe, or American content being sold in Europe, amounts to American imperialism and forcing our ways on them. And we sure as hell wouldn't want to inconvenience these whiny bastards by giving free stuff to Europe, either. So hopefully it won't be permitted to distribute these in Europe. This is a giant FUCK YOU to those people who post and whine constantly about the USA supposedly forcing itself upon Europe. I used to respect the hell out of Europe until I came on Slashdot and saw all the disdain some of you bastards have for the USA. FUCK YOU!
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.
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.
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.
Photocopying a book is lame. De-bind the book and run it through a photocopy machine that converts it to PDF with OCR.
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.