4 ms·

Seriously? some professors actually use all that crap? Over the last five years, I've been a grad student / teaching assistant at both a large state school and

Seriously? some professors actually use all that crap? Over the last five years, I've been a grad student / teaching assistant at both a large state school and an ivy, and I've never once seen anyone make use of supplied handouts or tests. The professor I work for now has written a book which he never assigns, updating his handouts each year to keep current with changes. There might be more room for that $50 textbook than you think.

dougmccune 10y ago
I honestly hope you're right. And if so things like OpenStax might really work in higher ed. We'll definitely respond accordingly if the market tells us they want a cheaper simpler textbook.
dougmccune 10y ago
And also it sounds like you have worked with good professors who actually care about teaching, which is always really good to hear. Sometimes hearing about the more cynical side of how higher ed is delivered gets depressing. So keep doing what you're doing, and if you're going to become a professor yourself please become one that values teaching equally to research.
jccalhoun 10y ago
This semester we have switched to an OER (it is only the second week so I don't know how well it is working)but the last two years we have used a book from Cengage. The powerpoint slides and test questions that they provided were of terrible quality. I did base my powerpoint slides off of them but changed them quite a bit - including basic things like fix typos. The course was taught by several people and we came together to make a test bank and some of the questions from Cengage may have made it into that. More than that, however, Cengage (and I'm sure the other publishers as well) have been making a hard sell for their online interactive stuff and their ebooks. A year or so ago they came and made a pitch to us talking about how much cheaper they are for students (of course the students can't sell the ebooks back and can't buy used copies and their access to the book goes away after a year...) and how awesome the interactive online stuff was. Luckily, the course director is kind of a self-professed Luddite and didn't really care for it but other people at the meeting bought the sales pitch completely so if we had a different course director I could see being forced to use this drmed junk.
- dougmccune 10y ago
  Really cool to hear about the OER adoption, I'd love to hear more about the decision process. From another comment in this thread it sounds like people in your dept actually wrote/revised significant content of the text. That's both awesome in that you/your peers can update the content that you need, and disappointing, in that it's not going to work on a mass scale if every dept has to dedicate a lot of time to editing the content before they'd be willing to adopt it. I'd love to hear your perspective on the state of OER resources and their likelihood of adoption. Particularly if you think outside your institution.
  - jccalhoun 10y ago
    I had very little to do with it (last semester I taught during the staff meetings so I was a bit out of the loop). From what the course director said it was really based on the cost. I teach at a SLAC with a lot of first generation students who rely on student loads. One of the profs apparently mentioned it and then they went whole hog on it because we didn't like the current book all that much. Basically, they took a book that existed and added at least 2 chapters and then customized the rest. I don't know to what degree they customized it but I do know that wherever possible they added links and references to campus resources to make the book more relevant.
- busyant 10y ago
  This is a little depressing. I'm a lowly adjunct at one school and this is my last semester teaching chem with just an old-fashioned textbook (which is already overpriced). The department head has decided to switch us over to Cengage (with all of its interactive features) next semester. My suspicion is that the students aren't going to use any of interactive products. Do the schools get some kind of kickback from the publishers?
  - jccalhoun 10y ago
    No. To the best of my knowledge there is no kickback (they did give us a Panera box lunhox and a totebag...). Like I said the sales pitch convinces them how awesome it is and how it saves money. I also think the fact that a lot of the online stuff can automatically be graded is appealing to some profs. I also think that some people are not that tech savvy so they don't see the downsides of drm that are so clear to most of us that read hacker news.
ajdlinux 10y ago
Trying to think over my 5.5 year degree in Comp Sci and Politics... I think my AI and Algorithms classes may have used some preprepared slides for Russell and Norvig / CLRS. My Theory of Computation lecturer set assignments based on questions from the Cindarella book (which initially bit a few people like myself who had imported "international editions" from India where they swap the questions around subtly). Some of our first year maths courses (though I don't think they included the ones that I took) use MyMathLab. Those are the only times I can remember seeing those extra textbook resources being used during my >5 years at the Australian National University. In the courses that I tutored/TAed, we barely touched the textbooks at all, let alone even thinking of these extra resources.

dougmccune 10y ago

I honestly hope you're right. And if so things like OpenStax might really work in higher ed. We'll definitely respond accordingly if the market tells us they want a cheaper simpler textbook.

dougmccune 10y ago

And also it sounds like you have worked with good professors who actually care about teaching, which is always really good to hear. Sometimes hearing about the more cynical side of how higher ed is delivered gets depressing. So keep doing what you're doing, and if you're going to become a professor yourself please become one that values teaching equally to research.

jccalhoun 10y ago

This semester we have switched to an OER (it is only the second week so I don't know how well it is working)but the last two years we have used a book from Cengage. The powerpoint slides and test questions that they provided were of terrible quality. I did base my powerpoint slides off of them but changed them quite a bit - including basic things like fix typos. The course was taught by several people and we came together to make a test bank and some of the questions from Cengage may have made it into that. More than that, however, Cengage (and I'm sure the other publishers as well) have been making a hard sell for their online interactive stuff and their ebooks. A year or so ago they came and made a pitch to us talking about how much cheaper they are for students (of course the students can't sell the ebooks back and can't buy used copies and their access to the book goes away after a year...) and how awesome the interactive online stuff was. Luckily, the course director is kind of a self-professed Luddite and didn't really care for it but other people at the meeting bought the sales pitch completely so if we had a different course director I could see being forced to use this drmed junk.

dougmccune 10y ago
Really cool to hear about the OER adoption, I'd love to hear more about the decision process. From another comment in this thread it sounds like people in your dept actually wrote/revised significant content of the text. That's both awesome in that you/your peers can update the content that you need, and disappointing, in that it's not going to work on a mass scale if every dept has to dedicate a lot of time to editing the content before they'd be willing to adopt it. I'd love to hear your perspective on the state of OER resources and their likelihood of adoption. Particularly if you think outside your institution.
- jccalhoun 10y ago
  I had very little to do with it (last semester I taught during the staff meetings so I was a bit out of the loop). From what the course director said it was really based on the cost. I teach at a SLAC with a lot of first generation students who rely on student loads. One of the profs apparently mentioned it and then they went whole hog on it because we didn't like the current book all that much. Basically, they took a book that existed and added at least 2 chapters and then customized the rest. I don't know to what degree they customized it but I do know that wherever possible they added links and references to campus resources to make the book more relevant.
busyant 10y ago
This is a little depressing. I'm a lowly adjunct at one school and this is my last semester teaching chem with just an old-fashioned textbook (which is already overpriced). The department head has decided to switch us over to Cengage (with all of its interactive features) next semester. My suspicion is that the students aren't going to use any of interactive products. Do the schools get some kind of kickback from the publishers?
- jccalhoun 10y ago
  No. To the best of my knowledge there is no kickback (they did give us a Panera box lunhox and a totebag...). Like I said the sales pitch convinces them how awesome it is and how it saves money. I also think the fact that a lot of the online stuff can automatically be graded is appealing to some profs. I also think that some people are not that tech savvy so they don't see the downsides of drm that are so clear to most of us that read hacker news.

ajdlinux 10y ago

Trying to think over my 5.5 year degree in Comp Sci and Politics... I think my AI and Algorithms classes may have used some preprepared slides for Russell and Norvig / CLRS. My Theory of Computation lecturer set assignments based on questions from the Cindarella book (which initially bit a few people like myself who had imported "international editions" from India where they swap the questions around subtly). Some of our first year maths courses (though I don't think they included the ones that I took) use MyMathLab. Those are the only times I can remember seeing those extra textbook resources being used during my >5 years at the Australian National University. In the courses that I tutored/TAed, we barely touched the textbooks at all, let alone even thinking of these extra resources.