31–40 of 64 posts
Hopefully it'll open access to more people and be less wasteful. I'm not a hugely analogue person, but have to admit, I much prefer non-fiction and text books in physical form over e-resources - for some reason it just goes in easier from the printed page for me.
Many textbook publishers, including Pearson, have already begun strongly encouraging professors to use additional online components from the publisher for things like homework assignments. Even if you buy the textbook used, you still have to purchase an online access code from the publisher (often for $100+ for the semester). The textbook publishers have been working on crushing the textbook resale market for years,…
Instructor resources have always been distributed separately afaik. If you're a student you can access free digital content from their website[1]. Am I missing something? [1] https://media.pearsoncmg.com/bc/abp/engineering-resources
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.
No idea why this is downvoted, same thing here. Ripping off students through overpriced mandatory textbooks is not a worldwide phenomena. Through CS Bachelor and Master I too have never had to buy a coursebook. The few books that were needed for extremely standardized courses like math 1-3 were available in sufficient numbers in the library. It takes two to force students to spend so much on books, a publisher can pr…
It is entirely possible that your experience might be relevant for CS, I don't know I did a Physics degree, but there are a lot more degrees out there than CS or Physics, for which your experience might not be representative, in other words: There probably are degrees out there that do require the textbooks or if not actual requirement, it makes the learning experience better.
Reality tries hard to validate RMS' wild predictions... https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
Of course what they didn't say is that online DRMed platforms give them 100% of the profits instead of losing money to used books or giving the bookstore a cut and they danced around the fact that students loose access to the material after a year so even if they wanted to use the material later on they couldn't (they can just buy a new code!).
Thankfully, our department didn't take the bait and instead worked on creating our own OER https://www.oercommons.org/hubs/open-textbooks but too many educators are falling for it. My hope is that Pearson's move will spur more faculty members to use and create more OER.
As a professor, I am not surprised about this. Publishers are pushing their online platforms hard. A few years ago Cengage came and gave a whole dog and pony show (with free lunch to ensure as many of us as possible showed up) with all these "statistics" about how great and effective their online learning platform was compared to paper books. Most of their "statistics" were things like "students like them more than p…
Hopefully it'll open access to more people and be less wasteful. I'm not a hugely analogue person, but have to admit, I much prefer non-fiction and text books in physical form over e-resources - for some reason it just goes in easier from the printed page for me.
I dont see how this does anything other than restrict access. They're killing the used book market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You see this is because the new generations expect to rent .... Nope. We just can't afford not to rent.
When owners of capital collude to remove owning as an option, they become sole arbiters of pricing. So "afford" becomes a bit odd when someone simply expands their profit margins as much as the market will bear.
For someone who still has many many textbooks sitting in their shelf many years after graduating, I find this very sad.