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by rahimnathwani
2482 days ago
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Your response is logically consistent, but doesn’t track our ordinary understanding of the world very well. At the time students sign up for college and commit to paying tuition fees, they expect to have to fork out money for textbooks. They don’t expect professors to give them free materials that mean they don’t need to buy their own books. But they also expect that professors will provide some tuition (including grading homework), as that’s what tuition fees are for. On your last point, if I convince my employer to pay for an expensive IDE that happens to come bundled with $30k of credits for Upwork, and I outsource part of the job I’m being paid to do, then that’s bribe-taking. And it's more similar to the scenarios I outlined than would be the purchase of an IDE without such a bundle. EDIT: looked at your personal site, and see that you create awesome materials for your students and the world to use for free! |
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- The professor receives some direct purely personal benefit from a publisher, like cash or a trip to Florida; or
- The professor receives some benefit that allows them to shirk their responsibilities to students, as defined by the common reasonable expectations of the academic process.
Maybe that second one should also have a proviso that the result of this shirking is that the students get less-good instruction, or maybe (being more strict with the professor) that the instruction the students receive doesn't improve, or doesn't improve sufficiently to justify the extra cost passed onto the student.
I think this does some work to track the difference between corrupt and non-corrupt textbook-assigning practices. But it also, unsurprisingly, leaves plenty of grey area. For example, I'm not sure if publisher-provided homework and grading falls into this category, since textbooks in many fields have included assignments and have teachers' manuals with the answers since basically forever. (I know that I had homework assignments out of the book in math-y classes as far back as the 80's and 90's, for example.) So I'd think that this would be part of the ordinary expectation of students.
On the other hand, it does seem fair to suggest that if the professor offloads all, or substantially all, of the course to some textbook publisher, then they're violating the expectation of the students that their own professional judgment will be used to guide their education.
(And yeah, I try my best to provide free materials to my students. I can't do it in every single course, because it takes an immense amount of time to create them, and, often, it's hard to figure out what materials work best for a course until you've taught it a couple of times. But I do it as much as possible.)