[jrm4]

Higher ed instructor here and -- yeah, no. It's the publishers.

You're speaking as if we, as professors or administration love this system and strongly benefit from it. We don't. It's just inertia.

Put differently, re: your protest idea. Hey, go for it, lets see what happens.

[yorwba]

Have you tried teaching without any textbook at all? Because that's how it worked during my CS education in Germany. All course content was written up in the lecture notes provided on the course homepage, variously a neatly-formatted LaTeX document or a scan of the instructor's literal handwritten notes. Sometimes there were also optional recommendations for further reading, but I recall one memorable case where a student asked the prof to recommend a textbook, who wasn't able to give an answer on the spot because his course wasn't designed around any particular book.

If you think that writing down everything you want to teach sounds like a lot of work, well, that's how you benefit from relying on a textbook to supply the content for you instead.

EDIT: Perhaps I should've read TFA first, considering that it describes a textbook grown out of the author's lecture notes for a course taught without textbook.

[WalterBright]

At Caltech, a textbook was often specified by the Prof, but was rarely referenced or used.

> All course content was written up in the lecture notes provided on the course homepage, variously a neatly-formatted LaTeX document or a scan of the instructor's literal handwritten notes.

I discovered (and others have confirmed) that handouts of lecture notes are not very effective. What is effective is the prof writes them on the chalkboard and the student copies them, by hand, into a notebook.

Labor saving machinery doesn't work when trying to learn a subject.

[yorwba]

Taking notes during a lecture is a neat trick to force the content to stay in short-term memory for at least a little while. But that also comes with the risk of transmission errors. Instructor-provided lecture notes can serve as a canonical reference. As long as you don't treat them as a labor-saving device, but instead as an error-correcting mechanism, they're helpful.

[jrm4]

I've taught about 10 or 12 different courses. I only have one course in which I require a textbook, and it can be found for about 20 bucks.

[rahimnathwani]

"It's the publishers" skips the part where you choose what your students will study, and how they will be graded.

Pearson cannot force a student buy anything. But you can.

The moment you decide your course will incorporate MyLab, McGraw-Hill Connect, Cengage MindTap, or WebAssign, the student is on the hook to buy the access code, by buying a brand-new copy of the book. The access code isn't a freebie that comes with the book. It's the main reason to buy the book.

That access code does one thing: it moves the grading work. Grading used to be your job or a TA's, and it was paid for out of the tuition fees the student already paid to your employer.

Now you're double dipping: you make the student pay tuition fees to attend your classes, and then you make the student pay your outsourced auto-grading provider.

[jrm4]

And the majority of people I work with DON'T.

[rahimnathwani]

If that's the case, by what mechanism are publishers forcing your students to buy books with a single-use access code?

[spit2wind]

I taught a remedial math class. There are thousands of books for such a topic. I was required by the university to use a specific new edition (something like 9th) from a specific publisher. I went to the university library and found the 2nd edition. The questions were more or less verbatim but in a different order. The lesson portions were more or less the same and tended to be better. I explicitly directed students to this edition, which they could purchase for something like 2$ (vs $150). In 10 years in post-highschool eduction, and 4 institutions, I never once heard or had a teacher do that. It's a choice and the majority of educators don't do it.

Tip for learners: find an early edition of a book. They're often vastly cheaper and much better written. It stands that if a book warrants a 12th edition, then the 1st edition must have been decent enough to get wide adoption. Often revisions are bloat or, when they're not, it's educational to see the difference between then and now (eg Andre Tanenbaum's OS books)

[autoexec]

Publishers are to blame for much of the situation, but so are professors. I've seen them do things like require overpriced books they authored or charge insane prices for nothing but photocopies held together with binding combs

[Someone1234]

So you say "It's the publishers" but you haven't really explained the mechanism of action?

Who writes the class syllabus? Nobody from the publishers does, professors and or departments do that. Maybe based on advice from collage admin. But it is all in-house. Ultimately the college picks the books, they're the gatekeepers.

Calling it "inertia" feels very dismissive; and isn't close to an explanation of why somehow Higher Ed Professionals share no responsibility.

[spwa4]

Why not choose different books? For most subjects, why not old books or wikibooks?

[WalterBright]

Because Calculus, Newtonian Mechanics, etc., has changed dramatically since 50 years ago.

LOL.

[spwa4]

You should probably add /s for sarcasm. It's not very obvious.

I think it's more "laziness" btw. My algebra professor at university was famous for buying a 500 page stack of printer paper the last day of the term, putting it on his desk so he'd be frustrated with it, and after a week or so start writing next year's course. You got bonus points for finding mistakes in it, but there weren't many. The calculus course was the same.