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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad something is being done. But while the public continues to blame the lightning-rods instead of the actual source of the issue, the problem will continue.

What I mean is that book publishers take the blame, and LIKE to take the blame, because that takes heat off the actual bad guys in this story: college professors and their departments.

It is they that decide which books are used in what courses, and it is they that are given the public trust to protect student's education. Instead they value the kickbacks (in the form of offloaded workload, free materials, free automated testing, etc) over what's best for their students.

It is an inherent moral failing in US academia where the almighty dollar has yet again wrecked havoc.

Open textbooks won't succeed for the same reason that cheaper textbooks haven't, the gatekeeps, the ones that create the artificial monopoly for particular textbooks: professors/departments, will continue to act in a self-interested and immoral way, and the public will continue to blame publishers.

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I never use paid materials in my courses but I understand the desire to use things like MyMathLab. We have a lot of students. Grading sucks and writing problem sets sucks. The pay isn’t good either. Especially for new faculty.

For the most part at my college faculty want to do the right thing. The biggest push to use fancy websites like MyMathLab comes from administration. We are constantly having an administrator say things like, “A college in Colorado uses this website and they pass 70% of their students. You should use it too.” The forces at play go well beyond lazy faculty.

Maybe this is one more example of a broader pattern: if you're spending someone else's money, you pay much less attention to the price, and tend to prioritise side-benefits to you.

That's why frequent flier programs exist: to bribe you into spending your boss's money one way.

It's also (very crudely) why medical care is stupidly expensive: the doctor making the call is spending insurance money on things which don't even bother to have prices anymore.

In which case the solution may be to align incentives better, rather just wishing that the people making decisions would have different priorities. For example, if college courses had to offer all-inclusive prices, they'd be a little more expensive, and suddenly administrators would be much more interested in creative ways to save money, and in pushing professors to do so.

It consistently amazes me how often we fail to guide policy by aligning priorities and allowing the details to be figured out.

If faculty bonuses included a mix of pass rates, success in subsequent classes, AND textbook cost, this problem would go away.

Don't blame logical actors for looking at the existing system making a logical choice -- especially when we have the power to change the system.

> If faculty bonuses

Oy. Faculty don't get meaningful bonuses. Like, a $100 gift card to the university book store is a really nice gesture for someone who really went above and beyond. True story.

Not only do they not get bonuses, but even their base salaries are often 1/2 or less of base salaries in industry. Meaning total comp can be as low as 1/3rd or even 1/5th for competitive applicants (100k vs. 300k is a pretty common spread in CS. The spread gets even larger for top-tier candidates because academia has a hard ceiling but industry is more than happy to throw 400+ and top-tier fresh phds...).

>... included a mix of pass rates, success in subsequent classes, AND textbook cost, this problem would go away.

It consistently amazes me that people underestimate the difficulty of perfectly projecting a high-dimensional approximation of an inherently unknowable quantity onto a single scalar.

If it were actually possible to do what you prescribe, to reduce good teaching down to a measurable combination of measurable variables, then why on earth wouldn't we just replace all teaching with a reinforcement learning algorithm?

Oh, and BTW, things like MyMathLab aren't even saving professors' time. They are saving graduate TA time. Those TA's are making 20k-30k a year.

The reason that auto-grading software can charge a lot of money is that even horrendously underpaid graduate TA labor is extremely expensive compared to a software license.

So, I think subjecting faculty to teaching metrics is probably a terrible idea, especially in STEM at lower tier universities. Recruiting is already hard enough. Doing so is not going to have the intended effect and might even cause a brain drain.

Projects like this pilot are a much better idea. We should also have pilot programs for open-sourced auto-grading software and small NSF grants (e.g., $8k over 3 months -- a princely some for a grad TA!) to cover the cost of refreshing the question banks every few years.

Agreed -- making alternatives, which are as good for the professor, and free for the student, seems like a great idea.

Correcting incentives is indeed hard. My guess is that, with professors, the ideal is actually zero explicit incentive: teaching well, or passing lots of students, should get you no more money, and neither more nor less subsequent teaching duties. They will never all be great, but the ones who are great at gaming any reward system the administrators can think up, those ones are always terrible. And seeing them richly rewarded is disheartening for the more honest.

As the child of tenured research faculty (before they left for greener pastures), I'm well aware of the systemic dysfunction.

But throwing up our hands and saying "We can't do anything perfect about this problem, so it's better to do nothing" doesn't make progress either.

To the GP's "Projects like this pilot are a much better idea [than explicit incentives]", my comment was in continuation of the sentiment that "It doesn't matter if you have excellent, free materials, if economic incentives (for-profit publishers) dissuade faculty from using them."

Will any system be gamed? Invariably. So we tweak it. And tweak it again.

Weaning academia (and I'm specifically looking at community colleges and technical schools, who I know are far worse offenders given their lesser resources) off for-profit course material seems a just deployment of incentives and government resources, because it's a barrier to entry market rather than an ongoing investment.

After materials of marketable quality are produced, the system is likely to be self-sustaining with the correct revenue direction.

The only reason it hasn't been done is the cost of producing the initial materials, and the unwillingness of any one user to bear that entire cost.

Take a look at Knewton Alta[1] as an alternative to MyMathLab. It uses OER content and is aimed at being very affordable - $44 for 2 year access or $9.95 a month (cancel anytime, which is great for those 6 week summer classes).

We have courses available in Math, Econ, Chemistry, and more on the way.

The biggest change Knewton champions is mastery based learning by using adaptivity and just-in-time remediation. By encouraging students to reach mastery throughout the course, they learn more and do better on tests and assessments. We offer comprehensive analytics for instructors and administrators to identify struggling students for offline intervention.

Many students love it for homework because they can get questions wrong, get remediation in the assignment, learn the material and still get a 100% on their homework.

Disclaimer: I work for Knewton.

1. https://www.knewtonalta.com/why-alta/

I did look at Knewton but wasn’t quite what I needed. I’ve come to the decision to never use paid materials for my classes.

I’d love to learn more about what you were looking for and how Knewton might better meet those needs, even if Knewton ultimately wouldn’t be a product you’d use.

How is this $44 better than MyOpenMath?

> We are constantly having an administrator say things like, "A college in Colorado uses this website and they pass 70% of their students. You should use it too."

My mom is a adjunct professor, and is also getting pressured about pass rates and graduation rates. It's such a strange metric, because passing (and by extension graduating) is a subjective indication of comprehension of the subject material, but they never talk about measuring that. It just feels so transparently like leaning on the scales and asking to just pass everyone so that you can attract more students($) because they know it's an easy place to get a degree. The problem is that if you do that, then industry will figure out the degree is meaningless, too.

Yes, long term it will be as you say. The only thing administration cares about is passing rate. None of them care to measure whether or not those who pass know the material. So....I pass more people than I want to.

College professors and the department are the gatekeepers, they pick the textbooks, they set the curriculum. Administrators might push something, but it is exceptionally rare for anyone outside of a department to dictate exactly what materials and resources they're required to use.

As an aside is your argument:

- Underpay

- Being a college professor is hard

- Administration made me do it

Because that really was the smorgasbord of excuses. I have very little sympathy for #1 (see college tuition increases; unionize if you want a larger piece of the pie), #2 since the whole rest of the world manages without selling out, and #3 is pretty much everyone's job (i.e. standing up to bad administration decisions).

We've had the same lame excuses for the last twenty years while the problems continue to get worse. Until incentives align, or the public correctly holds professors/departments accountable, this will continue and continue to get worse. None of the excuses here change that.

I am in a union. We do get pressure from administration. They can’t force me to use a given website but pressure does exist. You’ve made a lot of assumptions about me and what happens in departments. I’ve been in the job for 18 years and my anecdotal experience differs from your perception. I’m guessing you aren’t employed as a faculty member at a college. I don’t know if this is the case but your assertions feel like someone who is speaking about things they peripherally understand.

Your first paragraph is just plain wrong. There have been a number of states that have legally mandated that there can be no more than one precollege level math course before being allowed to take college algebra. This is an example of effectively being told what to do whilst maintaining the veneer of faculty control. I do not think you really understand the situation.

You made a comment about the rest of the world not selling out. You really think this? Google engineers haven’t sold out so to speak? Soldiers transporting people to secret prisons to be tortured haven’t sold out? When you use such hyperbole it’s hard not to read into your words anger and bitterness. It diminishes the quality of your comment.

I reiterate, the forces at play are not as simplistic as you appear to think. And the solution definitely isn’t as simplistic as the one you gave.

> There have been a number of states that have legally mandated that there can be no more than one precollege level math course before being allowed to take college algebra.

This seems... unlikely. By "college algebra", do you mean "a group is a structure with the following properties", or "x is called a variable"?

In the United States college algebra is a course that covers things like the quadratic formula, solving basic exponential equations and things like that.

That's not true "in the United States". It's a euphemistic choice by colleges that are ashamed to say "remedial algebra". The same course is called "algebra" when you take it in middle school, "algebra" when you take it in high school, and "college algebra" (apparently) when you take it as a college graduation requirement.

On the other hand, colleges do offer a different course called "algebra", which introduces group theory and is nothing like grade school algebra.

>> there can be no more than one precollege level math course before being allowed to take college algebra

The way you've defined "college algebra", it is a precollege level math course.

Well, I teach college algebra a lot and I teach it in the United States. I’m telling you what that term means in the United States. I don’t know what it means outside of the United States.

Beginning Algebra and Intermmediate Algebra are the names for courses that cover basic algebraic topics at the pre college level. Do you think I’m lying or otherwise wrong? Go to the American version of Amazon.com and search for college algebra textbooks. Look at the table of contents and you’ll see that my description is accurate.

In the United States courses that teach basic ring theory and group theory are usually called Modern Algebra or Abstract Algebra. You appear to have an axe to grind. Your apparent anger is misplaced. We are just discussing the names of things and not on the merit of those things.

What do you think the difference in curriculum is between "college algebra" and "remedial algebra"?

Why do you believe I'm outside the United States?

You don't appear to be qualified to speak for "the United States".

> We are just discussing the names of things and not on the merit of those things.

The name "college algebra" is a pretty transparent attempt to attribute spurious merit to the course. Imagine you see a course catalog offering "physics" and "college physics". Which one would you assume is the college-level course?

I don’t know anything about you and haven’t I indicated a belief about where you are. All I’m doing is tellling you what the phrase “college algebra” refers to in the context of the U.S. higher education system. In a nutshell all I’m saying is that if you buy a textbook with the phrase “college algebra” in it's title and it's from an American publisher it's not going to contain information on the Sylow Theorems.

I’m just trying to save you possible future heartache. I would feel bad if you bought a College Algebra textbook in the U.S. expecting it to be about ring theory or group theory. Whatever the merits of the course are or the lack of insight I possess just keep in mind to check the table of contents to make sure the book's content matches what you think its title should mean.

> I am in a union.

And yet you're posting on here about administration under paying you and forcing you to teach using certain materials? Seems like that would be issues to raise with the union.

> You’ve made a lot of assumptions about me and what happens in departments.

You told us what happens. I responded to what you yourself had to say, and those are "assumptions?" Seems like a trap, you provide anecdotes then attack those that criticise your own anecdotes for making assumptions? If you didn't want to discuss your situation then why raise it? And if we don't have the full picture isn't that your fault?

> I’m guessing you aren’t employed as a faculty member at a college. I don’t know if this is the case but your assertions feel like someone who is speaking about things they peripherally understand.

Weren't you just barating me for making assumptions? Yours are wrong, very wrong. My perception is from working in a University and seeing what goes on, seeing my colleagues sell out the students for fairly measly personal gains.

> You really think this?

I've worked in academia within the US and outside of. So, yes I think this. This type of exploitative publishing doesn't gain traction in e.g. Europe not because it doesn't have benefits to professors (it does) but because they view it as immoral to push their students under a bus to gain for themselves.

> I reiterate, the forces at play are not as simplistic as you appear to think. And the solution definitely isn’t as simplistic as the one you gave.

I didn't provide a solution. I suggested that students and the public at large start criticizing the gatekeepers for this issue rather than a scapegoat. At the very least they should feel bad about their poor behaviour.

I didn’t berate you. Of course I made assumptions. I specifically said so. Where I did make assumptions I mentioned that this was a guess on my part. From my reading of what you wrote your assumptions are embedded winthin your assertions without any acknowledgement that this is what you are doing. There’s a difference.

> You really think this? I've worked in academia within the US and outside of. So, yes I think this.

You didn’t understand what my rhetorical question was about. It was asking if you really think the whole rest of the world hasn’t sold out. There are lots of examples of people selling out outside of academia and even within European academia.

I’m not seeking to change your mind. You have what appears to be a rigid view on how American faculty view textbooks. I suggest that your view is based on limited experience - as is mine - and that others reading this exchange consider that topics concerning something as large as the number of faculty and departments in the U.S. generally can’t be reduced to, “It’s because of (insert simple observation).”

Your comment about unions shows you really don’t understand the issues that affect a large portion of the American academy. For one thing over 50% of courses are taught by adjuncts, and instructors whose employment is at the whim of administration. They are not in a position to withstand administrative pressures. Unions have nowhere near the pricing power on labor you seem to believe.

Generally decisions are made by individuals who are not any more or less moral than others. Decisions get made because of forces at play. Such is my opinion.

While I don’t like the tone of your posts and don’t agree with many of your assertions let me end by saying that I agree with the goal. Our goals appear aligned. I never use paid materials in my courses.

I view a lot of these cons as pluses.

In college organic chem classes we had a component of work that was online.

The main benefit was that it gave instant feedback and explanations, much better than the cycle of turning in physical work to get it back 2 weeks later and never look at it again.

I would rather have the better product at a higher cost than a free textbook and 1980s style grading.

If you want open textbooks to succeed there also have to be open resources. It's not just less work for teachers, in many cases it's higher quality as well.

On top of the digital stuff, which we used to solidify concepts, we had more involved psets which were turned in on paper. I thought it worked pretty well.

So, while people on HN like to complain and say controversial things like 'the almighty dollar hath wreaked havok once more, gather hither with pitchforks', I have had no issues with this.

Do american universities not have student unions? They seem to be pretty effective at preventing this kind of thing in the UK...

For the most part unions in the U.S. are ineffectual. Union membership is quite low and only in select industries. Pricing power for unions is virtually nonexistent. In addition to all this there are no unions for students worth mentioning. Students have very little negotiating power at this time.

Considering how weak labor unions are in the United States, the notion of an effective student union seems positively quaint. Oddly, in my experience the phrase "student union" usually refers to a campus center, not an actual union.

The "student union" in my school was basically one building with offices (which I assume they rented out) and a bagel shop. Beyond that I never heard of them doing anything, and certainly nothing that behaved like a union.

Yes there are student unions but they are mostly just involved in planning social activities if you can believe that. They're completely useless for changing any type of administrative policy.

That's because here in the US students don't think of it as a union. If the student union became a real thing where students collectively threw their weight around by making demands and staging protests/walkouts/etc. it would lead to change in administrative policy.

How do they do this in the UK? I mean, what's the mechanism? Do they have a formal seat at the table for textbook decisions, or do they just organise marches against lecturers who disobey, or what? (Seriously asking.)

I also had the idea that there was a culture difference, under which US courses tended to follow a book, while UK courses tended to follow a fixed path local to the university, slowly adapting the notes of what the last guy taught, etc.

That cultural difference certainly seems to exist. A few courses follow a book, but a lot don't I would say.

At least at my university (the University of Bristol), the Student Union had a formal seat (or multiple) at the table for pretty much every decision the university took (whether they were listened to is another matter, but they we're certainly there).

The relationship between the university and the students union was also pretty friendly. There was no need to march against lecturers, because the people in the departments whose job it was to work with student representatives were usually pretty happy to reduce course costs where possible. It's basically a win-win situation, so why not!

Thanks!

Our school had a student congress with a much more direct working relationship with administration on behalf of the students than the union ever did.

Interestingly, one of my good friends for a year was a student from France who was amazed at how much more we were getting done in classes, because we weren't constantly going on strike like he was used to.

Full disclosure: I'm a college physics professor.

You're making it sound like writing a good textbook (or notes to take the place of one) is somehow straightforward or easy. Believe me, it is not. I've taught out of half a dozen intro physics textbooks and served as a peer reviewer for portions of another, and some of them were just plain cruddy. Sometimes that meant actual errors in the physics (I got that chapter rewritten), but more often it was just books with unhelpful explanations or pointlessly confusing homework problems or weirdly flawed assumptions about what students using the book already know.

In the past couple of decades, there has been a lot of research on what actually makes a physics textbook work, and a number of good, innovative texts have emerged from that (some of which look quite different from the traditional approach, in one way or another). The textbook authors I've talked to (good ones!) have talked about the care they put into gradually ramping up the level of sophistication in the suggested homework problems over the course of a semester. They've thought in depth about the pros and cons of different orders of the traditional material, and about what topics deserve emphasis and which could be reduced or cut. They've tried to strike a balance between rigor and accessibility of the material.

None of that is easy to get right! And despite quite a lot of looking, I've sadly not yet found a freely-available intro physics textbook that is even half as good as the modern, research-based texts that I know. So despite having had concerns about the price, I've asked my students to buy good textbooks that I believe can form the basis of quality learning (and that don't leave me ranting to friends and family at night about how once again I'm having to teach around some substandard bit of a textbook). I have not studied the literature of Physics Education Research enough to be able to reliably write with equal skill myself. (Happily, the textbook I'm using now is sold as six smaller volumes, so at least the students aren't paying for content they won't use.)

I'm not at all clear on which part of all that is "valuing kickbacks over what's best for my students". But I can tell you that I agonize over the choice, and I worry about cost, and I have still concluded that the best learning experience is going to come with the help of well-written textbooks by people who actually know what they're doing.

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