Don't buy that textbook, download it for free
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It's a great read. Enjoy.
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~main/theory.pdf
Facultly contact info can be found here: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/people/faculty/bytitle.html
There is potential for $0 degrees. Maybe even free degrees. It's possible to acquire all the knowledge contained within a University degree on the 'outside'. That's not new but it's getting easier. But a framework for delivering the piece of paper, that would be something.
One other aspect is that I think we'll be seeing a change in education, where some people will be using the net to take classes their whole lives. There's so much I want to learn, but I'm not interested in another degree. I just want to know more.
The question is if this should be achieved via some sort of widely available, low cost way of providing a widely recognised degree-like thing or by removing the need for a degree-like thing in altogether & replacing them with specific certification (like CPA) whenever it is necessary (a small fraction of those jobs employing mostly university graduates).
But either way we need accessible education.
- Many can just prescribe to their own students. 'Introduction to Economics' could sell 1k units a year in just one University.
- Authors are presumably already known/respected/wrote the previous version.
- Many academics prescribing the damn things freely admit that one doesn't differ too much from the other.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/richard_baraniuk_on_open_...
... the week after he told us we'd have to buy $200 worth of dead-tree textbooks for the class.
Waldman's book was certainly very colourful, but lacked some rigour IMO.
I think students in each faculty should rally together and really push this point and work with the professors to find alternatives to 200$ textbooks..
The financial strain that textbook publishers place on students for profit inhibits the learning that their textbooks are supposed to stimulate... That's the big irony.
1.) Pool money together to buy the book. 2.) Photocopy it -- this is the tricky part. nowadays we can scan it. The students would take turns scanning in the book. photocopying it will cost $20 or so for a few hundred pages. 3.) Return the book and disperse money back to people in step 1
In most cases you didn't even have to buy the book, simply look it up in the library or class copies. Simply borrow the book and copy it. It was laborious and I didn't do this for all classes but some texts are simply not worth purchasing for the value they give. Others are priceless.
This is like someone else borrowing your code, copying it and using it himself or selling it to third parties without paying you.
In an academic context where I learn from books that are hard to get, expensive and I only use small portions or where this is a secondary text? Now if I was using ideas from textbooks to make serious money then I'd probably purchase the book. Two completely different scenarios.
unless there's some sort of online version available..
come on, harvard and stanford have like ten quadrillion dollar endowments and they get muscled by a thirty person publishing house in ohio??
i know the profs want to get paid. just pay them a flat fee of like $100k from their school's endowment and then release the book under CC license. the prof makes out because they get their money up front. the students win because they get cheaper books, quicker. the publishers die like vermin.
also some of these profs need a reality check. just like the musicians and actors...they are not a breed apart...if they want to gouge, they will need to deal with piracy.