
States are moving to cut college costs by introducing open-source textbooks - Dowwie
https://qz.com/962487/states-are-moving-to-cut-college-costs-by-introducing-open-source-textbooks/
======
darkengine
When I was at Oregon State (a couple years ago), all my math and econ classes
used "My{Math,Econ}Lab" as homework. Meaning, if you chose not to or could not
pay for Pearson's infamous Flash-based "web" app (which I had to spin up a
Windows VM to run), you could not pass the class.

It really astounded me that we had to pay a third-party for-profit company to
get access to our homework.

~~~
prklmn
I just graduated from a very large university and the number of professors
assigning homework this way was alarming. With prerecorded video lectures,
assigning homework like this, and using questions from test banks for tests,
professors are getting paid to do next to nothing.

~~~
thearn4
> professors are getting paid to do next to nothing

Speaking from the part-time professors perspective: occurring in parallel to
this is a steady growth in course section sizes. 30 students used to be the
norm for some courses, but 80-90 is the new normal just a few years later.
Some of these tools are designed to help manage this. But the actual process
of planning and delivering a lecture, providing individual feedback on written
assignments (like exams), etc. is suffering.

Teaching effectively to a large section is harder than you might think,
especially when teaching is only a fraction of your job & you have no TAs. But
half-assing it is actually not too hard I guess. And you are seldom rewarded
for the former. Thankfully for me and for my students, it is mostly a side
hobby for me and not a living.

~~~
BEEdwards
I know let's hire more administrators!

That seems to be the plan, instead of hiring more professors they grow class
sizes, cut corners, and hire more admin.

~~~
killjoywashere
Which is really the deans and provost growing a power base that is dependent
on them. They do not want to be dependant on a large group of influential
professors. Better to foster a workforce of neutered adjuncts overseen by
administrators who are not technically competent, and so design administrative
regimes that avoid addressing issues of technical competence at all. The IRB
is a prime example of this: people with a high school education provide
administrative oversight of researchers working at the outer limits of human
knowledge. It's insanity.

~~~
thearn4
Are you saying that you think IRBs are a waste by design, or that the way IRBs
are typically implemented makes them so as a side effect?

------
georgeecollins
When I went to UCSD (a long time ago) the standard engineering calculus book
was revised every other year, usually changing all the homework problems,
destroying the used market for it. It was written by the chair of the
department. In that way the professors and the book publishers had an interest
in keeping the price of textbooks very high.

~~~
greeneggs
One problem is that some students cheat. They develop and pass around open-
source sets of answers. If the problems don't change, then students don't
learn as well.

~~~
Chaebixi
> One problem is that some students cheat. They develop and pass around open-
> source sets of answers. If the problems don't change, then students don't
> learn as well.

The solution to that is to not revise the textbook, it's to pass out different
homework handouts each semester.

IMHO, the textbook problems sets should be for student practice and all the
solutions should be in the back of the book (vs. just the odds).

~~~
cmdrfred
>pass out different homework handouts each semester.

That sounds like work, we are talking about academia here.

~~~
kesselvon
It's not like they write those problems. They have auto generators now, go to
Khan Academy or WA and it'll spit out all the calculus problems you want

~~~
germinalphrase
I believe that auto-generation of homework/assessment elements (or the
maintenance of a large corpus of previously developed assessment elements that
can be curated at will) should be ubiquitous in all subject areas. Mathematics
is clearly the easiest and should be available now to everyone.

I suspect, however, that academic publishers would attempt to sue the pants
off anyone that built such a service if it relied on user submissions of
content (e.g. a professor uploads their homework assignments to the library of
content and that content can be utilized by anyone else on the system).

------
ravenstine
This is wonderful! Though I can't believe that Openstax wasn't mentioned. For
those interested in some excellent free & open source textbooks, look up
Openstax.org. I sometimes read through chapters for the heck of it. My only
wish is that they are made available for Kindle. Really makes me sad to look
back at my college education and think of all the money I spent on textbooks
of comparable quality.

~~~
Steuard
OpenStax is a really cool project, I agree.
([https://openstax.org/](https://openstax.org/)) It's organized by Rice
University, with support from big name foundations like Gates and Hewlitt. The
textbooks are free online, or campus bookstores can order print copies more or
less at cost (as I recall). I've done some peer review work for chapters of
their recently released University Physics book.

My main complaint is that their books are (intentionally) completely
traditional in content and format: they're designed to be maximally easy for a
"standard" existing course to switch to (since professors are often reluctant
to throw out years of work in polishing their lectures). That means in
particular that if you want a more modern textbook redesigned from the ground
up based on (e.g.) physics education research, you're still stuck asking your
students to pay big bucks for it.

Also, one negative observation I've seen as a chapter reviewer, at least for
this particular text: by their very nature, these textbooks aren't the result
of one passionate author with a cohesive vision and voice. They're written
chapter by chapter by a variety of authors under a central project management
team. So while the content winds up being solid (I hope), the text itself
isn't really much fun to read. (Not that most textbooks do especially well in
that department! But there are some good ones that do, and that can pay off
for the class.)

~~~
SSLy
Now, which are the new and fancy textbooks that you've mentioned?

~~~
Steuard
Tom Moore's _Six Ideas That Shaped Physics_ is one of my favorites. It upends
the traditional order of topics in an intro physics class: it starts with
conservation laws rather than F=ma, both because they're more fundamental
(you're not going to use F=ma in quantum mechanics, but you'll sure use
energy) and because students taking calculus concurrently will have learned
about derivatives there by the time you get to acceleration and _really_ need
to start understanding them. Lots of other pedagogically novel features, too.

Another favorite of mine that might be especially interesting to the HN crowd
is Chabay and Sherwood's _Matter and Interactions_ text. One key feature is
its tight integration of simulations using "VPython", which students start to
use within the first few weeks of class. That makes it viable to have students
study realistic forces rather than just the simplest cases. (E.g. adding air
resistance to projectile motion is just one more line of code, rather than
requiring a course in differential equations.) That also makes it more
reasonable for their book to give _true_ equations from the start (like the
equation for relativistic momentum rather than just p=mv) and then state the
more familiar forms as approximations.

Randall Knight's _Physics for Scientists and Engineers_ is a much more
standard text than those two, but it's still worlds better than most
traditional texts that I've used: it changes the old standards in smaller
ways, but still incorporating lots of research-based improvements. (Knight's
little book /Five Easy Lessons: Strategies for Successful Physics Teaching/
was a great introduction to Physics Education Research for me when I first
started teaching, too.)

Eric Mazur, one of the real leaders of the Physics Education Research
community, wrote a book not long ago called /Principles and Practice of
Physics/. I haven't had a chance to really go through it in detail yet to get
a feel for everything that makes it unique (one big structural change from
tradition is that he focuses on students getting rock solid on 1D physics
before introducing the complications of vectors), but he's such an expert in
this stuff that I wouldn't want to leave his book off of the list. (It's
organized in a bit of a weird way, mind you.)

I'm sure there are others that I haven't thought to list. Debora Katz has a
new book that I just heard about that emphasizes case studies, for example.
But yeah: almost any of these books are fundamentally different than the
classics in some way, and worlds better in my opinion.

------
thearn4
I'm teaching a data structures class w/java this coming fall semester, and am
putting together a reference text/notes in markdown to provide for free, since
it seems really silly to require a paid text for this stuff.

Every single item that contributes to the learning objectives of this course
is incredibly Google-able, but as new students to the field, they do need at
least some curation and direction to keep from getting overwhelmed. They need
a reference resource that they can trust which is academic enough to be true,
yet reasonably conversational. Textbooks used to fill this role, but
publishers priced and walled-gardened themselves out of relevance.

Side note: if you're an professor who has done something like this in the
past, I'd love to compare notes with you.

~~~
jpolitz
I'm basing my course this quarter on one from Northeastern, where Ben Lerner
has written a pretty impressive set of notes, the latter half of which are
data structures content:

[http://www.ccs.neu.edu/course/cs2510/Lectures.html](http://www.ccs.neu.edu/course/cs2510/Lectures.html)

The NEU course assumes that students have taken How to Design Programs in
Racket, so the early notes refer to Racket syntax. I'm working on notes for a
Racket-less introduction that uses the same tools for my course right now:

[https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/classes/sp17/cse11-a/Lectures.html](https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/classes/sp17/cse11-a/Lectures.html)

These notes also rely on a particularly good testing library that is capable
of doing things like comparing objects for structural equality without
requiring that students define a .equals() method first, which can be
incredibly helpful for getting off the ground.

------
djent
My college just started pushing this as well, but missed an important point:
some professors already use Creative Commons textbooks. I'm currently using
one in my proofwriting class - and my professor demanded we have a print copy.
I've only taken one computer science course that required a non-free book, and
that was because the professor was the author.

~~~
Jtsummers
What free texts are used instead of, say, _Introduction to Algorithms_ by
Cormen, et al or Sipser's _Introduction to the Theory of Computation_? There
are some really good non-free texts, I'm genuinely curious what the free
alternatives are and how they compare.

~~~
hackermailman
DPV was a really good 'free' undergrad algorithms text until the publisher
demanded the author's stop giving it away
[https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~christos/](https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~christos/)

"Algorithms with Sanjoy Dasgupta (Christos Papadimitriou) and Umesh Vazirani,
McGraw-Hill 2006. Note: until recently, we had here the pdf of an early
version of this book, for the convenience of the students. Unfortunately, our
publisher demanded that we delete it. Advice to authors: (a) make sure you
keep the copyright, and (b) do not publish with McGraw Hill."

------
sddfd
As someone from a country with a fixed book price agreement, the pricing of
college text books in the U.S. seems criminal to me.

~~~
yoran
You poor man, living in a socialist country... (sarcastic of course)

------
fnordfnordfnord
My .edu employer "encourages" faculty to use texts supplied by the campus BN
franchise.

As mentioned by /u/darkengine Pearson and Blackboard have their claws in as
well.

In my experience, most faculty simply take the lowest friction route.

------
zekevermillion
This is encouraging. I strongly believe that public schools at all levels
should (as in, morally ought to) use freely available coursework. Not only
does it remove one more way in which kids are sorted by economic class, but it
also teaches them something about the "system" in a meta way that could be as
useful as any other particular subject, in itself. But I can see the major
roadblock to this, which is just that it is damned hard to create a curriculum
in any subject that will meet all internal and state requirements.

~~~
snarf21
I think that is actually the answer. If you look at the cost to pay some huge
companies to create a curriculum and how much money all the publishers and
their sales people make, it seems pretty clear why it is so expensive. Why not
just have the Department of Education of each state create a curriculum that
is free for all schools in the state to use? All books would be sold at cost
to schools in that state (plus the state could make them digital). Each school
would be allowed to buy alternate books and do their own curriculum but at
their own costs. School boards will take this easy road to cost savings. There
is also no reason it can't be done at the federal level too and states can
pick and choose which parts they want of the federal curriculum to save costs.

The problem with universities is that the $50K price tag means the costs of
books isn't that relevant overall. Additionally, lots of professors use books
they wrote because it is about publishing not teaching. Universities want to
point to all of their faculty who are "known" and "published" so they are not
incentivized to cut this cost. Also, they want to be _different_ and _unique_
to justify their fees. The only schools who can afford to give away curriculum
are the Ivy Leagues that have so much endowments they don't even need the
money. Plus it helps their reputation for the (mostly) online schools that use
their classes.

~~~
zekevermillion
Yes, two different scenarios state primary/secondary, and university.

Regarding state universities, while true many subsist on tuition there are
some notable exceptions -- for example, the UT system has one of the largest
endowments of any university (public or private). I would argue however, that
it's the small and modestly endowed schools that can take the lead here. If
one doesn't care too much about cracking the elite rankings of the Ivies etc,
then it's not so much publish or perish. The schools can afford to hire
_teachers_ as well as more commercially successful researches who attract
grant money. For example, I took freshman calculus at Clarkson University in
Potsdam, NY. The professors at the time primarily used a weekly photocopied
handout to teach calculus, and it worked quite well. I later attended Columbia
($$$) which had some great researches but did a terrible job teaching calculus
(b/c the teacher was not interested in teaching) and used a shiny textbook
plus a half-assed "lab" that mostly involved fixing typos in Matlab programs
under severe time pressure.

~~~
snarf21
I had a similar experience. I had an ex-MIT professor at a branch campus of a
state school and other faculty with 10 year old handouts on Ada. One other
problem we have here is that there is sooooo many more people who want to be
faculty than positions that they can get Ivy grads to teach freshman comp at
state schools. Makes me sad...

We need some kind of schools that care about learning and not maximizing cash.
We also need a lot more trade schools and more apprentice style learning.

------
JustFinishedBSG
I think here ( France ) our profs are __required __to write a "textbook" for
their class.

We get a lot of awesome free material as a result.

~~~
hocuspocus
I think you should elaborate a bit since it might not be clear to US readers.

College professors (collaboratively) write teaching materials that are copied
and bound by the print shop of your school. Nowadays they're typically freely
available in PDF, to registered students at least.

Nothing like American textbooks sold over $100 by big publishing companies.

------
awch
I often wish there existed a 'student course materials bill of rights'. At a
minimum, it would require professors to indicate which version(s) of the texts
are acceptable, and would require them to provide this information ~2 weeks
before the start of the term, allowing students time to order used books
online.

The current-1 edition of a textbook, purchased used on Amazon, is often 25-50%
of the cost of the new textbook in the college bookstore...

Of course, open-source textbooks would be even better.

------
chrismealy
America could cut college costs by a quarter by making undergrad degrees take
three years instead of four.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
Actually, we should be expanding Vo Tech education.

Not everyone needs or should go to college, but we need good alternatives for
those people.

~~~
wccrawford
In the area I was from, VoTech was so looked down upon that I never even
_considered_ going to one of those schools. I can't help but think that
attitude stops a lot of people from considering them, even if they're
perfectly adequate for the career they want.

------
jimhefferon
I've been offering a math text that is open source (LaTeX on GitLab) for many
years, since 1995. I have had the good fortune to work at a college that gave
me professional activity credit for this.

Writing a text, well, is a major piece of work. The text body takes a lot,
writing good exercises takes every bit as much, the answers to the exercises
are important, and so also are ancillary material such as classroom slides.

People respond to rewards and unless they get rewarded for this it is not
going to happen nearly enough. If you are an alum, and have some contact with
your college or university, please urge them to give people credit for this.
Say its important.

------
EliRivers
I recall back at the turn of the century, I genuinely think none of my classes
had a required textbook. I know that some did recommend books that could be
used for extra depth, but that's all they were. Everything in the exam would
have been explained by the professor in their own words and drawing, at the
front. I've still got the set of notes from some of them; no textbooks
involved. Question sets were photocopied bits of paper.

This was in the UK; I can't speak for how common this system is in the UK, but
it sure feels like some people are getting massively ripped off. Clue's in the
title, surely; you're a professor? Profess things :) A few years ago, I did a
Masters in Maths in my evenings and weekends, for the fun of it, and that
_was_ to a large extent "get this textbook, make sure you can answer all these
question, see you in nine months for the exam" with a few phone calls and
weekends face-to-face thrown in. Whole thing cost a few thousand pounds. If
you're just learning from the books, the actual cost of the education is so
much smaller.

------
ythn
Somehow I doubt this. You think publishers are just going to sit back and let
this happen? Either publishers will lobby against this, or they will force
exclusivity contracts with universities so that "open source" books are
banned.

~~~
jcadam
Perhaps publishers could target the accreditation boards for their bribery? A
requirement that all university textbooks go through some ridiculous
vetting/approval process so onerous and expensive that only the major
publishers could possibly afford it might do the trick (and of course the
associated costs could just be passed on to students).

------
mrfusion
I wonder when more product classes might go open source? It's been such a hit
with software I wonder why more products haven't popped up?

What are your ideas for products that might someday have a successful open
source version?

------
taifff
[https://www.pearson.com/corporate/news/media/news-
announceme...](https://www.pearson.com/corporate/news/media/news-
announcements/2017/04/pearson-and-chegg-announce-partnership-to-make-
textbooks-more-af.html) Pearson and Chegg Announce Partnership to Make
Textbooks More Affordable for College Students.

imo, Pearson is really evil, I live in Taiwan and still lots of classes in the
top universities use Pearson textbooks, and lots of students pay for their
solutions on Chegg, which makes it all more absurd.

------
antisthenes
This is bikeshedding at its finest.

Textbooks were a _minor_ , tiny part of the total cost of attending college.
When you put the cost of books next to tuition, room and board and opportunity
cost of not attending college, it's barely noticeable. I probably spent no
more than $250 on books per semester (less on average, thanks to used books
and online materials).

This is almost as comical as a hypothetical scenario of putting public
terminals in health clinics that point you to WebMD, in an attempt to cut
medical costs in the US.

~~~
sathackr
The local public state college I attended was roughly $150/credit hour. So
about $1800/semester was my cost.

Books were up to $300 per class. Sometimes I could find a used one, but often
it was a previous "edition" which didn't quite match the teacher's latest
edition.

I spent around $500/semester in books, sometimes less, sometimes more. Which
is about 1/4 of _my_ total cost(yes I know the actual tuition was subsidized)

~~~
antisthenes
Guess my university was just better at giving options for accessing the
material.

A good ~30% of the classes didn't even require books (lectures and chapters
were available online), and the other 60% you could easy get used books for
half the cost.

The last 10% were classes where you had to buy a "workbook", which were only
available new, but they didn't come anywhere close to $300, maybe 80-100.

------
debacle
One of the biggest reasons I am dismissive of the "free tuition" change in NYS
for SUNY schools is the massive cost associated with college that isn't
tuition. Ignoring room and board, tuition is still only ~50% of the cost of
college. Fees can be massive (I was paying 2k+ a year in fees 10 years ago),
text books are exorbitant, and that doesn't consider all the ancillary costs
for lab supplies, etc.

~~~
burntwater
So since you can't (yet) get it completely for free, you'd rather just pay the
full 100%?

~~~
pchristensen
If it's branded as "free college", then students will have the wrong
impression when they're planning, and the politicians that deliver it can pat
themselves on the back more than they deserve.

------
ergo14
Heh, in my country we had state funded open source textbooks. Then right wing
took over and they scrapped everything just like that.

------
webninja
I pray that the quality of textbooks won't go down if they're reduced to free.
I know the textbook industry is a racket but I don't know many PH.D.'s who
expect to work for free. What if textbooks end up being funded by agenda-
pushing corporate advertising?

------
ReverseCold
"open source"

------
ourmandave
My daughter starts in the fall and during recent campus tours the advice on
the down low from the tour guide has been to get ebooks on-line and Never Buy
From The Campus Store.

They also mention Amazon's text book rental (but I haven't done any price
comparisons on that).

------
enknamel
This is great and all but textbooks for me, while expensive, were nowhere
close to my tuition cost. I'd love to see some traction on tuition cost
reduction. I know that's trickier but hey, Amdahl's Law.

------
BlackjackCF
Good. All those horrible, predatory textbook companies need to die.

------
EGreg
This should be done at the same time as flipping the classroom!

[http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158](http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158)

------
sn9
I'm really surprised Dover books aren't more common.

------
Tloewald
Good.

Why start at college? I am amazed that we don't have open source textbooks and
materials created cooperatively across the entire education system.

------
hyperion2010
I find it laughable that people think that $1500 a year (ballpark) is 'cutting
costs' when annual tuition is on the order of $50,000. That is an order of
magnitude of difference. Maybe students care about it because it is the only
cost they really feel, but come on, these efforts are marginal at best. I
thinking open textbooks are an incredibly important initiative, but they don't
make a meaningful dent in college costs.

~~~
kevinnk
Average annual state University tuition for residents is more like 10k.
Cutting 10-15% of that doesn't seem marginal to me.

~~~
SaintGhurka
California residents currently pay $46 per unit for community college courses.
A $250 textbook might be the biggest expense of the class.

------
ende
publishers : professors :: pharma : doctors

------
wolfkill
It is my opinion that

1) We continue to need new textbooks: Despite relative little change in core
materials for subjects like Calculus, there is a need for adaptation of texts
to include current applications and methods.

2) The best use of interactive media to complement and enhance learning is yet
to be determined.

3) The worst crime of textbook companies is lack of innovation.

------
carsongross
While I appreciate the token nod towards controlling costs, and the text book
scam is a mark of shame that the professoriate class should be deeply
embarrassed by, this is a bit like tending to the deep cut on your hand while
your severed leg spurts blood in cadence with your fading heartbeat.

~~~
mikebelanger
You're right, in the scheme of things it doesn't bring down a college
education cost that much. But it's one of the relatively simpler ways of
reducing the overall cost.

------
tehlike
seems like the best way to get college education at a cheaper cost is sending
kids to other countries for education. I am saying this as a non-american
resident of the US. You could use the extra money as a seed for the child's
potential business ideas, if any.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Your comment assumes that the goal of sending a kid to college is to have them
learn some body of knowledge.

A more common goal is acculturation and networking, which sending them to a
foreign school will actively work against.

~~~
tehlike
Is that so?

You could argue living in another country brings the similar benefit.

Though i agree that united states is pretty diverse from schools pov.

------
exhilaration
While this might be good PR the real driver of college costs is the ever
increasing number of administrators:

 _By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant
expansion of university administration. According to the Department of
Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by
60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the
rate of growth of tenured faculty positions._

\- [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-
real-r...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-
college-tuition-costs-so-much.html?_r=0)

~~~
rahimnathwani
You're talking about a colleges' costs, whereas the original article is
talking about students' costs.

You have the causality backwards.

An increase in # administrators isn't responsible for the increase in
students' costs (primarily through tuition fees). An increase in
administrators is _enabled_ by an increase in tuition fees received by
schools.

~~~
T-hawk
This is correct. People arguing otherwise are misunderstanding capitalism.
Tuition doesn't go up because administrators need to be paid. Tuition goes up
because the market will pay it. The administrators are the result of the
profit margin of tuition, not the cause.

It's the same argument that sports tickets cost so much because the players
get paid so much. That is backwards. Ticket price rises to the level that the
audience will pay, and then that determines how much money is available to pay
players.

