I taught a calculus class the the department had mandated be managed with MyMathLab. There is a kernel of a good idea in these subject-specific course content management systems, key among them is they give a reasonable way to actually manage homework for large course sections. I tended to grade HW very lightly, I just want them to have their head in the space a small bit every few days, and MML was a way to make that manageable for a section of 70+ students without losing my mind.

But the execution is so half-assed that it not only turns off students from the platform, but it runs the risk of turning them off to the actual subject matter as well. The whole thing had the stench of static requirements doc to a sub-contractor to a sub-contractor development pipeline with little to no end-user (that is, students, not department administrators) feedback in the development cycle.

It's a bit like self-driving cars in a way. The execution is everything, and the half-way hybridized situation is the most dangerous for the end-user. And the missed execution to me smells a bit like an arms race between Pearson, Wiley, etc. to get their platforms out and entrenched with individual departments before each other.

My abstract algebra course is using a system called mathweb currently, it works reasonably well.

I just graduated from a very large university and the number of professors assigning homework this way was alarming. With prerecorded video lectures, assigning homework like this, and using questions from test banks for tests, professors are getting paid to do next to nothing.

> professors are getting paid to do next to nothing

Speaking from the part-time professors perspective: occurring in parallel to this is a steady growth in course section sizes. 30 students used to be the norm for some courses, but 80-90 is the new normal just a few years later. Some of these tools are designed to help manage this. But the actual process of planning and delivering a lecture, providing individual feedback on written assignments (like exams), etc. is suffering.

Teaching effectively to a large section is harder than you might think, especially when teaching is only a fraction of your job & you have no TAs. But half-assing it is actually not too hard I guess. And you are seldom rewarded for the former. Thankfully for me and for my students, it is mostly a side hobby for me and not a living.

I know let's hire more administrators!

That seems to be the plan, instead of hiring more professors they grow class sizes, cut corners, and hire more admin.

Which is really the deans and provost growing a power base that is dependent on them. They do not want to be dependant on a large group of influential professors. Better to foster a workforce of neutered adjuncts overseen by administrators who are not technically competent, and so design administrative regimes that avoid addressing issues of technical competence at all. The IRB is a prime example of this: people with a high school education provide administrative oversight of researchers working at the outer limits of human knowledge. It's insanity.

Are you saying that you think IRBs are a waste by design, or that the way IRBs are typically implemented makes them so as a side effect?

Engineering here had 200+ student enrolled on each class years ago, all managed by early 199x tools. It's doable and still delivered on education quality.

"you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library" - Will Hunting

>> professors are getting paid to do next to nothing

That's not true. They're getting paid to publish research in third-party journals you have to pay to read.

>I just graduated from a very large university

Likely that was the mistake. I've been to both a small and a large university. If you care about education, go to the small one. Much more likely the professors will put in a lot of effort to teach properly. Fewer students per class also motivates them.

To be fair, temporary adjuncts are being paid next to nothing.

The full professors don't have any such excuse, though.

The full professors at many large universities have to split their time between research and teaching. Both of which can be full-time jobs on their own. The consequence is that many great researchers are mediocre teachers (or only good for teaching smaller courses in their specialty), and many great teachers abandon the time needed for research (or aren't good researchers) which doesn't bring money and prestige to the school. So they get booted.

You're left with underpaid adjuncts, under qualified TAs, and research professors that don't want to teach another-goddamned-section of Calculus 1 (as one of my profs referred to it).

Not to mention that "research" can be further split into myriad activities that take up substantial amounts of time. Personally, I'd contend that writing grants and writing scientific code could also constitute full-time jobs (this might explain why a lot of scientific code is spaghetti; most researchers have to balance coding with publishing- and coding loses in this battle). Regardless of how many full-time jobs the modern researcher is expected to perform, the end result is the same: lower quality science furnished by 80 hour weeks and emotionally wrecked postdocs.

I think the reason scientific code is spaghetti has more to do with different incentives than time management. you don't need scalable production quality code. you need a minimal working example of something even its a kluge. correct and ugly and novel will win over optimized and pretty and commented and non-novel...

I don't know whether or not the incentives or the time management contribute more towards the messiness, but I will nitpick one implicit assumption you're making here, which is that scientific code is "correct". There has been at least one well-publicized incident where scientific code is both messy and very much incorrect. I also think that, while optimization isn't necessarily something that researchers should focus on, pretty code / documentation / comments / systematic testing are elements that researchers really need to emphasize, because these practices ensure that the likelihood that their simulations / analysis pipelines aren't spewing out nonsense is substantially decreased. Furthermore, these practices would make code reviews a lot easier- it's much harder to make sense of your code when every other variable is named "i", "j" or "k" and this seems to be a common practice in some fields at least.

You know that is a very good point actually. I have talked with some bioinformaticians who have trouble reproducing others work because the dataset was unavailable or the code was not provided.

Personally, all the academic code I've used has been written by EE people or Applied Math people and had nice enough style/documentation/accessibility for me to have minimal issues.

> writing grants

this is the kind of crap that administrators (as a class in society) force on faculty and then use it as justification for "our role is necessary" and "see, they couldn't be that busy".

The full professors are there to do research. I can understand the motivation for having professors teach advanced subjects, but having them teach intro classes is just silly. It's worse for both the students and the professor. Teaching and research are completely different skill sets after all.

>The full professors are there to do research.

Contracts vary. In both universities I attended (one mediocre, one in the top 5), in most departments, professor salaries were purely for education (9 month salary - get paid extra if they teach in summer), even though all the expectations for tenure, etc are research.

They are expected to do research, but the funds for that come from grants, not from their salaries.

So the contract was: Their salary was a 9 month salary, and they get to pay themselves the extra 3 months by getting grants for research. This is why many professors will say they can supplement their income by "up to a third" of their salary via grants. Which, BTW, also means that when you look up a public university professor's income (usually accessible to the public), you are seeing their 9 month income, and if they are active researchers, they get paid more.

So no, the university typically does not pay them to do the research. They pay themselves via grants. The university pays them for education, even though they always act as if they don't.

>I can understand the motivation for having professors teach advanced subjects, but having them teach intro classes is just silly. It's worse for both the students and the professor. Teaching and research are completely different skill sets after all.

All fine and well as long as the university does not try to attract students for undergrad by highlighting the great research they do, and indirectly imply that they will get an education from the best in the field. If their prospectus merely said "Come join us. You'll get a great education taught by adjuncts and outsourced to other companies", then your point would have more merit.

I graduated from Oregon State in '92. The less-tech predecessor to this process was that they would sell homework packets at Kinko's for $20-30.

I've often wondered whether a legal case could be made against universities for price gouging.

Oregon State '05, they were charging $60 for the Kinko's packets for my various math and engineering classes. The best was the $150 I had to pay for a 'pre-print' loosely bound CS 'textbook' that one of my professors co-authored. Thank goodness it was only a 200 level class and I was already well beyond it. It was a terrible book and a rough class.

Wow, It seems like we already have the technology ready to go to create fast track online programs.

Why don't we just allow Pearson to bypass universities altogether and award degrees for cheaper than the 40,000 current universities cost.

Pearson isn't accredited. ;)

I think that's what GP is suggesting we change.

I hope not. I'd rather rethink the idea of accreditation.

Why? If they are already writing the curriculum,lectures labs/homework and Professors are justing using that material and forcing kids to pay for it.

Why don't we just cut out the extremely expensive middlemen, universities and professors ?

I think his point was that universities that are "teaching" like this shouldn't be accredited

I don't think Pearson has such materials for upper level courses. They could probably figure out a way to be contractors for the courses no on wants to teach though, if they can find a way to work for less than lecturers do.

My best math class was with a professor who did not use a textbook at all. He created ~5-10 problem long homework using a pdf we could easily get from his page on the school's website.

The focus universities have on homework is absurd. If you want to practice 100+ math problems, you can invent them yourself, or even find plenty on the internet. It only takes one or two problems to show that the student understands the subject matter. Any more required homework is a waste of everyone's resources.

At San Jose State we used "Mastering Physics" which we could only purchase a licence to by buying a new unopened textbook. It was an infuriating piece of software that would mark your answers completely wrong unless they were EXACTLY right.

If they aren't exactly right, how can you claim to be a physics master though?

Because "Mastering Physics" doesn't know jack shit about being a "physics master" by any stretch of the imagination.

I... I think it was a joke.

You are a Humor Master!

What would you say about your experience with SJSU engineering in general? It's one of my top 5 schools right now.

The truly savvy professors don't even take the token bribes / hand outs from the publishers. They'll have their own "custom text book" for a class and charge students $X for xeroxed copy of the it. The savviest rotate the problems from semester to semester to ensure zero resale value.

I was in a class where the required book was written by the professor. However, fortunately, the book was really fantastic and better than any other book I have seen. Plus it was like $15.

I think he wrote the book so that students didn't have to spend money on a huge textbook containing information they don't need. This book had everything you needed for the class and not much more.

I had a teacher that did the same thing...almost, he sold us the book after he had taught the class :P

Had a class with a book written by the professor... only available at 60€ at a local shop.

>The savviest rotate the problems from semester to semester to ensure zero resale value.

Not trying to tell you that there aren't some jackasses who do this for extra loot, but one good reason to rotate the problems is to prevent students from showing up with an answer key. ie: When I was in college our IEEE club had a more comprehensive question bank than any single prof at my uni.

Any college worth attending doesn't make homework a condition of your grades. If your class can be beaten by an "answer key" you aren't teaching/testing anything important.

On the flip side, I had a professor who intentionally assigned older versions of textbooks since they were more affordable and the material had not really changed between editions.

Another economics professor produced her own reader/workbook which was provided for the cost of photocopying and binding.

The professors friendliest to student budgets even separated their custom materials into "lecture notes" which contained only instructional material and "exercises" which were generally made up of problems that actually appeared on previous exams, including space to write in. Total cost for this style of "textbook" per course was less than $20, purchased new from the university bookstore. Or you could inherit an older copy of the notes for free and just get a new copy of the exercise portion.

That kind of thing would be a free download today. Can you imagine paying thousands of dollars in tuition for a course, and then getting the entire textbook for free?

Those who do it are truly saints among scoundrels.

My Economics professor famously used to release a new version of his textbook every year at my school. I suppose recognizing the forces at hand, he was making the most rational decision in doing so.

My Biology professor wrote the textbook he used in his class. And on the first day of class he gave each student who had purchased a new copy a cash refund on his author's royalty.

That must've amounted to several tens of cents (per book) on the $200 price tag.

Mine did that as well. He also offered unlimited extra credit at the rate of 5pts per error found.

A small group of us got together that first evening and found enough typos, spelling and punctuation errors that we all passed the class with a high "A" without needing to do anything else.

He wasn't happy about it, and I think he later dropped the "unlimited" part. He was less upset when most of us went to class anyway -- The way I saw it, I paid for the class, even if I didn't have to worry about doing the work for a grade, I still wanted to learn something.

And did he give you a speech about how he was doing you a favor because eliminating the resale market lowered the original price? Mine did.

I'm not sure if my professor was being nice or not as savvy as you describe because the course was taught with a printed out book by him and another professor but all he charged for the entire book (plus homework problems) was 40 bucks USD. This was back in 2006 so I don't know what he's charging now (assuming he's not retired by now). By comparison, the average new book at the university book store was around 80 USD (at the lowest).

Mandatory textbooks that happened to be authored by the professor or department head also had a variant - the collaboration work of different authors writing on some topic together.

At my university there were campuses hundreds of miles away from each other so I imagine the department also had to pay for the travel and other arrangements needed to get these collaborative textbooks written.

One of these textbooks that I had to buy for the usual massive price was one of the collaborative efforts. However, for the purposes of the degree at the campus I was on, only needed the bits written by our head of department were needed for the syllabus, the rest of it was out of scope.

To use a software analogy it was like buying the student version of MS Office when you only needed Word and not the other bits of the bundle. That would mean carrying 43 discs around instead of just the 7 discs around. So you see the problem of carrying a huge textbook up and down a hill every day.

I never understood why the lecturers did not produce, update and polish proper course materials that did not require outside materials except for pure reference. They had expectations on us to do homework but I wasn't seeing the results of theirs.

> It really astounded me that we had to pay a third-party for-profit company to get access to our homework.

Isn't a publisher a third-party for-profit company? If you need to buy a book for a class to read and do homework in order to pass the class, that's okay right? So, why is it wrong to expect someone to do the same thing digitally?

Books can be shared in study groups, lent between students, checked out from a campus library, bought and sold between terms, and photocopied. Much the same could be done for a DRM-free PDF.

The only way to complete MyMathLab homework is to pay out for a poorly-written Flash app.

textbooks don't disappear after one semester

Had that same bullshit last year, in a graduate level Econ class for running market simulations. The professor readily acknowledged this was insane, but the response was basically "this is the way it's been, we always have to buy from this vendor."

> It really astounded me that we had to pay a third-party for-profit company to get access to our homework.

I went to undergrad in the 90s & it was true for me then as well.

Most textbook companies are for-profit, and I needed the texts to complete the assignments.

I wonder what my old college is doing now, when I went the engineering and math departments had banned scantrons and everything was hand graded.

Yay capitalism. Everything is a product or service, everything should have a profit motive, there is no such thing as a right to education, health care, justice, you only get what you can pay for, or are entitled to by the superiority of your family name and blood line. The state has no business here.

That is exactly what this is. Old fashioned conservatism.