https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/11/07/inclusive-acc...
More recently I was required to purchase an ebook that included online tests and homework hosted by the publisher. There is no 3rd party marketplace for that content. There is no way to get a refund if you do not use it. Publishers are allowing professors to outsource basically all of their lesson planning and content development responsibilities and pass the cost off to students. To add insult to injury, that product is setup to allow each institution to be the sole distributor of the license to their students and charge an additional markup to mail you a physical card containing the product activation code and offer no digital delivery option.
I’m going back to school.
My networking course recently changed from CCNA to CompTIA network plus content.
I complained that I pay tuition and my coursework labs and tests for over 85% of the marks, are all done via CompTIAs cloud service. And this costs over $200.
On top of this, CompTIA charges the school thousands of dollars a year for the right to teach their content.
So I quit. If I wanted my network + cert, I’d self study and take the tests myself.
The cost of certifications that you earn along the way are included in the $3920.
Here's a page about their IT degrees from WGU Washington [2].
As an example of the certifications included, here is what they bachelor's degree in network operations and security includes: CompTIA A+, CompTIA Network+, CompTIA Security+, CompTIA Project+, CompTIA IT Operations Specialist, CompTIA Secure Infrastructure Specialist, Axelos ITIL®1 Foundation, LPI Linux Essentials, Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA), Amazon AWS SysOps Administration-Associate, and Amazon AWS Cloud Practitioner.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Governors_University
[2] https://www.wgu.edu/online-it-degrees/it-certifications.html
Think long and hard about doing an online degree, and what you think it’ll do for you.
Wow, did the school just decide that they didn't want anyone taking the networking course?
I don't really get why this is even a hard thing, surely there is some wordpress/whatever "quiz" plugin that the teachers can use to copy/paste multiple choice question/answers in and the school can pay the minimal fees to host for all their classes.
Textbooks were a scam 25 years ago when I went to school, but many of them were sub $40 or so, and could be picked up for ~$20 used. A few of the science engineering texts were closer to $100 but it was rare to spend more than ~$200 a semester on books.
Frankly, students can organize for all kinds of social issues, I'm shocked they can't organize to force the school to assure that prof's aren't playing into the textbook scams that seem common now. A bit of student fee to host a couple year old quiz server, and download PDF copies of class notes/etc seems like it should be doable. Particularly considering all the schools which have been providing online courseware for 20+ years now, frequently complete with free textbooks/lecture notes/etc.
Course notes are typically posted by the prof if they want on services like Blackboard or Brightspace or Moodle. My university student union had a random PC with an old exam bank.
At one class at my university (an early chem class) the author of the book was also the professor of the course. And each year it was a new version which didn't do a whole lot more than fix some typos, introduce some new ones to be fixed next year, and change (probably automatically through software) the problem sets.
Then you'd be forced to buy new copies at full price from the campus book store. And at the end they'd then buy them back for you for a few dimes on the dollar so long as they were in "like-new" condition. And while I don't know what they did with them then I expect at that point they were sold to other universities at a discount for them to start the racket all over again with a set of now "like-new" text books.
Really nobody has any motivation whatsoever to change the system besides the student. Though even there most students seemed frustrated but simultaneously pretty apathetic. Everybody of course realized it was a racket, but didn't really care to make too much of a fuss over it since endless loans and the like all make it feel somehow like the money involved is not really real. And, after all, in a decade or two we'd all be millionaires.
This is not completely true. I have long avoided using any textbooks the students have to pay to access. The only exception currently is my intermediate macroeconomics class. I have not found a suitable no-cost supplement that covers all the topics of the class. My motivation is that it's easier to teach a class if you can offload certain topics to a reference, and you can't do that unless everyone has access to said reference.
Beyond all that, universities have an incentive to reduce cost as much as possible. Whether university administrators ignore that incentive is left for the reader to determine.
My employer offers small grants to support the creation of open teaching materials: https://lib.k-state.edu/services-support/scholarly-communica...
The cherry on top, was that his book was chock full of errors. We were constantly receiving emails from the professor letting us know which problems HE HAD ASSIGNED had errors and which numbers to change in his own book, etc. How this is allowed to happen is beyond me and was beyond frustrating for all of us as students.
Worst experience I ever had with a teacher and textbooks.
This wasn't even advanced linear algebra, just the basics. You could literally assign/use any book published in the last 20-30 years and nothing would change about our learning experience. Math doesn't fucking change so often that a new book is needed every 6 months and everybody knows it.
I came to the comments to make this point. I had several professors with massive egos that made you buy their crappy book for their class. I remember on at least a couple of occasions the book wasn't even used!
At the other end of the spectrum, we had professors which used regular tech books for the textbooks and supplemented with lectures as appropriate. I much preferred this approach.
Frankly, the entire US higher education system is a racket and is long overdue for disruption.
These were mostly electrical engineering (and a few software eng) courses, dunno if that has anything to do with it.
Perhaps he was forcing you to buy brand new so that he didn't overpay the royalties back (i.e. they may have had a simple formula based on the number of students, regardless of whether you bought or not).
So, my mom is in grad school, and in the second quarter of a class, and the professor announces, "I'm sorry, but there's a new version of the textbook, so you'll need to buy it," and my mom, without thinking at all, muttered, "BASTARDS!"
Everyone turned in shock to stare at my mom.
Checking the situation now, some are even available online, eg:
http://antena.fe.uni-lj.si/literatura/ed.pdf
Some are even unchanged from my times: https://www.fe.uni-lj.si/mma/Osnove_elektromagnetike_2016-02... (1999)
Basically, noone really cares.
"The reason was that the books were so lousy. They were false. They were hurried. They would try to be rigorous, but they would use examples (like automobiles in the street for "sets") which were almost OK, but in which there were always some subtleties. The definitions weren't accurate. Everything was a little bit ambiguous – they weren't smart enough to understand what was meant by "rigor." They were faking it. They were teaching something they didn't understand, and which was, in fact, useless, at that time, for the child."
So it's the schools that are in on it and the primary target to put blame on. My university (in eastern EU) had majority of textbooks available for free. We could print them ourselves, have them printed at school, or just buy used. I'm sure it wasn't the case for all curriculums, but probably for many. Writing textbooks is one of the things teachers (professors) do after all.
Huge props to them and I hope more do this, but we also need to recognise that most OER today serves the basic classes that more people will take.
Its when you get into the higher level, more specific courses where OER is currently under-serving. OER for most of these courses just plain don't exist, I hope someone figures out a way to serve these student and instructors in the near future.
Bad news: they are pushing hard for ebooks that are drm'ed to hell so you can't resell them. And if they do still have paper books, increasingly they are moving to "loose leaf" editions which are "cheaper" because they are just loose pages which means they are much more likely get damaged so you can't resell those either. Or if they do offer actual books, they do "rentals" which means you pay most of the price but have to return them and so you have zero chance of being able to resell them.
But that's ok, I'm sure your local bookstore can help you. Oh wait, most college bookstores are now owned by Barnes and Noble and so they are just another corporate business...
My college has used the government covid money to pay for all students' textbooks and we hope to be able to include textbooks in tuition price from now on but they are ebooks only.
At my university, students who didn't buy the book would simply make photocopies from the library's copy or from a friend's. But then the photocopiers were modified so that they only operated using credits from "copy card" that was tied to the student ID.
I never knew anyone who got into trouble, but heard that you'd be called in if you were making "too many" copies.
edit: an extra word
That way we didn't have to lug our books back and forth to school and could just use the shared books in the classroom and our own books at home.
It seemed to serve us well and not stunt our growth!
Education in the US absolutely has issues, including the textbook pricing racket shown in this very thread. But at the same time, there's no question that the US has some absolutely fantastic universities and that the quality of education you can receive here is very high. I say "can receive" because obviously not all universities are equal, or even all programs within a given university. Still, all of those people flock here for grad school for a reason.
Note that I'm mainly talking about post-secondary education. Primary and secondary education in the US has a very tremendous degree of variance from state to state and is generally not seen as being in the upper echelon internationally.
I mean almost every class is available to be audited online for free. Most professors are average when it comes to teaching ability. There is no reason a foreign school can not mirror any program or class in the US.
Of course, the value of the credential is a totally different story. We are really talking about the education equivalent of Louis Vuitton bags and not the general function of a bag.
When I was more up on issues in education years ago, I read that people come here for an education because they can. In their country, there may be barriers to education that we don't have.
If you are an adult who wants an education and can pay for it, the US will let you pursue it. That isn't always true in other countries.
So the exact page layout of the text books doesn't matter, and you can use any edition.
In general text books just seem to be less of a big deal in the UK. I remember reading all the classic text books, but the course didn't revolve around them. You could often pick which text books to read out of a selection.
And you just get them from the library.
There are so many good textbooks for Algebra, Analysis, Topology and the most commonly taught ones are (Dummit&Foote, Rudin, Munkres) are nothing like what you describe.
i mean after that, and when everybody looks on the project, that would be done? and at least that works for the entry level courses? why does nobody do that?
I think high prices for textbooks are fair (although compared to the field Pearson et al seem to have extortionate prices), they contain high-value knowledge. I think it's more ridiculous that universities don't provide students with textbook copies, given the incredible cost of degrees.