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My UK experience on a science course was that any mentioned books were highly optional and all course material was available for free on the internal network: l
by tfgg 13y ago
My UK experience on a science course was that any mentioned books were highly optional and all course material was available for free on the internal network: lecture notes, slides and question sheets. Any reading material was only a suggestion, and available in the libraries anyway. Courses where you had to get books, e.g. history, the texts were in libraries. There was even a slight kerfuffle when the only way to get notes for one of the lecture courses was to buy their book, rather than giving them away as PDF as was normal. The idea of being forced to spend hundreds of £s on textbooks is crazy.
- quasque 13y agoSame experience here. In the rare case where a key text was unavailable in the university library, the lecturers would usually email us scans of the relevant chapters. Alternatively, interlibrary loans - typically from the British Library, so we had access to pretty much any published text - were free of charge.
- EliRivers 13y agoLikewise. The professor/lecturer taught the material in the class, with spoken word and blackboard scrawlings, with some paper handouts for the occasional supplement and for question papers. Recommended books were for those who wanted to go deeper in a particular area and were available for loan in the library and were very much indicated as so; you could pass every exam with no more than notes taken in class. The idea that a book would be necessary for a class that a teacher should be teaching seems crazy.
- SixSigma 13y agoNot only that the book is necessary but the person not delivering the necessary material sells the book that contains it.