Re:DRM Broke Its Promise
by yummypaint on Friday September 06, 2019 @02:10PM
(#20898129)
My experience as a past student and ta has been that courses with TAs have less dependence on the book, and problem sets are more likely written by the professor. A TA saves a prof vastly more work than using a book with canned problems, and the cost of writing problems is amortized in large classes. Smaller classes without TAs (which should ostensibly have better instruction) tend to fall into the textbook trap more often.
Professors either have to grade themselves OR assign a publisher's book, with a one time code, at no cost to them/their department where the publisher will grade for them. All for free from the professor's perspective.
In both cases the professor is likely using the publisher's resource to assign homework, because that's one way publishers encourage expensive book requirements: Allow professors to offload their work to the publisher.
There's 101 classes where the professor only turns up to teach. That's it. No homework creation, no grading, and they just have a TA take the publisher's grade report and import it into their student system.