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This is great but the reality is also, "Professors write their own textbook, cost students $175,000 and an arm"
by ajaimk 15y ago
This is great but the reality is also, "Professors write their own textbook, cost students $175,000 and an arm"
- artursapek 15y agoI don't understand. It doesn't mean the district spent less of their budget, it just means it can spend it on more meaningful things like promoting sports and the arts.
- antidaily 15y agoOr pop machines!
- aheilbut 15y agoYou don't understand. What happens is that once the teachers/professors (this happens more often in universities) realize that they can force the students to use their textbook, they do a deal with a publishing company and sell the book to the students for $120 a pop.
- _delirium 15y agoYeah, this is unfortunately common, but it's also fairly common for professors to give their students a free book, or one that costs whatever the university bookstore charges for printing a spiral-bound softcover book. That usually happens with professors whose class notes grew over the years to the point where they basically formed a textbook, but for various reasons (disinterest, saturated market, etc.) they didn't take the final step of actually publishing a textbook.
- jules 15y agoThe €5 textbooks I buy from my professors have consistently been the best textbooks, much better than the €120 textbooks in other courses.
- technomancy 15y agoThis is why the licensing of the text is absolutely crucial. Unfortunately the article didn't mention it at all.
- artursapek 15y agoInstead of mass-produced textbooks, the more than 3,100 sophomores in the state's largest district are learning from an online curriculum [...] distributed over the web. I thought the whole point of the article is that the alternative taken up was a digital one. The scenario you describe seems unlikely, and very cynical.
- sliverstorm 15y agoMaybe unlikely in this particular case, but plenty of college professors write their own books and then make them required reading for their students.