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Textbook manifesto (2016)

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Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#101

Post by andrewwharton »

I'd like to see this philosophy applied to some of the open content out there already like the OpenStax textbooks [0]. For example, the Prealgebra text is 1152 pages in the PDF format.

I think there would be a huge amount of value in distilling these down to chapters which are 10-15 pages each instead of 100-150 pages each. Of course you would loose a lot of detail, but they could serve as a summary of 'this is the important stuff you need to know'. The expanded textbooks would serve as reference material if you want to go into more detail.

[0] https://openstax.org/

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#102

Post by no_wizard »

AllenDowney wrote: post #86
tedmiston wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is too disaligned with the criteria that are important to having a successful career as a professor. The problem isn't doing the work , it's that it takes a lot of time and is generally not a priority for the university and department vs research. I've had some professors create fully self-contained slide decks for their course with references. Other professors teaching the same course often shared slides. Occas…

That's true. I have the good fortune to work at a college (Olin College) that recognizes that my work developing textbooks is aligned with the mission of the institution, and can have as much external impact as research. But you are right -- most places give professors zero credit for writing textbooks.

Hey man,

Just wanted to thank you for all the stuff you have given us. I have found your books to be both delightful and enlightening, and the fact you give them away is pretty astounding. I myself buy the printed copies just to support this work, however I know many many people not of means that I point your resources to with great success.

I don't know if you hear it a lot or not enough, but thank you, sincerely. Solid material you got here.

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#103

Post by milesrout »

supremesaboteur wrote: post #73
taeric wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being opposed by elected officials is one thing. What truly baffles me is being opposed by the very people that are adversely affected. Many policies are literally convincing poor families that it is in their best interests to help support the frail legacy of billionaires. How!?

Poor people are lifted out of poverty when they get jobs. Jobs are created by incentivizing job creators.

They're not called 'job creators'. Jobs don't need creating. They're called self-interested capitalists. They aren't 'creating jobs' out of the goodness of their hearts. They sometimes, to a certain limited extent, require labour in order to maximise their profits.

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#104

Post by dragonwriter »

supremesaboteur wrote: post #73
taeric wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being opposed by elected officials is one thing. What truly baffles me is being opposed by the very people that are adversely affected. Many policies are literally convincing poor families that it is in their best interests to help support the frail legacy of billionaires. How!?

Poor people are lifted out of poverty when they get jobs. Jobs are created by incentivizing job creators.

> Poor people are lifted out of poverty when they get jobs.

Poor people are lifted out of poverty when they get the tools necessary to secure and maintain sufficient initial and recurring quantities of material assets; jobs with sufficiently high pay do that (but not all jobs have sufficiently high pay), though they aren't the only thing that could.

> Jobs are created by incentivizing job creators.

No, jobs are created by paying people to do work. There are several ways government can cause this to happen: the simplest and least prone to be misdirected is to simply pay people to do work. Among the more complex, less reliable, and more likely to be manipulated to maximize profits to other people and minimize jobs to the people for whom the goal is to secure jobs is creating financial incentives to capitalists in the hopes that it will result in them creating jobs that lift people out of poverty.

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#105

Post by apetresc »

chipperyman573 wrote: post #97
igk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was in the students union for my faculty. We pulled out all stops to make things as efficient and cheap as possible(we actually sold them below cost because we found other ways to subsidise them). 10ish euro maximum performance semester for all the textbooks that were used in the classes, and printing thesis was 50 % of the next cheapest option... if we had doubled our prices. We also did "university politics", basic…

>We also did "university politics", basically creating pressure for professors to make good textbooks. I typeset one myself for a professor who wanted to "beat" another one. Out of curiosity, how would his textbook beat another colleague's?

Popularity, I assume; which is probably why he put "beat" in scare quotes.

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#106

Post by andrepd »

Much of this articles comes across as basically complaining: "these books are long and these books are hard". Why, it's true that sometimes this is a valid criticism, but what about when the subject matter really is long and hard to understand? What then?

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#107

Post by richardbatty »

pcmonk wrote: post #3

A lot of people tend to harp on the "textbooks are too expensive" issue, and I think this correctly identifies one of the problems: textbook price is not an issue to many professors. Unfortunately, there's no actual solution to that presented. > If you can’t find one, write one. It’s not that hard. I've used three or four textbooks written by my professor, and I can't say the quality was all that great. Considering t…

Why can't students just borrow textbooks from the library? I see the 'textbooks are expensive' complaint from Americans a lot and I'm confused. I never had to buy a textbook at my UK university, there were usually plenty of copies in the library. What's different about the US system?

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#108

Post by cbhl »

richardbatty wrote: post #107
pcmonk wrote: post #3

A lot of people tend to harp on the "textbooks are too expensive" issue, and I think this correctly identifies one of the problems: textbook price is not an issue to many professors. Unfortunately, there's no actual solution to that presented. > If you can’t find one, write one. It’s not that hard. I've used three or four textbooks written by my professor, and I can't say the quality was all that great. Considering t…

Why can't students just borrow textbooks from the library? I see the 'textbooks are expensive' complaint from Americans a lot and I'm confused. I never had to buy a textbook at my UK university, there were usually plenty of copies in the library. What's different about the US system?

While this doesn't apply to every case, this certainly affected me as a university student:

1. Mandatory online assignments for credit that require a code from a new textbook. (Usually because then the professor doesn't have to grade the assignments.)

2. New editions of textbooks every year, where the order of chapters or questions is shuffled, requiring you to have the latest edition of the textbook in order to do an assigned problem set ("Read Chapter 3, do question 2, 3, 5, 7 on page 148" only applies in the latest edition).

3. Libraries often only have two or three copies of the textbook, and all the students want to access them at the same time (cramming the week before exams).

4. The university library has hours and closes at night.

5. Fewer people buying textbooks leads to textbook publishers increasing per-book costs to cover the fixed costs of a print run, leading to fewer people buying textbooks.

6. Different professors teaching the same course having different preferred textbooks. Both get listed on the course description, but you don't know which one you should buy until the first day of class.

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#109

Post by tunnuz »

riffraff wrote: post #71
lvh wrote: post #32

In many European countries, this problem was resolved by what I feel is mostly student pressure. Our student union (for lack of better word) owned printing equipment and worked with most professors to do exactly what's suggested in this article: most professors wrote their own books (not 140 pages, though). Most of my textbooks were between 2 and 7 EUR, which I'm led to believe is approximately at cost. Occasionally,…

Italian, and fellow european here. When I started university (1999, I think) there were still plenty of Big Expensive Books (I recall my Chemistry one was like that). The "student pressure" materialized in the form of doing illegal copies of the books. This used to be totally illegal, but incredibly easy. At some point the legislative environment changed so that photocopying up to a decent percentage of the books was…

Thank you.

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#110

Post by richardbatty »

cbhl wrote: post #108
richardbatty wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't students just borrow textbooks from the library? I see the 'textbooks are expensive' complaint from Americans a lot and I'm confused. I never had to buy a textbook at my UK university, there were usually plenty of copies in the library. What's different about the US system?

While this doesn't apply to every case, this certainly affected me as a university student: 1. Mandatory online assignments for credit that require a code from a new textbook. (Usually because then the professor doesn't have to grade the assignments.) 2. New editions of textbooks every year, where the order of chapters or questions is shuffled, requiring you to have the latest edition of the textbook in order to do a…

Oh right, I think a big difference is that in American courses it seems that there is one course textbook, and the assignments are taken from that. Our courses weren't designed around a textbook.

For us, assignments (both problem sheets and essay questions) were written by our tutors. They came with a reading list that would include a selection of relevant articles, books, and textbooks, but there was no single one that you had to use.

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