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States Are Moving To Cut College Costs By Introducing Open-Source Textbooks (qz.com)
In an effort to curb the rising cost of textbooks, which went up by 88% between 2006 and 2016, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Maryland and New York have announced initiatives that adopt open-source, copyright-free textbooks. The initiatives will reward colleges who adapt or scale the use of OER (open educational resources) -- "materials like electronic textbooks that typically use licenses that are far less restrictive than traditional, copyrighted textbooks," reports Quartz. From the report: The University System of Maryland recently announced that it would be giving out 21 "mini-grants" to seven community colleges and five public four-year schools. The grants will go to "faculty who are adopting, adapting or scaling the use of OER [open educational resources] in Fall 2017 through high-enrollment courses where quality OER exists," according to the announcement. Although the mini-grants are only $500 to $2,500 each, the effort in Maryland is expected to save 8,000 students up to $1.3 million in the Fall 2017 semester alone. That's a significant amount, but just a drop in the bucket of what students in the state spend on textbooks each year. Another big investment in open educational resources came in the budget passed in New York state last week. The news was somewhat buried by the fact that the budget includes free tuition for New York students whose families make up to $125,000 a year, but the state will also be putting $8 million into open source materials over the next fiscal year.
Those stupid one use only keys should go first, IMO. Open materials are fine and all, but that will take a long time to develop. I think it would be much more effective to ban courses from requiring textbooks that have no resale value, and to prefer books that come in an international edition, with resources to help students acquire the international editions while ensuring that it's the right book for the course.
... that open source documentation is always of the highest quality. This will end well.
Duping stories. As soon as they can work in a way to connect everything to Elon Musk, the circle will be completed.
In my experience there were two really annoying "features" that, if eliminated, would slack textbook costs:
- incremental revisions: publishers put out regular "revisions" that really don't do much except shuffle some things around and *stop you reselling your text to next year's class*.
- over-the-top binding: physics was the worst offender for this in my experience. The only version of certain "classic" texts (Jackson's Electrodynamics springs to mind) you could get your hands on at any of the local bookshops would be the leather-bound edition with the shiny gold lettering, inbuilt cloth bookmark and (judging by the price) the ability to travel through space and time, cure cancer and end world freakin' hunger. I don't know, this might not be such an issue now we have Amazon et al, but back in the 90s the combined cost of your physics tomes could easily wipe out your food budget for a few months (unless you were willing to camp out in the photocopy room at the library for a day... not that we ever did such things).
Oh good. Surely this will help reduce the times we have to keep writing the same thing over and over.
Back in the late 70s and early 80s, we typically paid around $10/ gen ed books, except for science/engineering (which were always changing), and IIRC, the most expensive one was $40.
Then in early 90s went back for another degree, and noticed that upper end had moved to around $100/science.
So, what are these now? It almost sounds like these are $500-1000 for a single text book? But that would be insane.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Open-source textbooks are fine and I hope for the best for this format. As long as you don't take a course from a professor that authored a book that is required for your class. I went through college 25 years ago and had to work an ass-ton of extra hours to pay for my limited-use author-only (read a book you had to buy and study if you wanted to pass the class). The best thing I remember in the last 15 years beyond graduation.. was an effort to produce a highlighter pen that faded in 1 year.. so you could sell that expen$ive textbook you'll never use again to another student.. thus you shared the book load. They didn't have this back in the 1990's.
http://gizmodo.com/5889717/fading-highlighter-makes-textbooks-easier-to-sell
Peace out.
There are said to be countries around where education is practically free...
To go into serious dept for education benefits whom?
This topic is so old ...
Most graduate students get at least some amount of grand money from state and or federal as well as from the university itself. Mostly they tend to serve as TA's if not teaching the classes themselves. So make contribution to a open source books mandatory. Make them write and revise the very textbooks their university uses. They do at least partially teach/tutor other students so they are relatively well informed as to how to improve the material as far as how the class is taught.
Also by using open source books the classes could opt to use more textbooks in their classes. For instance one textbook might explain something better to one student than another.
Also wouldn't the money the state spends on k-12 textbooks be better spent on grad students to write the books?
"I've switched to publishing my books under the GPL."
"Oh, they're free?"
"No, the FSF says I can charge as much as I wish. Free as in speech, not beer."
"But at least you include the source?"
"Of course! Each copy includes its own text. It's tucked between the covers."
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Hey guys, I'm just here begging the question. Does that excite you? I don't know what question it begs, but it begs it none the less.
We use open source physics textbooks where I attend and it actually works out pretty well. The books are pretty well-written. The PDF versions are free, the dead-tree edition is like $100. The one-time key for the online assignments is like $40. At the end of the day, other than tuition I only had to spend $40. Pretty awesome idea if you ask me.... the rest of my classes require books ranging from $120 to $400.
The college book publishing racket has to end.
The additional amusement watching retarded millennial kids who never learned to use a real computer and are too cheap to buy a tablet trying to use the eBook version as well as complete assignments on their phones is priceless as well. I've seen people trying to write papers on phones recently. They'd rather fumble with a $600 phone than spend $100 on a used laptop. Boggles the mind.
What matters the most here is if the multiple universities begin to cooperate in their creation of textbooks. If they decide "I can't work with them" or "We should have our own!" then you are going to see the effort quickly stagnate because the effort required to make and revise these books is no small thing and each university will not have the expertise needed to create the books for every subject in the depth that is expected.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Wow you people are very luck. I live in India http://www.lyricsfundoo.in/
Sure, textbooks are expensive. But how much are kids paying for textbooks each year versus how much tuition they're paying into the state's coffers annually?
If the states really want to lower the costs of college... they should drop tuition costs instead of raising them 20-30% every year or two.
#DeleteChrome
But it would be even better if these measures actually lowered how much students will have to pay for said textbooks.
The problem right now is the entity selecting the textbook (the school/professor) is not the entity paying for the textbook (the student). Since the schools aren't the ones paying for the textbooks, they don't give a damn how much they cost.
Just pass a law requiring schools include the textbook(s) in the price of taking the course (included with tuition). Do that and you'll see schools tripping over themselves to cut textbook costs in every and any way possible.
... 100k of free student aid and to have to work 2 jobs for the next 20 years to pay it off.
You have a very strange idea of what free means.
Tuition costs are publicized. It's very easy to hit Google or any number of dead tree sources and get tuition comparisons. What's harder to find are all the add-ons that comprise almost half the cost.
Ps: my school does include books and other materials in the tuition cost. I spend maybe $50- $100 every other semester to get a supplementary source that I choose on my own. For example, the final exam for my networking class was the Cisco CCNA exam, so in addtion to the book and video series provided by the school, I went down to Half Price Books and spent $15 or so on a different kind of CCNA book.
An alternative to those student loans is something like Western Governors University. Founded by the governors of 19 states, WGU is an online university that charges $6,000/year. There's a $1,500 tax credit, so the cost if $4,500 / year. The student doesn't even have to pay that nuch, though. Employers can provide pre-tax tuition assistance up to about $5,500 / year, so many employers do offer a couple thousand dollars. There's one other thing that makes WGU even easier to afford:
Many WGU courses have the final exam be an industry-standard certification exam. For example, for my networking class the final exam was the Cisco CCNA exam. Other course final exams include Microsoft and CompTIA certifications. What that means is that halfway through school I had already earned a few certifications, which helped lead to a much higher-paying job. In the three years I've been at WGU, I've paid them $18,000, got $4,500 in tax credits, and been paid $60,000 more salary than when I started. So rather than graduating with debt, I'll graduate with a lot more money than when I started school.
There's one last trick for WGU to cost the cost even further. Like most schools, you can transfer in credits. Well for the networking course that has Cisco CNNA as the exam, you can transfer in an existing CCNA certification. So what you can do is spend a year studying and maybe getting some of the certs before you even enroll and start paying. Then when you enroll (and start paying $6K/year), you immediately start out with a year of credits already done, through your existing certs. Even better is to study and *not* get the cert. The first month after you enroll in WGU, you go get the cert and THEY pay for it. That can save up to $1,000, because some of the certs are expensive.
All in all, in your first year at WGU you can get two years of credits at a net cost of $4,500. Not bad. Even better if your enployer covers half of that $4,500, as mine did.
yep sounds like he's mistaking a grant and a loan.
The quality of US graduates will decline even further...
I just enrolled at WGU. Its far better than my original expectations. I only heard about it a few months ago. I'm surprised more people aren't aware of it.
established textbook publishing monopolies that feel they are entitled to live richly off the backs of broke college students.
Are they in an open format that you get to keep a permanent copy of if you wish? Or, ff you decide not to keep them, can you sell them to someone else?
yep sounds like he's mistaking a grant and a loan.
Doesn't invalidate the gist of OP's post, however.
Forcing by law that all student loans to be of the government-guaranteed type means universities and colleges are free to raise their prices because the taxpayer's pockets are deep and the government doesn't effectively cap loan guarantees in such a way as to discourage educational price-gouging by the schools. This naturally translates to increases in associated costs, like textbooks in this case.
Heck they *want* a lot of heavily-indebted students because; "Want to get your government-guaranteed student debt discharged? Just come to work as $GOV/MIL/LEOJOB for $YEARS. Serve your community and your nation while becoming debt-free! Fast tracks to becoming student-debt-free available to those with security/crowd-control/corrections skills and experience."
The government gets people even less-free to object/quit than Silicon Valley H1B workers as the government might deport an H1B worker, but defaulting on a loan-repayment agreement with the IRS for your student loan debt could easily land you in jail, maybe even killed if they send a SWAT team to serve the warrant (already happened, the SWAT team for student loan default, not the 'killed' part, although it easily could have ended tragically).
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
hahaha. State committee stuff tends to stink. Reminds of the 'Common Core' stuff, which most of the states supported, and funded, and produced lousy materials.
It just says it will be investing '$8 million to provide open educational resources, including electronic-books, to students at SUNY and CUNY.' So if you are a student you will have access to these texts but that isn't the same as a source published book that anyone can read. It is also possible that once this money runs out these books will no longer be 'open'.
(unless you were willing to camp out in the photocopy room at the library for a day... not that we ever did such things).
Fun fact: here (CH) the license that the university library has for books and journal actually includes a right for duplication (so student can copy a couple of page if that's all what is needed instead of buying the whole book / journal issue), and makes sure to provide enough exemplars of the book (for critical books required by lectures) that aren't allowed to be loaned (so there's always at least a few books free in the morning when you arrive).
In the 2000s part of my side-job of helping staff even consisted of preparing PDF scans of the small parts of books / journal, so students could quickly print them out, instead of having the chase down every needed small excerpt out of 20 different books / journals.
But yeah, on our side of the pond we haven't designed universities from the ground up as student dept generators.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I think Germany does something like this.
Most of european continent is doing it like this : CH is another example.
So that admission is based on ability
That's the only slightly controversial subject.
- In some countries you need to take a special admission exam, meaning that (richer) students that can afford to spend some time and money on preparatory class are at an advantage compared to (poorer) students that can only afford to directly go to the exam right after school.
(Though there it's not a separate test, but a special test at the end of high-school, France is a well-known offender. Parts of CH have also switched to such a system)
- Also some of these admission test are completely asinine and relevant to the studies (Swiss admission tests for medicine in the few uni that introduced them looks more like an IQ test than an actual test of knowledge and ability that will be useful for study).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Textbooks are expensive, and should definitely be dealt with, if we want our country's future generations to be able to achieve higher education, but the real killer is tuition. While I was an in-state student, I saw my tuition quadruple from when I started in 1997, to when I finished my second degree in 2003. I did not receive 4x the education value for that additional price, nor were the facilities significantly upgraded. I never really knew why my tuition kept going up and up, until I read this article. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/0...
Shouldn't colleges develop and own their own text books as a regular part of offering a class or curriculum? That should be the value you receive from higher education, not having a TA read a mass market book to you for two hours a week.
A) soldiers pay into the GI Bill before they get a red cent ... $100/mo for the first year in the military.
B) they get 4 years of coverage, no more. That motivates greatly.
C) they only get the GI Bill if they don't get kicked out dishonorably.
This causes a couple of very important things you neglect. I it requires the beneficiaries to have a stake in their education and it causes them to have a strong motivation to complete the degree. It also ensures that the people usingiitmhave demonstrated maturity.
Similarly, the German system isn't for everyone. If you don't test into university p, you don't get "free education". You go to what we'd call a community college or trade school. That's very different than the American model where everyone should go to college, and the academics and high schools scorn the skilled trades.
Most math textbooks, for example. Calculus, Linear Algebra, Differential Equations. I've got brand new texts on these topics alongside 40 year old texts and there's virtually no difference in the content, save for some topics about technology (e.g., slide-rules vs. software).
And no one should ever have to buy texts that are in the public domain. Why the hell are philosophy students buying Hume and Descartes?
This was a NO BRAINER. The only reason this wasn't initiated ages ago was due to all the backroom deals.
Article from 2011 The Four Companies That Control the 147 Companies That Own Everything
- McGraw-Hill (owns Standard & Poor's)
- Northwestern Mutual (owns Russell Investments)
- CME Group (owns 90% of Dow Jones Indexes)
- Barclay's (owns Lehman Aggregate Bond Index)
Does that first one sound familiar? Also, Pearson Education is pretty big, too.
TFA says "copyright free".
That's wrong. The materials will not be free of copyright. The authors that create the materials will have a copyright. Just like all authors of open source code have a copyright in that code. What makes open source open is that those authors choose to license their copyright rights to anyone under terms that effectively make it open for all to run, use, copy, study, modify and distribute the code. Similarly, these open course materials authors would have to license their work under terms that grant similar levels of freedom.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Since the recurring gripe regarding the cost of textbooks seems to center around the fact that a "new" version is required every fucking semester, which artificially inflates the textbook costs, I propose a rather simple solution. Institutions are not allowed to enforce a new textbook requirement unless the actual curriculum changes by a significant amount.
In other words, still teaching the exact same shit you were teaching 10 years ago in that English course? Then the exact same 10-year old textbook should work just fine. Used books are a hell of a lot cheaper, and cycling them through many students would maximize recycling efforts instead of killing trees for greeds sake.
Since you just started there, it might be be helpful to know that the credit hours at WGU don't always track very consistently with the amount of time you'll need to put in. Of course it depends on your previous experience with each topic, but also some 6-credit classes are much harder than other 6-credit classes. If you whip through one 6-credit class, don't assume you can complete your next class just as quickly. (On the the other hand, if your first few classes are hard, the next ones may be easier.)
Most of the video series have a download link. Two of my classes have used CBT Nuggets, if you're familiar with that company.
Most of the books are Vitalsource Bookshelf, which gives you access via your computer, phone, and tablet. That seems to be permanent access. You download the book to your phone and open it in the app. I would guess that you could also save them just like any other web page (at least the browser-based version), but I haven't tried. I don't think you can't sell them, but then again you didn't exactly buy them. I'm happy with having them permanently on my phone.
If the states are serious about this, they should pay good salaries to teams of professors, editors, graphic designers, etc... to create high quality material that they then provide by open access. The current open access textbooks available in my field (neuroscience & psychology) are horrible. This would save the students significant money, but would cost the states more. Otherwise, this is just a combination of talk and trying to get people to do work for free.
And this can't be a one-time deal. In my field anyway (neuroscience & psychology) there is a legitimate need for revisions every few years as the science is progressing quickly.
For middle and high school students, the cost of one textbook can cover about an entire class worth of reading material to be print and bound. The era of keeping and reusing hardcover textbooks year after year is pretty much over, and the kids get to keep their text after they are done with the class. After all, this makes perfect sense, as why would you teach them and then expect that the learning materials be returned? Better that they can keep it for use as a reference as they go forward in school.
These are very well understood fields. It's trivial to right text books for them. Don't waste time trying to fix a broken system. You'll get mired down in lawsuits. Nothing will get done. Nothing will change. We tolerated the corrupt textbook market because most students didn't pay for them. They got grants to do that. We cut all that funding and now they have to pay (My Kid's books are around $1000 a year for a bloody undergrad). Now we're on the hook. Kill the old system. Letting textbook companies skim was fine when it was just one more form of American Socialism to spread wealth around. That time is done. Kill the textbook companies. Kill them with fire.
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If the states are serious about this, they should pay good salaries to teams of professors, editors, graphic designers, etc... to create high quality material that they then provide by open access.
Some sort of funded process would certainly be helpful to kick-start things.
One approach to get started would be to acquire an existing text as a starting point for the open source text, perhaps getting bids from authors and/or publishers (depending on who holds the copyright) in some sort of blind auction. Ideally, things would be arranged so that people would have a strong incentive to participate - set up things so that folks know that they won't be able to make much profit on textbooks for a particular field after a certain date, maybe five or ten years out. Perhaps a fallback contract of some sort?
The initial text wouldn't even have to be a current text for many course, especially initial courses. If you look at the table of contents for many texts, they aren't all that different from current topics.
Then, once you have the existing text, the publish-or-perish system could be modified to allow substantial credit for publication of updated chapters or even smaller elements, all open source, with some sort of peer review, which would ensure things stayed up-to-date. You might have a competitive review system, where everybody that submits something that passes peer review gets some credit, but the best submission gets the most.
There might also be some system of providing small rewards to people who find errors in the accumulative work - with the revision authors getting the money if there are no errors.
Those who chose not to participate in the auction would still be able to publish commercial alternatives to the open source textbook - but since they would have a much smaller market there would be far less incentive to do so.
The beauty of this approach is it doesn't require changing copyright law. Admittedly, US copyright law violates the Bill of Rights in many respects (such as a bunch of rights "retained by the people" under the 9th Amendment, a point that has been made on this forum in prior discussions), but that would be very hard to change because of the deeply entrenched special interest groups that would oppose such change (and which donate substantial campaign contributions to the politicians who select judges). Fixing the textbook problem without also fixing a corrupt and unethical legal system is probably the most we can hope for until the public actually wises about how things really work.