Slashdot Mirror
Maryland Awards 21 Grants To Prepare 'Open Source' Textbooks (usmd.edu)
"The University System of Maryland has awarded 21 "mini grants" to university faculty to "help them expand open education resources," reports OpenSource.com. Recipients of the grants are also given time off to prepare courses that use open textbooks, and will receive personalized support and training on effective course design.
An anonymous reader writes:
"Although our faculty view textbooks as essential, some of our students see them as a luxury they cannot afford," said Community College of Baltimore County President Sandra Kurtinitis. "Having access to open educational resources will provide some financial relief for our students as well as contribute to their academic success." The cost of textbooks has risen 812% since 1978, the school system said in an announcement, "outpacing even the cost of medical services and new housing. Nationally, students spend an average of $1,200 a year on textbooks."
The Maryland Open Source Textbook initiative started in 2013 "to provide a state-wide opportunity for faculty to explore the promise of open education resources to reduce students' cost of attendance while maintaining, or perhaps even improving, learning outcomes." Since then it's helped replace traditional textbooks in over 60 different courses at 14 public institutions across the state, resulting in a cumulative cost savings of over $1 million for 3,500 students. "In addition to saving students money, faculty have gained the ability to adapt and customize their instructional materials to ensure they are aligned with their pedagogical methods to best meet their students' needs," the school system reports. "In follow up surveys with students participating in the MOST initiative, 93% reported that the open educational resource content they used was the same or better quality than traditional textbooks."
The Maryland Open Source Textbook initiative started in 2013 "to provide a state-wide opportunity for faculty to explore the promise of open education resources to reduce students' cost of attendance while maintaining, or perhaps even improving, learning outcomes." Since then it's helped replace traditional textbooks in over 60 different courses at 14 public institutions across the state, resulting in a cumulative cost savings of over $1 million for 3,500 students. "In addition to saving students money, faculty have gained the ability to adapt and customize their instructional materials to ensure they are aligned with their pedagogical methods to best meet their students' needs," the school system reports. "In follow up surveys with students participating in the MOST initiative, 93% reported that the open educational resource content they used was the same or better quality than traditional textbooks."
This is an idea I've been in favor of for years. Thumbs up!
Textbooks probably wouldn't be viewed as a luxury if the U.S universities and colleges didn't work out how the absolute maximum they could squeeze out of students and their families in tuition and fees and then charge them that.
Here's an idea. Instead of commissioning brand new textbooks, why not form a buyer's collective with other universities (particularly state university systems) looking for value-priced textbooks (but not Dover Books, I hope). Don't go after the top 3-4 titles in any subject; instead, go after some of the laggards so their publishers will be open to cutting deals instead of demanding $100+. You can ask for paperback or cut-rate editions, like the International Editions sold in India.
That's where the department heads can exercise their good judgement, it's easy to recommend the same books used by many of the top schools but it's more challenging to look for value.
in Maryland. Seriously textbook industry F-. See me after class.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Here's the actual article in the diamondback - TFS links to a news aggregator that links to this:
http://www.dbknews.com/2017/04...
The State is still going to do a poor job of educating students. Public education is just a way to keep kids off the street until they are 18, at best.
If you care about your kids you seriously would not put them through that.
I published in 2015 a textbook about operating systems (http://sistop.org/). Besides working for a university full time, I got a grant from the LATIn Initiative from the European commission. They required me to join other authors (a requisite for participation was having at least threee coauthors, located in three different countries in Latin America), and paid each of us a very decent amount (€1200, particularly good given the wages in our region). There was, of course, a quality requirement - But the second requirement was for the licensing to be CC-BY.
I won on all fronts due to this.
The capitalist class are exploiting open source more than ever. Capitalists can't resist the promise of free labor, and the best part is the capitalists don't have to employ any of the young naive laborers. Open source means the work is publicly available and ripe for the taking. Capitalists just take everything and give nothing in return. Open source developers don't get paid anything, and developers live in poverty while capitalists make billions.
Explain how the "capitalist class" is going to make undeserved money from a resource made freely available at no cost to all. Sure, Red Hat et al earn money from Linux, but it's for the value-added they furnish. If you don't want to give them money, you can still download the product without paying, you'll just have to be your own support.
"Nationally, students spend an average of $1,200 a year on textbooks" - this claim is extremely difficult to believe. Given the 'ready' availability of most common textbooks as PDFs or ePubs via the internet, and even their solutions manuals, where are all these honest fools spending over $1000/yr on textbooks? There's certainly not seen in classrooms.
They are scared this set the precedent for government providing low cost broadband.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I think this is generally a fantastic idea. Nothing has really changed in subjects such as calculus, linear algebra, chemistry and biology in decades if not centuries for some subjects. Heck, I used my dad's control systems textbook from the 60s to learn. My fear is that publishers will start charging people on the back end of this for more specialized textbooks that are more typical in third and fourth year courses or specialized graduate courses. So, free textbooks for the two-year community college crowd, but $500 textbooks for process control of chemical reactors and digital signal processing.
The real underlying problem here is that student loans are the only type of debt that can't be discharged under bankruptcy, and that has created a moral hazard for post-secondary institutions to accelerate their costs. Tuition has also greatly and disproportionately increased in cost because students can get mortgage-like terms for their student debt, but institutions don't have any responsibility to make sure they graduate or make money. Meanwhile, endowments, perks and expensive buildings keep going up on campuses with little marginal benefit to students. The cherry on top is the IMO bizarre cultural support in this country for post-secondary institutions from alumni and through college sports.
If you really want to solve the textbook crisis, solve the debt crisis in education and allow discharge of student debt in bankruptcy at the same time as you investigate the publishers for any type of RICO or antitrust activity. The system will take a few years to clean out, but the issue will eventually be solved. The best part will be that tuitions will eventually come down to sane levels again, although that will be at the expense of the administrators and faculty who are more concerned about pretty buildings and social justice than they are about academic and human progress.
We don't want our own bathrooms. We just want you to leave us alone so we can pee in peace.
Publishers of university text books are rounding up an army of lawyers to descend on UM and Washington D.C. to quell this abhorable insurrection.
Students are not the "privileged" class! They should be proud to pay, i.e. their parents pay, $12,000 for a Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics and Medical text book and love the feeling!
Publishers like John Wiley & Sons will retaliate with Federal laws, passed by Congress, to out-law open source publishing of any kind and re-ward the out-laws with university text books costing $120,000!
Greed ... is Good! It POWERS the mind, enlivens the Heart, Fills the Soul.
Jajajajajajajaja
The grants are indeed "mini" - ranging from "$500 to $2500". Although it's a step in the right direction, that won't pay for much quality curriculum (see https://www.slideshare.net/debralewis/curriculum-develop-cost-time-example).
The summary was to long, so I'm assuming this is about using state taxpayer funds to translate textbooks into Ebonics?
Professors usually have total control over the textbooks used in their classes. In many cases the digital e-textbooks offered are hideously crippled -- DRM-linked to a single device, no cut/paste/copy, no highlighting or notes, and they erase themselves 10 days after the semester ends. Is it any wonder students still elect to pay extra for a real book? It has better functionality and resale value.
You seriously do not understand the ecosystem. Many of the major projects have core teams which are FTEs of the company, and others donate funds for outside contractors that are key contributors. Far from being paid nothing, I've known several that began as unpaid contributors and eventually went direct, started their own companies to service their piece, or received federal grants ( from the US Army for instance ). Other projects start on a purely unpaid volunteer effort, become essential and evolve into well funded projects. Firefox was originally a commercial product, then donated as open source, and now has spun off some of it's projects. IBM, Google, and others have transferred many internal projects into the open domain. Far from exploitation, FOSS is almost hyper-capitalistic, in that it short circuits the rent taking inherent in closed source monopolies, it allows microscopic participants into markets alongside the giants.
And non-state-funded textbooks are unbiased?
Unfortunately you may be correct. I work at a university that I graduated from many years ago. Costs have gone through the roof. There are fancy expensive study areas everywhere. The paint is barely dry on renovations when they are renovating again. The administration went from a small area in one building to their own four story building. Classroom space has tripled, but student population is only up by 70%. Nobody wants to take a class before 10AM or after 2PM so we need more faculty and classrooms to accommodate the concurrent scheduling. Athletics has been losing big money for years but nobody wants to make them live within a budget. The number of buildings on campus since I was a student has quadrupled. Tuition cost is up 564%
Why does this shit continue? Because all the other universities are doing it, we need to do it too so we can attract students. At least we haven't gone apeshit with the snowflake SJW crap. They opened a couple tranny bathrooms in one building and nobody will venture inside them. The girls avoid them like the plague and guys are reluctant to go in there too. I'm not even sure who they were for.
To get a real feel for the sudden growth since 2000, note that the first two data points span a couple of decades. The rest of the points are year by year:
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76
The article says an 812% increase since 1978. They could have easily cut down the start point to the year 2000 and still produced a startling, and more meaningful result.
That model sounds great, but the publishers have already gotten past you. The current model is to "give" the university online homework systems, embedded in your LMS, that require you to have a $120 subscription to the textbook. Fuck that noise; that's where we need to attack them.
Writing textbooks sucks as much as writing documentation. There isn't any real payoff for anyone in writing textbooks in terms of reputation (other than having the opportunity to write more textbooks). At least with open source software there is more of a structure to the intangible benefits one gets out of contributing to such projects (such as being able to show contributions when applying for jobs).
The new model is to have the "free" online homework require the $120-$180 texbook "subscription". Taht way the professor doesn't have to write questions or grade homework, and you get assraped without the chance of buying a used textbook.
In part, government intervention has disconnected costs from results.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
While this is a good step, the REAL solution is to stop requiring a new edition of the textbook almost annually.
THIS is the huge scam that has created this trap for students. There is almost zero reason for these new additions, however courses often REQUIRE and actually check for them (and often have included coursework, its own scam..).
The problem? This means there is no market for the books second hand!
By allowing a collusion between publishers and courses to effectively kill second hand use of the books, we end up in this situation.
So, just REQUIRE textbooks to have a minimum 5 year life (could easily be 10 years in many subjects).
Refuse any textbooks that are 'licensed' (including non-transferable electronic versions).
Problem solved!
Wont ever happen, people are making too much money screwing over the students, who are too young and green to avoid it.
Sorry, but you are completely wrong about student loans.
I know its very 'fashionable' to harp on that you should be able to drop them like a hot potato the week you graduate, but that would be a disaster, and in no way addresses the root problem.
Why a disaster? Because graduates are graduates. A large number of them would see this as a free lunch, and jump on it, declaring bankrupcy just to clear the debt (after all, they have almost nothing to lose here..), and THEN starting building their carreer with a problem. The 'punishments' of a bankrupcy will be of little consequence to them for the immediate future.
Therefore such risk in such loans will skyrocket, and availability will collapse, and interest rates will skyrocket.
We would immediately see a backlash from THE VERY PEOPLE WHO WANT THIS, claiming 'only the rich can now get an education!' and we will be back to square one.
The ACTUAL problem is the bullshit worldview that everyone needs a degree. THIS is what pushes demand to stupid levels, and created this whole problem in the first place.
Any sane education system has (and has respect for..) universities, technical institutes, apprenticeships, on job training, and just good old 'getting a job' as perfectly valid paths. THIS IS HOW IT SHOULD BE. Only the more intellectual 5% should ever be going to university, and having the other 80% there only harms those top thinkers by holding them back in a sea of mediocrity. Everyone else should be pursuing much less expensive, quicker, and more useful trade training.
But no, we need to be inclusive, no ones feelings can be hurt, everyone MUST have a degree to prove what a unique and special snowflake they are.
THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is the problem.
... to pay for those overpriced books, that changes every year even in subjects with no new factual information, hampering secondary market for text books.
This way the bankers can make a comfortable living, after all they only take in ~40% of all corporate profits in the US.
For the past two semesters, I've been teaching an intro-level science class for non-majors at a Big Ten university. Basically, there are two texts I'm aware of that could be used for my course. One costs about $30 for a printed copy and can be acquired freely as a PDF through the university library's website. The problem is that the book is terrible, in that it contains figures that are okay, but the text is unrelated, doesn't explain the topic, and doesn't reference the figures. It's quite possibly the worst textbook I've ever seen. The other is a book that costs roughly $200, and I haven't been able to get a sample copy of it to evaluate if it's a good text. I'm not going to make my students pay $200 unless I'm certain it's a useful text.
I've seriously considered using Inkscape and Blender to create figures, use LaTeX for formatting the text, and creating my own text. I'd self-publish it as an ebook on Amazon and sell it for around $30, giving students the option to rent it for a semester at a lower price. I could also create additional instructional materials like presentations and exercises to give to instructors using my text. Ultimately, there's no benefit to selling the instructor materials because it won't bring in much of a profit, and giving the materials away is an easier way to get my text adopted at other schools. I wouldn't want to assume the risk of printing copies. I suspect that I could make a good profit selling electronic copies at a fair price. Printing a large quantity of books carries the risk that those books won't sell, leaving the publisher with the losses from unsold inventory. With ebooks, there is no such risk, and the only loss if my text doesn't sell as many copies as I hoped is that I earn less money for my time. I can negotiate to pay a copy editor to review my text. I don't see a place for the more traditional publishers.
I haven't done it yet due to other commitments, but it's something I'm seriously considering working on after the semester ends. I definitely think there's a place for a high quality etextbook at a fair price. I wouldn't give it away, because I need to make a profit and pay my bills. But I think I can make a good profit while undercutting the traditional publishers.
I welcome the existence of free-of-charge textbooks. But it seems to me that much of what is available on various textbook repositories does not meet the "open source" definition. For example, it is common for textbooks to have a copyright licence that does not grant people the right to use a book commercially. That is against the open-source definition. Likewise, it is common for the textbooks to be provided only in a read-only format, such as PDF or as HTML that can be browsed on a website. It is very rare to be able to download the "source" of the book, for example, as a LaTeX, Word or Libre Office document. Thus, even if the copyright license allows people to modify a book, the lack of source code makes this infeasible.
The problem is not availability of economical textbooks. It's publishers paying off administrators. Our local community college uses nearly 100% Pearson textbooks. Many of them are custom printed in binders specifically for that school and are required. Supposedly they are custom designed for the requirements of that school. But there is nothing unique about them and in fact they are practically identical to other community college textbooks except for numbering and questions/problems. They cost around $200, and they change every year so students can't buy&sell or borrow. I would love to meet the the asshat responsible.
COE
Easy student loans drive this. Administrators feel free to increase spending because they feel free to increase costs because lenders feel free to lend because there is low risk to student loans due to the lack of a default mechanism.
Politically, I think they appease Democratic state legislatures by increasing aid and scholarships to protected class students, knowing that these costs can be shifted to students who pay with loans, as the loan amounts can go up easily. The added spending by Universities is spun as "education spending" which is generally approved of.
Republicans, who are generally against increased spending, appear to be asleep at the switch, but probably they're too busy fighting ideological battels to care or are getting different signals from their political constituencies in the construction industry who benefit from University capital spending. Plus I'm sure there is heavy lobbying by the financial services industry who benefit from student lending, reminding legislators that this is "free" spending that doesn't come from tax revenue, so it doesn't count.
Open source textbooks, reference material, and study guides are plentiful. Used textbooks are cheap. Amazon has a great service providing them.
Colleges and Universities frequently require the use of online, "digital learning systems", like Cengage. Access to that site, where the homework is, requires a subscription code that can be hundreds of dollars. A textbook without the "online access code" is a doorstop.
If schools are serious about this, they need to start pushing the use of Moodle instead of Blackboard, and providing high quality open source content including lesson plans, homework, and textbooks.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
You nailed it.
If you really want to solve the textbook crisis, solve the debt crisis in education and allow discharge of student debt in bankruptcy at the same time as you investigate the publishers for any type of RICO or antitrust activity.
Neither of these solutions work. If you can discharge a student loan through bankruptcy then no lender will offer them without a guarantee from the government and that will be really expensive. So if you go this way why not just have the government cover the tuition costs with grants which it recoups by charging a higher tax rate on higher incomes? It worked this way in the UK for decades before the government got stupid and massively increased enrolment beyond what society needed and taxes could support.
As for text book publishers they are not guilty of breaking any laws they are just exploiting an unusual economic model where the person choosing is not the person paying: their customers are professors, not students, but the students are the ones footing the bill. The solution is for professors to write their own texts and use either the open source model or the cheap, online publishing model. I've done this myself for a first year physics coursee - students can get the PDFs for free on the course website or they can get a hard copy from CreateSpace for US$4.74(with code)+postage which is about a quarter of the price the university bookstore would charge for it as a coursepack. About ~10% get hard copies and the rest just use the free PDFs - which without the annoying DRM/apps of publisher etextbooks are very widely adopted.
Great idea but there is an issue for many states. One of the stated benefits is
"... faculty have gained the ability to adapt and customize their instructional materials to ensure they are aligned with their pedagogical methods to best meet their students' needs,"
But that is opposing the common core curriculum methodology which specifies not only what to teach but how to teach it. In many cases it does not matter if a student gets the correct answer if they do not do it the CC way; which is sometime insane. It drives my kids' teachers nuts that they are not supposed to teach to each student's best way to learn.
There's one simple scenario that prevents this from happening: 1. Go to expensive college.
2. Graduate.
3. File for bankruptcy immediately.
4. Profit.
Most college students have no assets and poor credit. There is no downside to filing for bankruptcy. An established adult with a house and a car are a different story. Creditors can go after that persons house, car, retirement savings, etc.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".