Re:States are moving to cut college costs by introducing ope...
by Theodores on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @04:10PM
(#14197522)
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.
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.