10 ms·

U.S. Congress Renews $5M Open Textbook Pilot for Second Year

166 points by infodocket 8y ago

wyldfire 8y ago
No, not that SPARC. It's "Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition".
jnmandal 8y ago
This is great news but sadly 10m is still a drop in the bucket for this context.
Someone1234 8y ago
I'm glad something is being done. But while the public continues to blame the lightning-rods instead of the actual source of the issue, the problem will continue. What I mean is that book publishers take the blame, and LIKE to take the blame, because that takes heat off the actual bad guys in this story: college professors and their departments. It is they that decide which books are used in what courses, and it is they that are given the public trust to protect student's education. Instead they value the kickbacks (in the form of offloaded workload, free materials, free automated testing, etc) over what's best for their students. It is an inherent moral failing in US academia where the almighty dollar has yet again wrecked havoc. Open textbooks won't succeed for the same reason that cheaper textbooks haven't, the gatekeeps, the ones that create the artificial monopoly for particular textbooks: professors/departments, will continue to act in a self-interested and immoral way, and the public will continue to blame publishers.
- skh 8y ago
  I never use paid materials in my courses but I understand the desire to use things like MyMathLab. We have a lot of students. Grading sucks and writing problem sets sucks. The pay isn’t good either. Especially for new faculty. For the most part at my college faculty want to do the right thing. The biggest push to use fancy websites like MyMathLab comes from administration. We are constantly having an administrator say things like, “A college in Colorado uses this website and they pass 70% of their students. You should use it too.” The forces at play go well beyond lazy faculty.
  - Someone1234 8y ago
    College professors and the department are the gatekeepers, they pick the textbooks, they set the curriculum. Administrators might push something, but it is exceptionally rare for anyone outside of a department to dictate exactly what materials and resources they're required to use. As an aside is your argument: - Underpay - Being a college professor is hard - Administration made me do it Because that really was the smorgasbord of excuses. I have very little sympathy for #1 (see college tuition increases; unionize if you want a larger piece of the pie), #2 since the whole rest of the world manages without selling out, and #3 is pretty much everyone's job (i.e. standing up to bad administration decisions). We've had the same lame excuses for the last twenty years while the problems continue to get worse. Until incentives align, or the public correctly holds professors/departments accountable, this will continue and continue to get worse. None of the excuses here change that.
    - skh 8y ago
      I am in a union. We do get pressure from administration. They can’t force me to use a given website but pressure does exist. You’ve made a lot of assumptions about me and what happens in departments. I’ve been in the job for 18 years and my anecdotal experience differs from your perception. I’m guessing you aren’t employed as a faculty member at a college. I don’t know if this is the case but your assertions feel like someone who is speaking about things they peripherally understand. Your first paragraph is just plain wrong. There have been a number of states that have legally mandated that there can be no more than one precollege level math course before being allowed to take college algebra. This is an example of effectively being told what to do whilst maintaining the veneer of faculty control. I do not think you really understand the situation. You made a comment about the rest of the world not selling out. You really think this? Google engineers haven’t sold out so to speak? Soldiers transporting people to secret prisons to be tortured haven’t sold out? When you use such hyperbole it’s hard not to read into your words anger and bitterness. It diminishes the quality of your comment. I reiterate, the forces at play are not as simplistic as you appear to think. And the solution definitely isn’t as simplistic as the one you gave.
      - 8y ago
- nicoburns 8y ago
  Do american universities not have student unions? They seem to be pretty effective at preventing this kind of thing in the UK...
  - skh 8y ago
    For the most part unions in the U.S. are ineffectual. Union membership is quite low and only in select industries. Pricing power for unions is virtually nonexistent. In addition to all this there are no unions for students worth mentioning. Students have very little negotiating power at this time.
  - Buldak 8y ago
    Considering how weak labor unions are in the United States, the notion of an effective student union seems positively quaint. Oddly, in my experience the phrase "student union" usually refers to a campus center, not an actual union.
  - kissickas 8y ago
    The "student union" in my school was basically one building with offices (which I assume they rented out) and a bagel shop. Beyond that I never heard of them doing anything, and certainly nothing that behaved like a union.
  - anonymous5133 8y ago
    Yes there are student unions but they are mostly just involved in planning social activities if you can believe that. They're completely useless for changing any type of administrative policy.
    - beenBoutIT 8y ago
      That's because here in the US students don't think of it as a union. If the student union became a real thing where students collectively threw their weight around by making demands and staging protests/walkouts/etc. it would lead to change in administrative policy.
  - iguy 8y ago
- dhnsmakala 8y ago
  I view a lot of these cons as pluses. In college organic chem classes we had a component of work that was online. The main benefit was that it gave instant feedback and explanations, much better than the cycle of turning in physical work to get it back 2 weeks later and never look at it again. I would rather have the better product at a higher cost than a free textbook and 1980s style grading. If you want open textbooks to succeed there also have to be open resources. It's not just less work for teachers, in many cases it's higher quality as well. On top of the digital stuff, which we used to solidify concepts, we had more involved psets which were turned in on paper. I thought it worked pretty well. So, while people on HN like to complain and say controversial things like 'the almighty dollar hath wreaked havok once more, gather hither with pitchforks', I have had no issues with this.
- Steuard 8y ago
  Full disclosure: I'm a college physics professor. You're making it sound like writing a good textbook (or notes to take the place of one) is somehow straightforward or easy. Believe me, it is not. I've taught out of half a dozen intro physics textbooks and served as a peer reviewer for portions of another, and some of them were just plain cruddy. Sometimes that meant actual errors in the physics (I got that chapter rewritten), but more often it was just books with unhelpful explanations or pointlessly confusing homework problems or weirdly flawed assumptions about what students using the book already know. In the past couple of decades, there has been a lot of research on what actually makes a physics textbook work, and a number of good, innovative texts have emerged from that (some of which look quite different from the traditional approach, in one way or another). The textbook authors I've talked to (good ones!) have talked about the care they put into gradually ramping up the level of sophistication in the suggested homework problems over the course of a semester. They've thought in depth about the pros and cons of different orders of the traditional material, and about what topics deserve emphasis and which could be reduced or cut. They've tried to strike a balance between rigor and accessibility of the material. None of that is easy to get right! And despite quite a lot of looking, I've sadly not yet found a freely-available intro physics textbook that is even half as good as the modern, research-based texts that I know. So despite having had concerns about the price, I've asked my students to buy good textbooks that I believe can form the basis of quality learning (and that don't leave me ranting to friends and family at night about how once again I'm having to teach around some substandard bit of a textbook). I have not studied the literature of Physics Education Research enough to be able to reliably write with equal skill myself. (Happily, the textbook I'm using now is sold as six smaller volumes, so at least the students aren't paying for content they won't use.) I'm not at all clear on which part of all that is "valuing kickbacks over what's best for my students". But I can tell you that I agonize over the choice, and I worry about cost, and I have still concluded that the best learning experience is going to come with the help of well-written textbooks by people who actually know what they're doing.
tyingq 8y ago
Several of my kid's mandatory textbooks are ones written by the professor, and changed every semester to a new revision. It's such a transparent money grab...I don't get how they do it with a straight face.
- zdragnar 8y ago
  Depending on the topic, it's potentially a means to avoid plagiarism and cheating; there's only so many assignments you can squeeze out of the same textbook semester after semester, at which point you're at the mercy of students who sell their homework for quick cash. It's also possible- again, depending on the field of study- that the professor's textbooks are substantially cheaper for students than those from larger publishers. I had a few professors do just this because they were able to get special rates for the shop at the school they taught at. And yeah, it's entirely possible that your kid's professor is a jerk and ripping them off.
walterbell 8y ago
Here are some open textbooks, https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks > Open textbooks are textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization Whitepaper from Open Textbook Alliance: http://opentextbookalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Open-Textbook-Alliance-Guide.pdf http://opentextbookalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/O...
- HillaryBriss 8y ago
  Thanks for the helpful link to the listing of actual textbooks! I was looking in OP for that but somehow could not find it.
phaedryx 8y ago
They've been working on this in Utah for the past few years: https://www.uen.org/oer/ https://www.uen.org/oer/
skh 8y ago
I teach mathematics at a community college. The content I cover has a very slow rate of change. There is no valid educational reason for textbooks to cost so much in my area or to change from year to year. I decided some years ago stop using paid materials on my courses. I create most of the content myself. I have my own problem sets with solutions and create almost all of my own lectures. It was a lot of work to get everything to the point of being able to stop using paid materials but the up front work pays dividends in making my job a lot easier now. I don’t know how feasible this is for other areas but in mathematics it is. The problem with open textbooks that I’ve seen is that they tend not to be done well. I’ve found a few open textbooks in math that are very well done. The nice thing is that when you find one that is done well you won’t ever have change books.
- yorwba 8y ago
  > I’ve found a few open textbooks in math that are very well done. Do you have links?
  - patentnumber100 8y ago
    Book of Proof by Richard Hammack: https://www.people.vcu.edu/~rhammack/BookOfProof/ https://www.people.vcu.edu/~rhammack/BookOfProof/
  - skh 8y ago
    For college algebra and precalculus: http://www.stitz-zeager.com http://www.stitz-zeager.com For calc 1 - 3: http://www.apexcalculus.com http://www.apexcalculus.com I did find one really good intermediate algebra book but can’t find the website.
  - nickysielicki 8y ago
    University of Wisconsin Calculus 1/2/3 textbooks, GNU public licensed. https://github.com/fabiohenriquecn/wisconsin-calculus https://github.com/fabiohenriquecn/wisconsin-calculus edit: I guess as of this semester these are no longer being used in classes, they've moved to the online homework / $300 textbook model.
nvmd 8y ago
Came for comments by economic illiterate lunatics who believe in the right to spend other people's money. I'm not disappointed.
- sctb 8y ago
  Maybe so but the rest of us came for civil and substantive discussion. Could you please read and follow the guidelines? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - stevehawk 8y ago
    something wrong with him pointing out how it's not really punishment because the guy is so rich?
skip_region 8y ago
Somewhat indirectly related question. Looking briefly at some websites, of which most of them look questionable, is there a site, other than amazon used books where someone like myself could by old versions of college course books? Most sites look like they just buy books and do not have an outlet for the selling of books. For someone constantly reading about philosophy, it would be a nice change of pace for me to get some college related books that are not used anymore due to a new and "better" version being out.
- anonymous5133 8y ago
  Amazon is the only place. They've pretty much forced everyone to sell their books on amazon so competition is higher and prices are lower overall.
- sitkack 8y ago
  Try “thrift books”, great source of old text books and cheaper than amazon.
ckluis 8y ago
IMO - the open textbooks should be based on a web/tablet/e-reader based environment to remove printing all together. If they were in fact apps - teachers could even have the auto-homework pieces built in. The government should invest in this kind of solution. If you consider: 19.9 million college students - there are numerous classes every single one has to take cycle... we'd do well to build a US government app platform for all students in those classes.
- Retric 8y ago
  Open textbooks can be read on Tablets just fine, but e-ink is black and white which causes some issues.
  - anonymous5133 8y ago
    PDF versions are probably the best bet since pretty much every computer device knows how to read them. Also the better solution is to have the content in HTML/CSS etc. type format because you can add interactivity to the book. Modern web technologies are pretty much the ultimate tool in creating interactivity.
OneFishTaco 8y ago
In Canada, we have open textbooks in British Columbia: https://open.bccampus.ca https://open.bccampus.ca
dajohnson89 8y ago
[deleted my angry diatribe]
tasty_freeze 8y ago
I was surprised nobody mentioned openstax, which is organized by Rice University https://openstax.org https://openstax.org

166 points by infodocket 8y ago

wyldfire 8y ago

No, not that SPARC. It's "Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition".

jnmandal 8y ago

This is great news but sadly 10m is still a drop in the bucket for this context.

Someone1234 8y ago

I'm glad something is being done. But while the public continues to blame the lightning-rods instead of the actual source of the issue, the problem will continue. What I mean is that book publishers take the blame, and LIKE to take the blame, because that takes heat off the actual bad guys in this story: college professors and their departments. It is they that decide which books are used in what courses, and it is they that are given the public trust to protect student's education. Instead they value the kickbacks (in the form of offloaded workload, free materials, free automated testing, etc) over what's best for their students. It is an inherent moral failing in US academia where the almighty dollar has yet again wrecked havoc. Open textbooks won't succeed for the same reason that cheaper textbooks haven't, the gatekeeps, the ones that create the artificial monopoly for particular textbooks: professors/departments, will continue to act in a self-interested and immoral way, and the public will continue to blame publishers.

skh 8y ago
I never use paid materials in my courses but I understand the desire to use things like MyMathLab. We have a lot of students. Grading sucks and writing problem sets sucks. The pay isn’t good either. Especially for new faculty. For the most part at my college faculty want to do the right thing. The biggest push to use fancy websites like MyMathLab comes from administration. We are constantly having an administrator say things like, “A college in Colorado uses this website and they pass 70% of their students. You should use it too.” The forces at play go well beyond lazy faculty.
- Someone1234 8y ago
  College professors and the department are the gatekeepers, they pick the textbooks, they set the curriculum. Administrators might push something, but it is exceptionally rare for anyone outside of a department to dictate exactly what materials and resources they're required to use. As an aside is your argument: - Underpay - Being a college professor is hard - Administration made me do it Because that really was the smorgasbord of excuses. I have very little sympathy for #1 (see college tuition increases; unionize if you want a larger piece of the pie), #2 since the whole rest of the world manages without selling out, and #3 is pretty much everyone's job (i.e. standing up to bad administration decisions). We've had the same lame excuses for the last twenty years while the problems continue to get worse. Until incentives align, or the public correctly holds professors/departments accountable, this will continue and continue to get worse. None of the excuses here change that.
  - skh 8y ago
    I am in a union. We do get pressure from administration. They can’t force me to use a given website but pressure does exist. You’ve made a lot of assumptions about me and what happens in departments. I’ve been in the job for 18 years and my anecdotal experience differs from your perception. I’m guessing you aren’t employed as a faculty member at a college. I don’t know if this is the case but your assertions feel like someone who is speaking about things they peripherally understand. Your first paragraph is just plain wrong. There have been a number of states that have legally mandated that there can be no more than one precollege level math course before being allowed to take college algebra. This is an example of effectively being told what to do whilst maintaining the veneer of faculty control. I do not think you really understand the situation. You made a comment about the rest of the world not selling out. You really think this? Google engineers haven’t sold out so to speak? Soldiers transporting people to secret prisons to be tortured haven’t sold out? When you use such hyperbole it’s hard not to read into your words anger and bitterness. It diminishes the quality of your comment. I reiterate, the forces at play are not as simplistic as you appear to think. And the solution definitely isn’t as simplistic as the one you gave.
    - 8y ago
nicoburns 8y ago
Do american universities not have student unions? They seem to be pretty effective at preventing this kind of thing in the UK...
- skh 8y ago
  For the most part unions in the U.S. are ineffectual. Union membership is quite low and only in select industries. Pricing power for unions is virtually nonexistent. In addition to all this there are no unions for students worth mentioning. Students have very little negotiating power at this time.
- Buldak 8y ago
  Considering how weak labor unions are in the United States, the notion of an effective student union seems positively quaint. Oddly, in my experience the phrase "student union" usually refers to a campus center, not an actual union.
- kissickas 8y ago
  The "student union" in my school was basically one building with offices (which I assume they rented out) and a bagel shop. Beyond that I never heard of them doing anything, and certainly nothing that behaved like a union.
- anonymous5133 8y ago
  Yes there are student unions but they are mostly just involved in planning social activities if you can believe that. They're completely useless for changing any type of administrative policy.
  - beenBoutIT 8y ago
    That's because here in the US students don't think of it as a union. If the student union became a real thing where students collectively threw their weight around by making demands and staging protests/walkouts/etc. it would lead to change in administrative policy.
- iguy 8y ago
dhnsmakala 8y ago
I view a lot of these cons as pluses. In college organic chem classes we had a component of work that was online. The main benefit was that it gave instant feedback and explanations, much better than the cycle of turning in physical work to get it back 2 weeks later and never look at it again. I would rather have the better product at a higher cost than a free textbook and 1980s style grading. If you want open textbooks to succeed there also have to be open resources. It's not just less work for teachers, in many cases it's higher quality as well. On top of the digital stuff, which we used to solidify concepts, we had more involved psets which were turned in on paper. I thought it worked pretty well. So, while people on HN like to complain and say controversial things like 'the almighty dollar hath wreaked havok once more, gather hither with pitchforks', I have had no issues with this.
Steuard 8y ago
Full disclosure: I'm a college physics professor. You're making it sound like writing a good textbook (or notes to take the place of one) is somehow straightforward or easy. Believe me, it is not. I've taught out of half a dozen intro physics textbooks and served as a peer reviewer for portions of another, and some of them were just plain cruddy. Sometimes that meant actual errors in the physics (I got that chapter rewritten), but more often it was just books with unhelpful explanations or pointlessly confusing homework problems or weirdly flawed assumptions about what students using the book already know. In the past couple of decades, there has been a lot of research on what actually makes a physics textbook work, and a number of good, innovative texts have emerged from that (some of which look quite different from the traditional approach, in one way or another). The textbook authors I've talked to (good ones!) have talked about the care they put into gradually ramping up the level of sophistication in the suggested homework problems over the course of a semester. They've thought in depth about the pros and cons of different orders of the traditional material, and about what topics deserve emphasis and which could be reduced or cut. They've tried to strike a balance between rigor and accessibility of the material. None of that is easy to get right! And despite quite a lot of looking, I've sadly not yet found a freely-available intro physics textbook that is even half as good as the modern, research-based texts that I know. So despite having had concerns about the price, I've asked my students to buy good textbooks that I believe can form the basis of quality learning (and that don't leave me ranting to friends and family at night about how once again I'm having to teach around some substandard bit of a textbook). I have not studied the literature of Physics Education Research enough to be able to reliably write with equal skill myself. (Happily, the textbook I'm using now is sold as six smaller volumes, so at least the students aren't paying for content they won't use.) I'm not at all clear on which part of all that is "valuing kickbacks over what's best for my students". But I can tell you that I agonize over the choice, and I worry about cost, and I have still concluded that the best learning experience is going to come with the help of well-written textbooks by people who actually know what they're doing.

tyingq 8y ago

Several of my kid's mandatory textbooks are ones written by the professor, and changed every semester to a new revision. It's such a transparent money grab...I don't get how they do it with a straight face.

zdragnar 8y ago
Depending on the topic, it's potentially a means to avoid plagiarism and cheating; there's only so many assignments you can squeeze out of the same textbook semester after semester, at which point you're at the mercy of students who sell their homework for quick cash. It's also possible- again, depending on the field of study- that the professor's textbooks are substantially cheaper for students than those from larger publishers. I had a few professors do just this because they were able to get special rates for the shop at the school they taught at. And yeah, it's entirely possible that your kid's professor is a jerk and ripping them off.

walterbell 8y ago

Here are some open textbooks, https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks > Open textbooks are textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization Whitepaper from Open Textbook Alliance: http://opentextbookalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Open-Textbook-Alliance-Guide.pdf http://opentextbookalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/O...

HillaryBriss 8y ago
Thanks for the helpful link to the listing of actual textbooks! I was looking in OP for that but somehow could not find it.

phaedryx 8y ago

They've been working on this in Utah for the past few years: https://www.uen.org/oer/ https://www.uen.org/oer/

skh 8y ago

I teach mathematics at a community college. The content I cover has a very slow rate of change. There is no valid educational reason for textbooks to cost so much in my area or to change from year to year. I decided some years ago stop using paid materials on my courses. I create most of the content myself. I have my own problem sets with solutions and create almost all of my own lectures. It was a lot of work to get everything to the point of being able to stop using paid materials but the up front work pays dividends in making my job a lot easier now. I don’t know how feasible this is for other areas but in mathematics it is. The problem with open textbooks that I’ve seen is that they tend not to be done well. I’ve found a few open textbooks in math that are very well done. The nice thing is that when you find one that is done well you won’t ever have change books.

yorwba 8y ago
> I’ve found a few open textbooks in math that are very well done. Do you have links?
- patentnumber100 8y ago
  Book of Proof by Richard Hammack: https://www.people.vcu.edu/~rhammack/BookOfProof/ https://www.people.vcu.edu/~rhammack/BookOfProof/
- skh 8y ago
  For college algebra and precalculus: http://www.stitz-zeager.com http://www.stitz-zeager.com For calc 1 - 3: http://www.apexcalculus.com http://www.apexcalculus.com I did find one really good intermediate algebra book but can’t find the website.
- nickysielicki 8y ago
  University of Wisconsin Calculus 1/2/3 textbooks, GNU public licensed. https://github.com/fabiohenriquecn/wisconsin-calculus https://github.com/fabiohenriquecn/wisconsin-calculus edit: I guess as of this semester these are no longer being used in classes, they've moved to the online homework / $300 textbook model.

nvmd 8y ago

Came for comments by economic illiterate lunatics who believe in the right to spend other people's money. I'm not disappointed.

sctb 8y ago
Maybe so but the rest of us came for civil and substantive discussion. Could you please read and follow the guidelines? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- stevehawk 8y ago
  something wrong with him pointing out how it's not really punishment because the guy is so rich?

skip_region 8y ago

Somewhat indirectly related question. Looking briefly at some websites, of which most of them look questionable, is there a site, other than amazon used books where someone like myself could by old versions of college course books? Most sites look like they just buy books and do not have an outlet for the selling of books. For someone constantly reading about philosophy, it would be a nice change of pace for me to get some college related books that are not used anymore due to a new and "better" version being out.

anonymous5133 8y ago
Amazon is the only place. They've pretty much forced everyone to sell their books on amazon so competition is higher and prices are lower overall.
sitkack 8y ago
Try “thrift books”, great source of old text books and cheaper than amazon.

ckluis 8y ago

IMO - the open textbooks should be based on a web/tablet/e-reader based environment to remove printing all together. If they were in fact apps - teachers could even have the auto-homework pieces built in. The government should invest in this kind of solution. If you consider: 19.9 million college students - there are numerous classes every single one has to take cycle... we'd do well to build a US government app platform for all students in those classes.

Retric 8y ago
Open textbooks can be read on Tablets just fine, but e-ink is black and white which causes some issues.
- anonymous5133 8y ago
  PDF versions are probably the best bet since pretty much every computer device knows how to read them. Also the better solution is to have the content in HTML/CSS etc. type format because you can add interactivity to the book. Modern web technologies are pretty much the ultimate tool in creating interactivity.

OneFishTaco 8y ago

In Canada, we have open textbooks in British Columbia: https://open.bccampus.ca https://open.bccampus.ca

dajohnson89 8y ago

[deleted my angry diatribe]

tasty_freeze 8y ago

I was surprised nobody mentioned openstax, which is organized by Rice University https://openstax.org https://openstax.org