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If Pearson is down, does the exam get cancelled?
Edit: Not really. Seems like a common DDoS attack costs about $20 per hour, and an access code costs about $100 USD. Each student could buy about 5 hours of DDoS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It will be interesting to see where this goes. After undergrad and grad school, the amount of times I’ve gone back to hardcopy books or course notes is so tiny that It didn’t justify lugging them around over many moves. (And I love books - prefer bookcases to wallpaper!) The current model of forcing student to re-buy books that are only marginally updated on an annual basis is wasteful. The real question is will tota…
Ah, but that's the trick of the modern price: It does not ever go down. This isn't grandpa's hardware store. These are scientists working to extract as much money as possible from their "customers" in an industry which already enjoys regulatory capture and oligopoly. It may seem as though the price has gone down, in much the same way that grocery stores claimed prices would go down with their club cards, only to have…
Just saying, I didn’t use a single textbook throughout my entire CS degree here. All of the course materials were available freely on our Moodle instance or through our library. Most of the course materials were produced by the lecturers, and where they had written a proper textbook, they just sent us the PDFs.
What is happening now is the publishers are providing a “service” that puts the homework assignments online.
That means you have to pay in order to do the required homework. Eg the books being in the library doesn’t mean you don’t have to pay the publisher. Similarly second hand books are closer to worthless because you still have to pay to have access to, and to submit, your homework.
I suspect legislation that requires the university to cover all fees required for assessment would end this nonsense in short order.
Just saying, I didn’t use a single textbook throughout my entire CS degree here. All of the course materials were available freely on our Moodle instance or through our library. Most of the course materials were produced by the lecturers, and where they had written a proper textbook, they just sent us the PDFs.
I bought very few textbooks (Physics degree) but heavily used the ones available in the library, clearly YMMV.
If Pearson is down, does the exam get cancelled?
The money a class pays for their access codes could finance a couple of years of DDoS instead. Edit: Not really. Seems like a common DDoS attack costs about $20 per hour, and an access code costs about $100 USD. Each student could buy about 5 hours of DDoS.
If you covered one or two critical weeks (say the weeks just before and during final exams and midterms), per semester, you're looking at 672 hours of downtime or less. Even a large availability loss-- say, down 50% of the time in peak hours-- would be enough to make the program look risky and fragile.
A 50-student lecture could finance that.
Against the rising trend? The Rise in Popularity of Printed Books Continues http://theprintingreport.com/2018/05/03/the-rise-in-populari...
Perfect example of rent seeking.
Sweet, now we can go and pay $200 for a digital copy of a book instead of a $250 copy of a physical book. lol
This sounds like a raw deal for students. I kept all of the textbooks relating to my major for several years. They were good reference materials while completing the degree and were useful as supplementary resources. By the time the second year of undergraduate studies rolled around, the faculty started assigning textbooks that were intended to serve as introductory material to graduate studies. By the time the final…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I bought very few textbooks (Physics degree) but heavily used the ones available in the library, clearly YMMV.
Doesn’t matter if the school has the book in the library: you have to pay the publisher to access and submit the homework (the homework is not in the book, only online)
I take your point that if the e-books are available via the library, they will charge the library, probably on a pay as you go basis too