191–200 of 322 posts
States should mandate that public universities use open textbooks. Federal government should make open textbooks, open journals, and FRAND licensing of patents mandatory as a condition of subsidies and other largesse like student loan guarantees.
That’s a good idea, and it should be paired with grants or some other compensation/support for people who develop those open books.
Guess what? You do not need to buy textbooks if you have a smart professor that cares and isn't into the racket. You can use 15% of a copyrighted work for educational purposes. That means you can pick and copy chapters from different books to cover the course material. All free!
A smart professor is the one who wrote the book they sell to their own class.
Of course the same company fired me when I was fighting cancer, and then was acquired by Wimba. Oh and if T. Mack Brown reads this site, you can kiss my ass...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Freshman year, first semester, I paid $1100 for books, and then we only actually used one of them more than slightly. This really bothers me. Universities hold themselves up as virtuous. Then students hire them to provide to provide an education. Instead of being agents for the students, the students are instead treated like a captive market. There is a very real conflict of interest in universities profiting off t…
It's complete bullshit You can now comfortably afford to hire a staff of PhD students to tutor you 1on1 in every subject you want to learn more cheaply than going to a university. So where the FUCK is all that money going?
Oh and another 14% gets invested - buildings and securities.
Here's a weird idea. Bundle materials into tuition expenses. It incentivizes the right people with the power and market participation to optimize for the right thing. Presumably, teachers and departments would have to justify costs from a materials budget to an admin forcing real downward pressure on the textbook market. The current state of textbooks acts like a surprise fee(dark pattern) where you purchase a produc…
We cannot be funding things that are not truly new. I know that textbooks are well known for having multiple editions that pretty much just scramble the pages, but students should be able to map books around, and I bet that professors can also point out to the pages on older editions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hang on there. A legal hazard is not necessarily a moral hazard.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard
Here's a weird idea. Bundle materials into tuition expenses. It incentivizes the right people with the power and market participation to optimize for the right thing. Presumably, teachers and departments would have to justify costs from a materials budget to an admin forcing real downward pressure on the textbook market. The current state of textbooks acts like a surprise fee(dark pattern) where you purchase a produc…
I think that's how it's done in the UK? I don't remember paying out the wazoo for my course books. If I did have to pay it would have been some nominal amount.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Freshman year, first semester, I paid $1100 for books, and then we only actually used one of them more than slightly. This really bothers me. Universities hold themselves up as virtuous. Then students hire them to provide to provide an education. Instead of being agents for the students, the students are instead treated like a captive market. There is a very real conflict of interest in universities profiting off t…
It's complete bullshit You can now comfortably afford to hire a staff of PhD students to tutor you 1on1 in every subject you want to learn more cheaply than going to a university. So where the FUCK is all that money going?
I came to America poor, and went straight to a public university, on scholarship and no money to even pay for food (grad seminars and special events with free sandwiches and pizza is how I learned about things like quaternions as an undergrad). But as an eastern European hacker, i had a complete disregard of copyright, I also grew up in the 90s when hacker ethos included strong anti-authoritarian elements. No way I w…