Hacker News Reader

Comment by yequalsx | Hacker News Reader

I teach math at a community college. The courses we teach cover content that hasn’t meaningfully changed in a long time yet textbooks change frequently. About 10 years ago I decided that I would never require paid content for my courses. I make my own problems sets and lectures. I use lectures on YouTube and where possible free, open source textbooks.

The publishers got too greedy. Their websites all suck. Their lectures are generally terrible. Their books sneak in ads. There is nothing user friendly about that industry. I hope it withers and dies and gets replaced by something more palatable.

View on HN

Not all heroes wear capes sir. Thank you for not supporting the problem.

Edit: Thanks for the down votes for expressing thanks. Would expect nothing less.

NOTE: I didn't downvote you. I almost never downvote people, and here on HN specifically I don't have enough karma anyways

I wish there was a way to both downvote and anonymously provide feedback.

With the thread of retribution downvotes I can understand not wanting to both downvote and publicly say you did so, but it would be nice to have a way of saying what it is you objected to.

I also wonder if websites could then use that data to fight astroturfing (e.g., if an account consistently downvotes without providing feedback does that indicate a higher likelihood that the account is being used to influence the site without trying to contribute to and improve it?, etc)

Totally agree. I just wanted to say thank you.

If you don't get updated textbooks, how do you deal with all the changes to the cosine function or the pythagorean theorem? /s

Thank you for doing that - I'm sure your students appreciate it.

One of my professors specifically told us to get an older version of the textbook used, presumably to save us money. I was able to get it for ~$10 used on Amazon instead of $150 and I'm pretty sure the content was identical.

Book reuse is also key. I was able to use my Calculus book for three semesters. And like you say the content does not change that much.

Are there no appropriate open textbooks available in electronic form for your courses?

The form isn’t as important as the price and churn.

There is an excellent College Algerva I and College Algebra II open source textbook. It’s very high quality. There is a passable Calculus I and Calculus II open source textbook. I haven’t found any other high quality opens source textbooks for the math courses I teach. Hence I create my own lectures and problem sets.

http://www.stitz-zeager.com open source pre-calculus

Reply on news.ycombinator.com