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A comment on States are moving to cut college costs by introducing open-source textbooks. Parent comment

Re:States are moving to cut college costs by introducing ope... by molsongolden on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @12:13PM (#14194907)
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.

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Re:States are moving to cut college costs by introducing ope... by logfromblammo on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @12:26PM (#14195082)
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.

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