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University of Missouri To Use Open Source And Other Cheaper Alternatives For General Education Textbook (columbiatribune.com)
Rudi Keller, writing for Columbia Tribune: The University of Missouri will move quickly to use open source and other cheaper alternatives for general education textbooks, building on initiatives already in place, system President Mun Choi said. At an event with members of the Board of Curators, administrators, lawmakers, faculty from all four campuses and student representatives, Choi said the intent is to save money for students while providing up-to-date materials. Faculty, including graduate assistants, will be eligible for incentive payments of $1,000 to $10,000 for preparing and adopting materials that save students money, Choi said. Textbooks are sometimes overlooked as a contributor to the cost of attending college, Choi said. "We want to provide our students an opportunity to have a low cost, high-quality alternative," Choi said.
they'll try this, i guess. http://www.stltoday.com/news/l...
linux sux
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Physics 101, Chemistry 101, Calculus 101, etc. can basically be taught the same way forever (unless we come up with some dazzling new educational theories that change how to present idea to students). The material is not changing and it may never change at the introductory level. These are prime candidates for an open source or CC textbook that anyone can use. No good reason at all to buy from publishers who roll out a 'new edition' every couple years that basically just corrects errata or (more likely) just refreshes the pictures.
I've always thought that the perfect use for e-books is textbooks, especially since they can be yanked back and/or edited at will; whereas I hate them for that ability and how it's been sometimes abused when it comes to purchased literature (I prefer printed paper books, TYVM) textbooks are often updated, and textbooks are very often only good to the student for one semester, but can cost hundreds of dollars. An e-book version could eliminate all these problems, as well as the massive weight of carrying around a bunch of textbooks; students would just need a laptop (which they'd have anyway) or a tablet computer, or even just an e-book reader. E-book readers are inexpensive, and they could even be rented to students by the college bookstore. The e-book textbooks themselves could also be rented; you'd just pay for access for a given timespan. College bookstores would only really have to keep consumable materials in-stock, and could also be smaller. Win-win for everyone.
This could have an interesting effect in the book and e-book market. Hopefully a good thing. Lots of books that are basically republished but identical material (especially in math), have been a a financial gouge for students.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
They'll get real open source quality people, then.
Look at everything that Miss Mash posts. Do you think that she isn't paid off by half a dozen corporations?
We went quickly from "news" -- however LAME -- to entirely clickbait and FUD articles in the matter of about a year.
It used to be that you could blame the stupidity on kdawson or timothy who really were just dumb but didn't have some overt agenda to stomp on X because Y paid them. The FUD articles were always kdawson's dupe of timothy's or timothy's dupe of kdawson's acceptance of something that neither of them actually bothered reading through.
Miss Mash is paid off.
There are multiple efforts to produce quality open source textbooks. E.g., U.Minnesota's Open Textbook Library and Rice U.'s OpenStax.
Finally, a college who's textbooks don't cost $200 (used) and can be sold back for $50 at the end of the semester!
Several times per year I see these stories that yet another university is switching to some form of "open" textbooks, and readers are left to infer that "open" means "open source" (in this particular case, the OP and the article linked to both explicitly use the term "open source"). Typically, the text books in question are released under a Creative Commons (CC) license, but none of those CC licenses actually meet the requirements of the open-source definition. In particular none of the CC licenses requires that the textbook be made available in an editable format, and several repositories of "open" textbooks seem to provide books only in non-editable formats, such as PDF or online HTML. Aside from the "must provide source code" requirement of the open-source definition, which all of the CC licenses violate, 4 of the 6 licenses also contain "no commercial use allowed" and/or "you are not allowed to modify it" clauses, both of which are also forbidden by the open source software definition.
Don't get me wrong. I am not complaining about people making books available free of charge. All I am complaining about is the misuse of the label "open source" to refer to free-of-charge books that are provided under a CC license, since CC licenses do not classify as being "open source".
Let's just make sure that the open source book is GOOD.
It does not have to be good it just has to be better than the books from the publishers. Many of these are of increasingly poor quality and, for physics, often have major omissions or simplifications to the point of being wrong. One of the worst examples is where a lot of books categorically state that resonance occurs exactly at the natural frequency of vibration for an oscillator and fake plots to show this over a wide range of damping.
Sadly though the open source texts I have seen are even worse. OpenStax makes all the mistakes above plus more e.g. it uses the Tacoma Narrows bridge as an example of resonance (it's actually aeroelastic flutter which is anti-damping) while ignoring London's Millenium footbridge which is an excellent example. It also came out with a series of support videos which were so full of the conceptual errors that you see students make I had to wonder if they were prepared by a struggling student instead of a faculty member.
We could just teach Physics and Calc out of 'Principia'...but the fail rate would skyrocket.
Good luck teaching first-year special relativity out of it, not to mention all the wave-like properties of light like diffraction. Even in a first-year physics course, there is a lot of physics which Newton had no clue about.
I really don't see much reason beyond special interests that schools or parents should be held to ransom by publishers for educational material.
Grew up about 30 miles from Columbia. MU has been a "big bully" for years. Whatever MU wanted, Columbia & Boone County would bend over backwards to get them whatever they wanted. Now, MU, because they pretty much let the leftist teachers & their minions the students, caused so many parents to either pull or say NO to allowing their kids to go to MU, to the tune of freshman enrollment is down upwards of 25%, MU is JUST NOW trying to stay within budget, because the state legislators about 40 miles away have slapped their spoiled brat kid MU, with CUTBACKS. Now all of those student built apartments, that had huge tax breaks are going to go unused, MU is forcing something they never enforced, freshmen must live on campus, to generate more revenue for MU, many buildings have been closed/consolidated. Sorry MU, Columbia/Boone County, you did it to yourselves! I know MANY people have moved out of Boone County to neighboring counties, still working in the Columbia metro area, just to ESCAPE the high property taxes in Boone County.
Everything the government uses or mandates the use of (i.e. tax software, research software such as that used at NASA, textbooks for public universities etc.) should all be open source.
We, the taxpayers, are paying for it. The government works for us, not the other way around.
Why open source? Because if the government mandates the use of a privately owned product then that's crony-ism and should be despised by everyone who loves freedom. For example, if they required the use of Apple products in order to read the law of the country (say if it was in an Apple proprietary format) then how would you feel? NO! It should be open! It must be open. Anything else is tyranny and crony-ism!
Don't try to imply that I meant national security / spy stuff should be open. That's not what I meant and you know it.
With the political shift of Missouri to a Republican slant, while Primary Public Education in Missouri will hit 'full funding' or come close to it in the state, (which triggers other interesting, and positive events to happen,) we have seen Higher Education take a major hit in funding. They've lost $150M across the state. The University of Missouri - Columbia, the 'bright and shining star' of the UM system, has been rocked with scandals that have caused the turnover of high-level potions in the preceding years, which has caused their attendance to plummet.
With such a large loss in their budget from state funding, it's not surprising to see UM looking to not just cut, but slash costs in other areas. While not rocked by scandals, other Public Higher Education institutes are feeling the very same belt-tightening, such as the University of Central Missouri. "It used to be a college where a farm-boy could set a cow or two, and get a good education." That's a direct quote I've heard from more than one alumni, but it's far, far from the case any more.
I suspect that states like Missouri, will struggle for the next few years, with Public Higher Education. It's becoming a necessity for entry-level jobs in our Knowledge Age (opposed to the Industrial Age), where Knowledge Workers have to have stronger skill sets. States and the US will struggle in this area until we figure out it needs to become easier and more reasonable for all High School graduates to be able to attend 4-year and trade schools to make themselves fully ready for the job market.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
How about paying the top STEM course book authors a fee to create a book? I mean as I understand it currently the publisher and middle men take 93% of the revenue from a textbook. So why not pay an author of a leading text in a particular field the amount they would earn plus extra and ask them to author an open source book. I bet if a bunch of universities got together to and formed a foundation to do this (wikimedia?) they could accomplish it. Basically pay people to author wikibooks or freely available textbooks.
If people were really interested in doing something about the cost of tuition, they'd do something about the ballooning number of administrators that are directly paid out of student fees. But University Presidents like Choi aren't really interested in doing that, so they come up with schemes like this.
My offspring's math text book comes in two flavors. The online version and the dead tree version. Last week it was a frantic search to find the dead tree version to turn it in, so we weren't charged. She accesses the online version that has extra features that can't be implemented in dead trees with her school provided chrome book. Which survived numerous drops. My other daughter in 11th grade, never visited her locker more than once during the school year. No need to. Point is, the change over to e-text books has started. Local school districts strapped for cash and parents worried about their kids suffering permanent back injuries from backpacks weighting 1/3 of their weight are driving change. A school district on the Gold Coast of Connecticut has for a number of years created their own math e-texts books, no dead tree version. The teachers create them and all editing and formatting is done off-shore in India. Or at least it was 3 or so years ago, the model may have changed. They may have already licensed out their IP. That would be the next logical step. By the way, school teachers are famously known for sharing their lesson plans, for free. The college text book racket and it may qualify for RICO status, collapsing before my girls get to college. The minor revisions in text and problems that render an expensive text book worthless on the used market is nothing short of theft. Profs having us proof their draft versions of their opus magus is theft of labor and services. No I'm not bitter. But I'm enjoying watching the system collapse and enjoying greatly watching Universities choke on the bile they created.
And all due to those fucking SJW twats that destroyed its reputation and has had to close FOURTEEN residence halls because no one wants to send their kids to a place where the media has to have 'muscle' to be thrown out.
Fuck that school and everyone in it.
Pax Vobiscum