[HN Gopher] Open Textbook Initiative
___________________________________________________________________
Open Textbook Initiative
Author : turingbook
Score : 381 points
Date : 2022-02-09 09:25 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aimath.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (aimath.org)
| dzdt wrote:
| College level textbooks in USA are a total racket. The major
| textbooks come out with a new revision roughly annually, where
| the material is reorganized enough to change section and exercise
| numbers. The purpose is to destroy the used textbook market, as
| assigned reading and homework will not correspond to older
| revisions of the book. Then students are forced to buy new books
| and the publishers can make big profits.
| voxadam wrote:
| I personally believe that public universities in the US should
| be incentivized if not outright required to use and contribute
| to open textbooks when possible.
| jordan_curve wrote:
| In my experience undergraduate math textbooks are not like that
| at all. Perhaps for the introductory calculus sequence, but
| rarely for anything upper-division.
|
| 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.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| Well good news: they don't bring out new versions as often any
| more for most subjects.
|
| 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...
| chrisseaton wrote:
| What I don't get is - do US universities not have libraries
| where you can borrow these text books?
| malauxyeux wrote:
| They might have one or several copies, though maybe not the
| right edition and never enough for an entire cohort of
| students.
|
| 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
| chrisseaton wrote:
| It's weird because they know how many students they have,
| they know the text books needed before the course starts,
| they have a library, seems like the library should
| provide them.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| They will generally have one on reserve that you can only
| check out for something like 4 hours or something.
|
| 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.
| RF_Savage wrote:
| Thats fucked. I only bought two text books (30eur and
| 40eur) for the entire time I was in collage. All else I
| loaned from the school library for free.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Can students no longer pool their money for a loose-leaf
| edition and then take it down a local sketchy copy center?
| nerdponx wrote:
| Even better, download a PDF on Libgen, print it out on the
| school library printer or pool your money for a laser
| printer, and bring it down to a local coffee center for a
| cheap plastic binder.
| dexterdog wrote:
| Even even better, don't print it and just read it on
| screen or get a supernote and put all of your books on
| there where you can mark them up and have them all with
| you all of the time.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I still prefer reading on dead tree material.
| dartharva wrote:
| Ugh. As a non-American I have not heard a positive thing about
| American Education in any kind of media at all. There always
| seem to be a dozen problems with American colleges at all times
| yet so many flock there for higher education (mainly for
| Masters).
| lariati wrote:
| It is because when we have this discussion it is 95% about
| credentials and 5% about education.
|
| 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.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| _There always seem to be a dozen problems with American
| colleges at all times yet so many flock there for higher
| education (mainly for Masters)._
|
| 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.
| mindcrime wrote:
| Sure, largely because the press are more interested in
| negative stories, because they generate more "engagement" and
| outrage and sell ad impressions and clicks.
|
| 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.
| taubek wrote:
| Same thing is happening in my country. Is starts at primary
| school level. We used to have separated text and exercise
| books. Now the have up to three books for same math class and
| they have to write in at least in two of them.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| In slovenian (tech) colleges, years ago most of the books were
| written by professors, and published directly by in-college
| publishers, so calculated to current prices, books cost
| 10-20eur (literally depending on thickness and size), and were
| resold and reused for many years. Even photocopied versions
| were available at a few photocopied places around, due to a
| size difference (A4 book shrinked down to two A4 pages, side by
| side on one landscape A4 page), and noone cared, not even the
| authors.
|
| 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.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| We have the same problem with high school (videregaende skole)
| here in Norway. It should be possible for a child to use their
| older sibling's textbooks, especially for subjects like
| mathematics and physics, but very often the school requires a
| particular edition.
| projektfu wrote:
| I took Calc 2 at my university and borrowed my roommate's
| book that he bought the year before. It was useless because
| it was the "preliminary edition". It was virtually the same
| book except all the exercises were in customary US units
| instead of metric. Can you imagine, publishing a math
| textbook in 1995 in customary units? All of my high school
| books had been metric and were a decade old. There could only
| be one reason to do so -- to require the next group of
| students to buy the new book.
| nvrspyx wrote:
| At my high school, the textbooks were given to us and then we
| returned it at the end of the year for the next cohort (we'd
| right our names on list in the back with the current
| condition to keep track). I'm not sure if this is how other
| US high schools did it.
| leonvv wrote:
| It's the same in the Netherlands. It's a great system I
| think. Sometimes you can see kids haul all their books on a
| bicycle, which is quite a challenge even for the Dutch
| smeej wrote:
| We each got a book to bring home, and then there was
| another set of the books kept in the classroom, and a few
| copies in the library.
|
| 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!
| deknos wrote:
| i do not really understand, why students do not come together
| then and try to write, for example on wikibooks.org good
| comprehensive study material.
|
| 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?
| somenameforme wrote:
| It's definitely not just the publishers. I think rackets like
| this work so effectively because bellies get buttered all the
| way down.
|
| 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.
| hahamrfunnyguy wrote:
| > At one class at my university (an early chem class) the
| author of the book was also the professor of the course.
|
| 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.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Most universities have a policy that if the professor
| authored a textbook he himself assigns, then he is required
| to return a comparable proportion of the royalties.
|
| 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).
| dzdt wrote:
| In my experience the professor-authored books are not the
| same story. Professors teach one or two sections and earn a
| few dollars per book (author share on technical books is
| small!). Their main optimisation using the book they wrote is
| reduced preparation time to teach as they know that version
| inside and out.
| bradstewart wrote:
| Interestingly, in most of my classes, the professor-authored
| textbooks "lasted" the longest. Revisions were infrequent,
| and the professors would routinely tell you what changed when
| they did occur so you could continue using older versions
|
| These were mostly electrical engineering (and a few software
| eng) courses, dunno if that has anything to do with it.
| dkarl wrote:
| That was my experience, too. Opposing the racket was a
| reason that a couple of my professors wrote their own
| textbooks. Only a few did that, but a lot more wrote and
| distributed their own problem sets so that students could
| use any edition of the assigned textbook, or even a
| different textbook if they had one from another school.
| dexterdog wrote:
| Every course like that which allows rating of the course
| should get negatively reviewed for exactly this reason. It's
| fine if they want to extort students, but there should be a
| cost.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > Really nobody has any motivation whatsoever to change the
| system besides the student.
|
| 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...
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| Yeah but you care about teaching. That already makes you an
| outlier at a research university.
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| I distinctly remember the author of my Linear Algebra courses
| textbook was the professor himself. He only assigned homework
| out of that book and you had to buy the book through his
| website/preferred publisher. It was not available in print at
| all so you couldn't even buy it in the bookstore.
|
| 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.
| jcranberry wrote:
| I think it's more secondary school textbooks which are the
| racket, as schools buy up the new versions of the textbooks
| when they come out without care for the prices. It depends on
| the course and subject but I find that professors often
| recommend books which aren't so difficult to get cheaply or
| second hand.
|
| 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.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| When I was a kid, watching a movie on TV, it would pop up and
| say, "This movie has been edited for time, and for content, and
| to fit this screen," or whatever, and my dad would always
| jokingly mutter, "BASTARDS!"
|
| 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.
| viovanov wrote:
| Reminds me of Feynman's anecdote about how math textbooks were
| evaluated by the Curriculum Commission.
|
| "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."
| chrisseaton wrote:
| In the UK we (or at least I) never used the exercises from the
| text books - the lecturer sets their own questions and
| exercises.
|
| 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.
| mavhc wrote:
| I was never required to buy a textbook in uk for
| maths/physics, my biology friends had to buy 1 large
| textbook, that was it
| deckar01 wrote:
| It has been getting worse recently. Publishers are encouraging
| institutions to adopt programs that use dark patterns to force
| students to *rent* ebooks for the same price as purchasing
| textbooks new. The default release date for telling the student
| what book to buy is the first day of class, but reading and
| homework is assigned that same day. Unless you want to go in
| person to a book store and wait in a long line (or rent the
| ebook) you are going to be a week behind schedule waiting for a
| used book to ship from an independent marketplace.
|
| 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.
|
| https://www.oercommons.org/about
| newsclues wrote:
| I used to work in the textbook industry.
|
| 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.
| LambdaComplex wrote:
| > My networking course recently changed from CCNA to
| CompTIA network plus content.
|
| Wow, did the school just decide that they didn't want
| anyone taking the networking course?
| tzs wrote:
| Western Governor's University [1] is a good deal for IT-
| related online degrees. They are $3920 per 6 month term, no
| matter how many or few classes you take that term. You can
| take the tests for most classes without having taken the
| class and get credit for passing, so if you already know a
| subject required for the degree would can satisfy the
| requirement that way.
|
| 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(r)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
| ughjooihxsqq wrote:
| I have a degree from an accredited online institution,
| and it holds literally no sway at tech companies. In
| fact, it's a hindrance. I was self taught before I got
| the degree, and while you still won't get past HRs
| screening for most interesting jobs, you will, at least,
| get industry props for being a "go getter". With the
| degree I've hit more glass walls and ceiling's because
| it's not from a "good school", and in their eyes I am no
| longer self taught either.
|
| Think long and hard about doing an online degree, and
| what you think it'll do for you.
| lokalfarm wrote:
| I appreciate this comment. Being an "adult student"
| (30s+) is a rough road and I definitely understand the
| attraction of self-paced online degrees. That WGU
| includes certifications as part of its tuition is pretty
| appealing too. I'm slowly trying to whittle down
| community college credits so I can hopefully transfer to
| a state school, but it often feels like a helpless
| situation. I'm just grateful I don't have children -
| work, bills, and a wife are hard enough to juggle as it
| is.
| deckar01 wrote:
| My last internship was working on a textbook publishing
| tool. The whole reason I took the job is that it allowed
| authors and small teams to create beautiful books, publish
| them independently, and push updates rather than sell new
| editions. It did not take long for the big publishers that
| were partnered to cut off independent publisher access and
| continue rereleasing small revisions as new editions that
| had to be purchased at full price. * Some speculation, but
| this was the optics.
| StillBored wrote:
| It seems the online quiz/testing racket, that is only
| available with the ebook license, is just the response to the
| fact that there is a vibrant ebook/textbook piracy community.
|
| 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.
| rplnt wrote:
| > Then students are forced to buy new books and the publishers
| can make big profits.
|
| 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.
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| Some instructors are beginning to use more Open Educational
| Resources (OER) such as open access online textbooks
| (OpenStax) in their courses.
|
| 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.
| fractal618 wrote:
| I' surprised more people don't know about OpenStax. It's an
| amazing project
| tomrod wrote:
| In my view, this can be part of the solution. The biggest issue
| is an incentive issue with tenure.
|
| [1] Professors are critically punished for poor research, mildly
| punished for poor teaching
|
| [2] A base level of teaching acumen is required. Improving
| teaching at all is costly, so teachers are willing to pay up to
| the opportunity cost of lost research impact for course materials
|
| [3] So they systematize and outsource necessary non-core
| components -- course content, course grading (via TAs and PhD
| candidates), and where permissible test and homework creation and
| evaluation. Since they have no real impact to them for the costs
| involved, such as purchase of texts, they proceed forward
| purchasing into the racket
|
| How to fix? Make teaching reviews (student and outside observer)
| factors for keeping tenure. Don't include as part of tenure
| review beyond what is already there. This gives you the best of
| all worlds: world-class professors invested in quality teaching.
| when_creaks wrote:
| I worked for a higher-ed startup that was heavily involved in the
| textbook space for a little over 5 years. There are a myriad of
| factors that contribute to the high price of textbooks. Some of
| those factors are:
|
| * The principle / agent problem - Instructors naturally select
| the course materials for their own courses but typically never
| need to pay for their own instructor copies. In essence
| instructors are making decisions for which they generally bear no
| cost, but which do impact costs for students. Compounding this
| problem is that, surprisingly often, instructors did not actually
| know the cost of the materials they selected.
|
| * The cost structure problem - Instructors will sometimes select
| a textbook to use for a course for only a year, but often they'll
| use a textbook for longer than a year. Using the same textbook
| for two to three years for a course isn't uncommon. This has
| implications re: how much revenue is at stake for a publisher for
| each textbook sale.
|
| For example - if an instructor is teaching a particular course
| twice a year (once in the spring and once in the fall), and they
| use the same textbook for 2 years in a row, and each course has
| roughly 30 students - then a publisher selling an instructor on a
| $200 textbook has a value of:
|
| 4 courses * 30 students * $200 = $24,000
|
| Or, roughly the cost of some cars. With this kind of revenue on
| the line for each sale it makes sense for publishers to develop a
| nation-wide, high touch, hands on, sales force. And a friendly,
| knowledgeable sales person can be more persuasive during the
| course materials selection process than a worthy (but distant)
| affordable textbook initiative that doesn't have an in-person
| advocate.
|
| * The content discovery problem - Part of the reason why
| publishers resort to sales teams is because they don't really
| have any good alternatives. There isn't a great platform for
| higher ed content discovery. Instructors who want to survey what
| content might be available for their course have a limited amount
| of time to make a decision, that decision has large consequences
| (their entire course might have to be redone for example), and
| there often isn't very good info about higher ed content (what
| are the learning outcomes associated with this content? what is
| the resale value of this content for the student? what do other
| instructors think about this content? etc.).
|
| * The transient pain problem - Most students complete their
| college education in 4 - 6 years, which means that (for most) the
| pain of high textbook prices is temporary. In other words - the
| pain is temporary for the cohort that would probably be most
| motivated to solve the problem.
| chicob wrote:
| Great initiative! I love it.
|
| I'm trying to get people interested in developing a model for an
| open, digital, printable, free textbook, that anyone could access
| online, download, in full or in part, share, or print if
| necessary.
|
| The general idea is to create dematerialized textbooks, organized
| in modules: an officially approved minimum basis, and additional
| optional modules. Redundancy would be allowed for easy adaptation
| to local needs. Learning and teaching communities could also make
| contributions.
|
| Bundles could then be customized or made available in presets.
| Schools could have their own official bundles, and students could
| get them in print in libraries, online, and the digital versions
| would, of course, have open formats.
|
| The best example is that of a Math textbook, that allows for
| direct translation, and which main contents never get old.
|
| So, for example, LaTeX modules would be made available online,
| and compiled into one document as needed. Indexes would, of
| course, need to me made universal in some way. And bundles would
| get their own UID, for easy sharing.
|
| Today, the available digital textbooks are heavily copyrighted
| walled gardens, and their licenses expire after some time, so
| they're broken by design. But their contents are, for the most
| part, already Commons. So what gives?
|
| When I started writing this comment, I had in mind that the
| Portuguese Ministry of Education had spent around 40 MEUR buying
| textbooks from large publishers that are distributed for free to
| students in need, in a voucher system. While checking this, I
| found recent news reporting that this value, in the Portuguese
| national budget for 2019, had underestimated the cost by 100 MEUR
| (and that year's budget had a surplus of 0,2% of the GDP...). I
| expect that an annual sum this large would be more than enough to
| fund a long term project.
| eternauta3k wrote:
| As someone who's never studied real math (only Physics math), I
| found the book "Abstract Algebra: Theory and Applications"
| extremely interesting, in part because it leads you to understand
| asymmetric cryptography and error-correcting codes. Also the SAGE
| exercises are neat.
|
| http://abstract.ups.edu/aata/aata-toc.html
| vmilner wrote:
| Error correction fans will enjoy this talk:
|
| https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/error-control
| monkeybutton wrote:
| I had a CS/Math course that used this textbook. It was
| excellent!
| d4rkp4ttern wrote:
| Sage looks neat. Is it similar to Mathematica ?
| romwell wrote:
| Yes and no.
|
| It's a computer algebra system, of which Mathematica is an
| example.
|
| But the real power of Mathematica lies in its language.
|
| SAGE wraps many libraries in a Python syntax, so the core
| language is different.
| jp0d wrote:
| Thanks for posting this.
| snicker7 wrote:
| The issue with the textbook market is that the people that pick
| them (departments, professors) don't actually have to pay for it.
| If colleges were forced to subsidize even a small % of textbook
| costs, we'd see an order of magnitude reduction in prices.
| romwell wrote:
| In case you didn't know:
|
| American Institute of Mathematics is a research non-profit ran by
| one of the Fry brothers (of Fry Electronics).
|
| At least until recently, it's been run out of the back of the
| office space of their headquarters location on Brokaw road in San
| Jose.
|
| Now that the store (and the company) is defunct, I'm happy to see
| that AIM is still kicking.
|
| Can't vouch for everything that they do, but they have been
| running pretty solid geometric group theory workshops on the reg.
| I got to attend one, and have good memories of it.
|
| I'm still sad that the store has shut down. They cite COVID as a
| reason, but they've been in liquidation mode long before that (at
| some point, I couldn't even get a USB flash drive there!). I hope
| that AIM will go on as a legacy.
| therealmarv wrote:
| https://openstax.org/ if you search for more open textbooks (OER
| = open educational resources) other than math.
| culi wrote:
| Are there any major resources tracking all the open-source
| textbook type projects? I've seen some really cool stuff posted
| on HN like that Homopothy-Consistent Mathematics textbook.[0]
| AIoM's OTI seems cool, but is limited in scope and OpenStax
| mostly makes their own textbooks so it also ends up limited in
| capacity
|
| [0] https://kerodon.net/
| DrBoring wrote:
| Some mostly off-topic textbook stories:
|
| My dad used to be dept chair at the college where he worked.
| Because of his title, textbook publishers would send him copies
| of their books for consideration. He would give them to me and I
| would sell them on half.com.
|
| He was also able to order the answer books for my calculus
| textbook. I could do all the practice problems and look up the
| answers (not just the odd # questions which were in the back of
| the student book). At the end of the semester, I gave the answer
| book to the chair of the math dept to keep in the student math
| lab.
|
| Also, one day in my physics class, some textbook sales reps came
| to demo this new RF remote with numbered buttons like a TV
| remote. Each student in class would get one. Their sales pitch
| was that it would allow our teacher to put a daily quiz up on the
| projector screen, and each student would use the remote to submit
| their answer, and then his TA wouldn't have to grade 150 quizzes.
| Also it would track attendance (which I thought should be
| optional for college classes). Students were expected to pay for
| their own remote, and I think there was a license fee per
| semester. Yuck.
| klondike_ wrote:
| These remotes (iClicker) are in widespread use for large
| lecture hall classes at major universities. I don't know why
| they can't replace it with an app or something, but supposedly
| the point is that they work as an attendance measure because
| they only work when you're physically in class.
|
| They're about $30 used and there's a large supply of them
| because you don't use them in higher level classes. IMO not the
| worst scam in academia compared to $200 book and homework
| combos
| Telemakhos wrote:
| There is an website (mobile-optimized to eliminate app
| downloads or spying): socrative.com. It does everything the
| iclickers used to do and more. You can, optionally, upload
| class rosters and make students log in, or you can use it
| anonymously. It's free for small classes and $50/year flat
| fee (billable to the administration) for large lectures.
| MikeTheGreat wrote:
| I'm surprised to hear about them being used for attendance.
| Attendance usually isn't a factor at the college level,
| especially for large lecture classes.
|
| I _have_ heard them being used to try and create a more
| interactive, engaging environment for the students. Typically
| they're used something like this:
|
| The teacher explains something, then asks a question that you
| can correctly answer if you understood the explanation.
| There's N answers available; the question + multiple choice
| answers are on the current slide.
|
| Students then group up into small-ish groups (4 people or so,
| maybe less) and each group discusses the question & comes up
| with an answer, and then they use the clicker to make their
| choice.
|
| Once all the groups have had a chance to answer the teacher
| displays a bar chart / histogram showing how many groups
| chose each answer.
|
| The next part I'm not 100% clear on the details, but the bar
| chart points the students in the right direction AND provides
| feedback for the instructor. For example, if pretty much
| everyone got the right answer then the teacher can give the
| groups that didn't choose the right answer a couple minutes
| to re-discuss and/or ask questions. If lotsa' students got
| the wrong answer then the teacher can go back and clarify
| stuff, etc, etc.
|
| So yeah - the point of clickers is to transform a passive
| "listen to the teacher lecture" experience into something
| that is more interactive and engaging.
|
| In terms of apps - I don't use clickers myself (I teach
| smaller classes), but if I wanted to I'd definitely use an
| app for this. I suspect that people still using physical
| clickers got started with them and are continuing to use
| them. Personally I'd get my college to buy a classroom set
| for the students to borrow each class (or to checkout for the
| semester/quarter/term) but there's overhead with that, too
| jkaptur wrote:
| I've never used these myself (too old), but my understanding
| is that to get around the attendance measure you and your
| friends just take turns going to class and you all give that
| week's attendee your clickers.
|
| An app would actually be a lot better for this, since it's
| not like you're going to give your phone to your friend for
| several hours. On the other hand, I agree that tracking
| attendance in college is a bit pointless.
| sugaroverflow wrote:
| Omg, we had the remotes too and they often broke or stopped
| working and we had to get them replaced via the company that
| was contracted. Eventually, my teachers stopped using them
| because they were more trouble than they were worth.
| averagedev wrote:
| Great resource, thanks for sharing. As someone who wants to "re-
| learn" some college level math, this is invaluable.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Based off my shelf of old books, the price of a good, new,
| textbook has stayed roughly the same. The quality of the text and
| layout is much better now, but the paper is pretty much worse.
|
| Some really boring old radar books I own, have the most beautiful
| silky paper that the equations practically glow, whereas now you
| get stuck with the toilet paper edition for not much less than
| what that old one would've cost.
| dls2016 wrote:
| I'm just a lowly adjunct, but I sense that one barrier to open
| textbook adoption is the accreditation process. I don't know
| exactly the connection, but I get the feeling that the department
| can check some box if they say that all their lower division
| calculus courses are taught with Pearson's book, for instance.
| Sort of a "no one ever got fired for choosing IBM" type
| situation.
|
| Anyone have any insight to this? I only have a sample size of
| two... which leads me to believe not all departments worry about
| this so much.
|
| Edit: see these MAA guidelines: https://www.maa.org/programs-and-
| communities/professional-de...
|
| One suggestion is "there should be established procedures for
| periodic review of the curriculum... should include careful
| scrutiny of course syllabi, prerequisites, and textbooks."
|
| As much as I hate to say it, there are legitimate reasons for
| carefully controlling the curricula in lower division courses. A
| big one is: transfer credit. People get pissed when it's
| difficult to transfer their cheaper CC credits to a larger
| university.
|
| The easiest way to solve these problems is by dictating
| curricula. But, unfortunately, the Pearson's of the world feast
| on the resulting homogenized market.
|
| This is similar to my problem with Common Core. Everything in
| Common Core is perfectly reasonable. But now we have one giant
| textbook market where Pearson dominates with their products which
| now bear a "Common Core approved" label on the cover.
| memco wrote:
| I expect it varies a lot from school, region, accrediting body,
| etc., but I worked for a school administration and taught as an
| adjunct for a spell and mostly the teachers themselves decided
| the books and were approved so long as the cost was reasonable
| and the books were easily available. A free textbook published
| independently would actually have more or less been
| automatically approved. it was a small school of a few hundred
| students focused on humanities. YMMV.
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