Maryland Awards 21 Grants To Prepare 'Open Source' Textbooks (usmd.edu) 98
"The University System of Maryland has awarded 21 "mini grants" to university faculty to "help them expand open education resources," reports OpenSource.com. Recipients of the grants are also given time off to prepare courses that use open textbooks, and will receive personalized support and training on effective course design.
An anonymous reader writes:
"Although our faculty view textbooks as essential, some of our students see them as a luxury they cannot afford," said Community College of Baltimore County President Sandra Kurtinitis. "Having access to open educational resources will provide some financial relief for our students as well as contribute to their academic success." The cost of textbooks has risen 812% since 1978, the school system said in an announcement, "outpacing even the cost of medical services and new housing. Nationally, students spend an average of $1,200 a year on textbooks."
The Maryland Open Source Textbook initiative started in 2013 "to provide a state-wide opportunity for faculty to explore the promise of open education resources to reduce students' cost of attendance while maintaining, or perhaps even improving, learning outcomes." Since then it's helped replace traditional textbooks in over 60 different courses at 14 public institutions across the state, resulting in a cumulative cost savings of over $1 million for 3,500 students. "In addition to saving students money, faculty have gained the ability to adapt and customize their instructional materials to ensure they are aligned with their pedagogical methods to best meet their students' needs," the school system reports. "In follow up surveys with students participating in the MOST initiative, 93% reported that the open educational resource content they used was the same or better quality than traditional textbooks."
The Maryland Open Source Textbook initiative started in 2013 "to provide a state-wide opportunity for faculty to explore the promise of open education resources to reduce students' cost of attendance while maintaining, or perhaps even improving, learning outcomes." Since then it's helped replace traditional textbooks in over 60 different courses at 14 public institutions across the state, resulting in a cumulative cost savings of over $1 million for 3,500 students. "In addition to saving students money, faculty have gained the ability to adapt and customize their instructional materials to ensure they are aligned with their pedagogical methods to best meet their students' needs," the school system reports. "In follow up surveys with students participating in the MOST initiative, 93% reported that the open educational resource content they used was the same or better quality than traditional textbooks."
YES! (Score:2)
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When will Wikipedia use MathML instead of images for equations?
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Under the Kurtosis entry, it does the formula for Kurtosis as an SVG. If Wikipedia uses MathML, why not there? It's only one entry, but still. Also, perhaps there is a setting for logged in users.
Is there a Wikipedia entry that uses MathML?
The real solution.. (Score:4, Insightful)
While this is a good step, the REAL solution is to stop requiring a new edition of the textbook almost annually.
THIS is the huge scam that has created this trap for students. There is almost zero reason for these new additions, however courses often REQUIRE and actually check for them (and often have included coursework, its own scam..).
The problem? This means there is no market for the books second hand!
By allowing a collusion between publishers and courses to effectively kill second hand use of the books, we end up in this situation.
So, just REQUIRE textbooks to have a minimum 5 year life (could easily be 10 years in many subjects).
Refuse any textbooks that are 'licensed' (including non-transferable electronic versions).
Problem solved!
Wont ever happen, people are making too much money screwing over the students, who are too young and green to avoid it.
Re: The real solution.. (Score:4, Informative)
If this is the reason students are spending $1200 pa, why don't community colleges design their courses around last year's textbooks (which are presumably available for much less)? Very few fields of study change significantly from year to year.
As someone who has taught at the college level, I can tell you that most professors would be thrilled to do this. Unfortunately, it only really works for a year or two. The first year after a new edition comes out, there may be sufficient stock left to source a decent amount of textbooks (though they'll still be nearly full price).
The second year, you're down to mostly used copies. But the used textbook market is unreliable. You can probably get away with using the old edition for that second year, because used textbook stocks may be reliable enough. But after that, it gets harder -- the bookstore may not be able to reliably source a lot of copies. If you go on Amazon or whatever, you'll end up buying from 3rd-party sellers who often don't pay detailed attention to textbooks... resulting in inaccuracies for listings. You'll get the student who comes in and says, "I know the current edition is 7th, and you want to use 6th -- I ordered a 6th from a used seller, but they sent me the 5th edition! Can I use it?"
A large number of students don't sell textbooks back, particularly if they already bought them used and it's an old edition that they won't make much money off of. So the used market dries up after a couple years.
And most textbooks (except in very active fields) aren't actually releasing new editions EVERY year. Instead, it's often every 3 or 4 or 5 years, which is long enough to "dry up" any used market and force everyone to upgrade.
Believe me -- I know there are always plenty of stories of professors who teach from their own books and want to make loads of money. But the majority of professors don't write textbooks, and they're often happy to stay on a consistent edition (and save students money). Who wants to update course materials to take into account all the exercise numbers changing from edition to edition, the minor rearrangements of text, etc., etc.?
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Do the books change subtly enough from edition to edition that it would be possible to prepare a plan that would work for both the current and previous editions at the same time?
Textbook producers have long found ways around this. I mentioned exercise numbers, because that's one way they make this practice next-to-impossible.
One edition you assign problems #1-10, but in the next edition those same problems are #1, 3-4, 6, 9, 11-12, 19. Oh, except for #4 and #7 in the original edition, which have been dropped for no apparent reason and replaced with new problems. (Admittedly, in the first few editions the exercises are often edited for legitimate improvements -- clarifying them
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Maybe if there were a more active market for used textbooks, students would make the attempt to sell their old, bought used textbooks and the market would become more active. Yes, that's circular but so is: students don't sell their old textbooks because they know no one is buying them.
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I fear that: a) you don't have any experience teaching at the university level; and, b) you don't actually understand the problem. Let me try to educate you.
First, I teach a course at a large public university. I work full time as consultant/developer and I teach a single course as an adjunct. My motivation for doing it, you ask? I thought it would be fun and my fondest memories of my undergraduate education were three adjunct professors who were experienced industry professionals and taught only a sing
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For calculus a revision every 20 years would probably be far too frequent. The main valid reason for a rewrite would be to improve the teaching style, more likely this would result in a whole new book. So outside of a whole new book, new calculus, chemistry, math, logic books are probably not needed once good ones are written. Every 20 years, add some new examples, to make it so not everyone is a blonde, blue eyed male who wants to become a nuclear engineer. Publish errata that can be easily added and c
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Back in my undergrad days, the Engineering-track Physics I and II courses had textbooks that were huge stacks of punched stencilled pages ( required a 4-inch binder. . .). Cost, between 12 and 14 dollars, plus a 6 dollar binder.
Junior Year, both volumes came out as a textbook. 80 bucks. And, of course, enough minor changes in the exercises that the old paper editions were useless.
Oddly enough, the professor who taught the course bought a new car that year.
Funny how that works. . .
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I used a physics textbook that was the same one (same fucking exact one) that my Dad had used when learning physics. Of course I'd bought my own recently published copy of a 40 year old physics book. Our professors at community college created spiral bound lab books that were probably around $20. These were fantastic as they expanded on topics and had nice hand-drawn illustrations, etc... Ah, the good-old days.
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Maybe they should just reduce their fees (Score:2, Insightful)
Textbooks probably wouldn't be viewed as a luxury if the U.S universities and colleges didn't work out how the absolute maximum they could squeeze out of students and their families in tuition and fees and then charge them that.
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Textbooks probably wouldn't be viewed as a luxury if the U.S universities and colleges didn't work out how the absolute maximum they could squeeze out of students and their families in tuition and fees and then charge them that.
What incentive do they have to do that? My old school took the profits from bookstore sales and funded all the student center stuff from it, so they'd never have cut their prices If this open textbook idea catches on, both the schools and publishers will have to reduce prices or they'll lose a ton of business, if not all of it.
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I take GP as saying that if universities charged less for tuition, the price of tetbooks wouldn't be so bad.
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Their incentive is perks from the publisher.
Buyer's collective for existing textbooks (Score:1, Interesting)
Here's an idea. Instead of commissioning brand new textbooks, why not form a buyer's collective with other universities (particularly state university systems) looking for value-priced textbooks (but not Dover Books, I hope). Don't go after the top 3-4 titles in any subject; instead, go after some of the laggards so their publishers will be open to cutting deals instead of demanding $100+. You can ask for paperback or cut-rate editions, like the International Editions sold in India.
That's where the depar
Re: Buyer's collective for existing textbooks (Score:2)
Re: Buyer's collective for existing textbooks (Score:1)
Places of higher learning (including community colleges) should just band together nationally or state level and go after all the primary subjects (that dont change much anyway) first and tackle the higher stuff with a fund each one pays a nominal fee towards. If each college paid 1 semester tuition (community college level, not harvard) toward such an endeavor, we'd have 90% of the books tackled in no time.
Re: Buyer's collective for existing textbooks (Score:5, Informative)
Places of higher learning (including community colleges) should just band together nationally or state level and go after all the primary subjects ...
They are doing exactly that. I give you the Open Education Consortium [oeconsortium.org].
But there are lots of others. The University of Minnesota runs the Open Textbook Network [umn.edu].
Of course Openstax [openstax.org] is producing lots of curriculum.
There are so many free textbook programs out there that the real challenge is paring down the list. Openstax seems to be emerging as the big, reliable repository.
My news site [freetextbooks.org], for lack of a better word, about free textbooks.
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I think the limiting factor here isn’t a lack of available open source materials. Too many schools have gotten bed with the publishers and are getting a nice cut of the way over priced books. The schools for example could have gone with cheaper publishers without much trouble. They could have told their publishers to not rearrange the same text every year to make it hard on people using used books. Yet, they don’t. Simple fact is that at the end of the day it isn’t in their interests to m
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Nice info, thanks!
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Used book store.
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Somebody hasn't been paying their bribes (Score:5, Funny)
Link to actual article (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the actual article in the diamondback - TFS links to a news aggregator that links to this:
http://www.dbknews.com/2017/04... [dbknews.com]
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The capitalist class are exploiting open source more than ever. Capitalists can't resist the promise of free labor, and the best part is the capitalists don't have to employ any of the young naive laborers. Open source means the work is publicly available and ripe for the taking. Capitalists just take everything and give nothing in return. Open source developers don't get paid anything, and developers live in poverty while capitalists make billions.
Explain how the "capitalist class" is going to make undeserved money from a resource made freely available at no cost to all. Sure, Red Hat et al earn money from Linux, but it's for the value-added they furnish. If you don't want to give them money, you can still download the product without paying, you'll just have to be your own support.
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I was benefitted from a similar initiative. (Score:5, Informative)
I published in 2015 a textbook about operating systems (http://sistop.org/). Besides working for a university full time, I got a grant from the LATIn Initiative from the European commission. They required me to join other authors (a requisite for participation was having at least threee coauthors, located in three different countries in Latin America), and paid each of us a very decent amount (€1200, particularly good given the wages in our region). There was, of course, a quality requirement - But the second requirement was for the licensing to be CC-BY.
I won on all fronts due to this.
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I published in 2015 a textbook about operating systems (http://sistop.org/).
Thanks! I had a look and began reading it last night (when I should have been sleeping). The book is very well written, thorough, and also accessible to students who are still in the early stages of learning about the field.
I am in the process of redesigning a course which I teach on Java and business IT systems and this has inspired me to seek out new materials from the open textbook ecosystem. The current book I use is now quite outdated (the students complain about it and I don't like it) and the new
Seriously inflated statistics (Score:2, Insightful)
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You missed the new model (Score:2, Interesting)
The new model is to have the "free" online homework require the $120-$180 texbook "subscription". Taht way the professor doesn't have to write questions or grade homework, and you get assraped without the chance of buying a used textbook.
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5 courses/term * 2 terms/year * 1 book / course * $100/book = $1000/year. Simple Stoichiometry.
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We don't want our own bathrooms. We just want you to leave us alone so we can pee in peace.
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And non-state-funded textbooks are unbiased?
cable companies will object and file suite (Score:2)
Cheap 1st/2nd year textbooks, expensive years 3+ (Score:4, Informative)
The real underlying problem here is that student loans are the only type of debt that can't be discharged under bankruptcy, and that has created a moral hazard for post-secondary institutions to accelerate their costs. Tuition has also greatly and disproportionately increased in cost because students can get mortgage-like terms for their student debt, but institutions don't have any responsibility to make sure they graduate or make money. Meanwhile, endowments, perks and expensive buildings keep going up on campuses with little marginal benefit to students. The cherry on top is the IMO bizarre cultural support in this country for post-secondary institutions from alumni and through college sports.
If you really want to solve the textbook crisis, solve the debt crisis in education and allow discharge of student debt in bankruptcy at the same time as you investigate the publishers for any type of RICO or antitrust activity. The system will take a few years to clean out, but the issue will eventually be solved. The best part will be that tuitions will eventually come down to sane levels again, although that will be at the expense of the administrators and faculty who are more concerned about pretty buildings and social justice than they are about academic and human progress.
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Unfortunately you may be correct. I work at a university that I graduated from many years ago. Costs have gone through the roof. There are fancy expensive study areas everywhere. The paint is barely dry on renovations when they are renovating again. The administration went from a small area in one building to their own four story building. Classroom space has tripled, but student population is only up by 70%. Nobody wants to take a class before 10AM or after 2PM so we need more faculty and classrooms
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Easy student loans drive this. Administrators feel free to increase spending because they feel free to increase costs because lenders feel free to lend because there is low risk to student loans due to the lack of a default mechanism.
Politically, I think they appease Democratic state legislatures by increasing aid and scholarships to protected class students, knowing that these costs can be shifted to students who pay with loans, as the loan amounts can go up easily. The added spending by Universities is
You need a bit of critical thinking here (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, but you are completely wrong about student loans.
I know its very 'fashionable' to harp on that you should be able to drop them like a hot potato the week you graduate, but that would be a disaster, and in no way addresses the root problem.
Why a disaster? Because graduates are graduates. A large number of them would see this as a free lunch, and jump on it, declaring bankrupcy just to clear the debt (after all, they have almost nothing to lose here..), and THEN starting building their carreer with a p
Re:You need a bit of critical thinking here (Score:4, Interesting)
I think you're pretty much dead on. I'd only differ in that I think student loan debt should be dischargeable, but inversely proportional to the time since the education was obtained. All assets depreciate in value and an education isn't really all that different, and inverse proportion depreciation prevents short-term discharge after graduation without the punishment that would be inflicted on someone whose finances otherwise allow them to declare bankruptcy. I think part of the escalating college cost/loan cycle needs some negative feedback loop -- lending should have risk, without it they lend irresponsibly and all it ends up being is inflationary.
But you're absolutely right about the "everyone doesn't need a degree" stuff. Most people go to college because they don't know better and are only in it for the signaling value that a degree supposedly has to employers.
College loans are basically a subsidy to corporations who would otherwise have to provide training and education to their employees and even if it provides some vocational value, it's a horribly inefficient -- the overlap between what's learned in school and what has vocational value to employers is really small.
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Community colleges are an option, but society looks down upon the CC 'graduate'. There should be a one year program (12 months full time) that give students the basic business and technical backgrounds for their chosen path.
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There should be a 4 year program for that. It should be called High School.
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The 'fix' for student loans if for the schools to 'co-sign' the loan with the student. The student can only discharge the dept back to the school after X number of years of paying Y% of their salaries towards the loan. You figure out the X and Y with some negotiations but the end result is if you go into a field where there is no way to pay off the loan in X years paying Y% of the salary then the school should never have loaded you the money in the first place. One of two things happen, schools either don't
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Since society benefits from an educated population, be it very intellectual or very vocational (who doesn't want a great plumber?). Why not implement what you propose and boost it with free education? That way everyone is educated appropriate to their desires and abilities, society benefits, and no one has to worry about paying off some stupid loan.
I disagree that the loan situation is not a contributor to the problem, in fact it might even exacerbate the situation you are concerned about. Since universi
Better Solution (Score:2)
If you really want to solve the textbook crisis, solve the debt crisis in education and allow discharge of student debt in bankruptcy at the same time as you investigate the publishers for any type of RICO or antitrust activity.
Neither of these solutions work. If you can discharge a student loan through bankruptcy then no lender will offer them without a guarantee from the government and that will be really expensive. So if you go this way why not just have the government cover the tuition costs with grants which it recoups by charging a higher tax rate on higher incomes? It worked this way in the UK for decades before the government got stupid and massively increased enrolment beyond what society needed and taxes could support.
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There's one simple scenario that prevents this from happening: 1. Go to expensive college.
2. Graduate.
3. File for bankruptcy immediately.
4. Profit.
Most college students have no assets and poor credit. There is no downside to filing for bankruptcy. An established adult with a house and a car are a different story. Creditors can go after that persons house, car, retirement savings, etc.
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oh, the irony!
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It's time for university "non-profit" status to be re-examined, as everything they do is designed to maximize revenue.
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With a webcam any textbook can be copied in an hour or less. From that time on, it's just a bunch of JPEGs that can be distributed freely until you're caught.
Do a good job photographing, and the images can be converted back to text.
Re: Control and profit (Score:1)
Except now coursework and tests are supplied by the textbook publisher too, saving the tutor work, and these are only available with an active $100+ subscription (and one student per subscription).
Here's a table of historical college costs (Score:4, Informative)
To get a real feel for the sudden growth since 2000, note that the first two data points span a couple of decades. The rest of the points are year by year:
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76 [ed.gov]
The article says an 812% increase since 1978. They could have easily cut down the start point to the year 2000 and still produced a startling, and more meaningful result.
Because open source documentation is A+ (Score:2)
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Your analogy couldn't have been more perfectly bad.
In an open source software project, the product is the software, not the documentation.
In an open textbook project, the product is the book, not the documentation of how it works.
So all of the intangible benefits you elucidated belong to the people who created the content of the book. There are also tangible benefits, such as grants to create the work etc. No doubt it is a strong resume builder and with a proper community in place around the book, it woul
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Do it! You can do it!
Misuse of the term "open source"? (Score:1)
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I'm totally cool with the license not granting people the right to use a text-book commercially. The information is given freely, it should be passed on freely? Don't like the license? Don't use the work. It is basic true-capitalism. It gives freedom-of-choice. What's not to like?
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Yes. I didn't read your full comment. We are in agreement.
I too would like "libre" books and not just free-of-charge textbooks, though I also think they are a great start!
I disagree though that disallowing commercial use is what makes them bad. I'm good with a license that allows academic use and even research use, however, it would seem somewhat unfair for some publisher to take a "libre" book, rewrite it a bit throw it in a printing press , mark it up %500 and give nothing back. There could be licensin
Payola in universities (Score:4, Informative)
Smoke and Mirrors (Score:5, Insightful)
Open source textbooks, reference material, and study guides are plentiful. Used textbooks are cheap. Amazon has a great service providing them.
Colleges and Universities frequently require the use of online, "digital learning systems", like Cengage [wikipedia.org]. Access to that site, where the homework is, requires a subscription code that can be hundreds of dollars. A textbook without the "online access code" is a doorstop.
If schools are serious about this, they need to start pushing the use of Moodle [moodle.org] instead of Blackboard [wikipedia.org], and providing high quality open source content including lesson plans, homework, and textbooks.
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The Common Core standards are not a fully developed curriculum; they are a list of skills that students should have at certain points in their education. Here's an example:
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Yeah, look at the Big Education corporations. Find out how much your district payed Pearson. Ask questions about whether curriculum changes are necessary because of CC or because of Big Ed. If an administrator insists that some horrible change is required because of CC, ask them to cite the section of the standard that requires it.
I think a lot of districts probably just
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Common Core is for grade school, we're discussing college textbooks here. I'm guessing you're a republitard and figured this was a good place to bang one of your favorite drums. It isn't and you're as stupid as you look.
Here you go troll:
What is Common Core?
The Common Core State Standards Initiative is an educational initiative in the United States that details what K–12 students should know in English language arts and mathematics at the end of each grade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
CC also d