Coursera to offer students free online textbooks, with conditions | Hacker News Reader

Coursera to offer students free online textbooks, with conditions

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79 pointssonabinu17 comments

I've made a point of buying textbooks when they've been written by the person giving the course (and when they've taught me something).

Like many here I can afford it, and it's my way of saying "thank you" for the effort.

That's cool, as long as the professor isn't a scumbag. A lot of my friends have been stuck with some dude who requires students to buy new editions of his book each year (he makes just enough changes to get away with it).

Worst I've had was a chemistry 101 prof. With the knowledge, I'm sure, that chem 101 and bio 101 are far and away the most popular classes that fulfill science gen ed reqs, the professor chose not to write his own textbook but to create a (horrible) DVD with all the class content on it. Functionally, we're basically talking about chapters of powerpoint presentations with recordings by one of his T.A.'s explaining each diagram.

This was a while ago, so I can't say how many sections of his 101 class there were (though he also taught 102), but we're talking in the neighborhood of 300-600 total students. $45 per DVD. Which you had to buy, because everything other than the exams (i.e. homework, quizzes) could only be submitted online...with a unique key from the DVD you bought.

So assuming no royalties (he made the DVD himself), $45 * we'll say 400 students = $18,000 per semester. Minus the overhead of blank DVD's, to be fair.

This will greatly improve the appeal of Massive Open Online Courses for people like me who would rather read than listen to a lecture. I can read faster than almost anyone can talk. And a well selected set of readings by several authors provides more perspective on a subject than a lecture series by one lecturer. I really like the effort that Coursera, Udacity, edX, etc. are making to offer free online courses on college-level subjects. I will be better able to time-shift my studying and learn more faster if the courses include readings as well as video lectures. Three cheers for Coursera doing this.

Genuinely curious, not trying to be snarky: why not just read a book then? What additional value do you get out of taking the course?

I guess interacting with other students, having assignments to complete and having someone else look at them, getting a sense of accomplishment after finishing it etc. That's why I sometimes take MOOCs.

For me, the automatically graded exercise and access to a forum of people who're working on the same information are two major bonuses. Add in the fact that more and more employers are recognizing Coursera courses and it's a huge value-add.

I too can read faster than most people can talk, but I have the opposite view to you. If it is a technical subject and the lecturer is good then I get far more from a lecture than a book, in the same amount of time.

Kahn lectures are an example and there are many, many other online lectures that I would rather watch than read a book about the subject and I love reading books :)

Note that this is not an either-or. I will watch the lecture and still read the book as this is more efficient method for me.

  1. Watch lectures
  2. Browse book.
  3. Focus in on areas of book I find interesting or relevant.
  4. Do examples.

The only value lectures have for me that a textbook doesn't, is being able to ask the professor questions when I can't follow something (in a live lecture). I typically get way more out of a well-written textbook than a well-constructed video lecture. That being said, if the MOOCs would integrate a feature into their video players to emulate 'raising your hand' (for example if you have a question at a certain point, you can click a button and other questions that have been asked and answered at that or nearby points would appear, with stackoverflow-like voting on questions and answers, and the ability to chain your question to that point in the video if it wasn't already answered) it would make their video lectures even MORE useful than traditional classroom lectures and perhaps on par with textbooks.

One of details that makes Coursera amazing is the ability to speed-up lectures.

Also on that note: I recently discovered the 'Swift Player' app for iOS devices, which offers up to 2X speedup on most web videos (if they play on iOS already). It's great, and until I find something similar for MacOS, it's made the iPad my preferred presentation-video playback device.

Wait, I'm confused. Isn't the whole point of free MOOCs is that their content is open source, freely modifiable by other teachers, or anyone?

Or was I just under a rock when MOOCs were being popularized?

The way I understood this was to be that the courses are free and contain all the free 'open source' content needed for it; as they always have.

However, the addition being, they will offer parts of selected published textbooks for free which would help with the understanding of the course - but were not produced as part of it.

Hmm, not really. The current best-of-breed are taught by professors at big establishments, some of them basically mirror the university class they're currently teaching. They're usually videos too, so they're not exactly modifiable nope. They do tend to keep the content up after the classes though in my experience, so you could consider them open source.

-Coursera and Udacity: platform and courses are proprietary

-EdX and class2go: platform is open source, courses are not

These are leagues ahead of platforms I've seen which are completely modifiable in content.

Pretty much all [good] current MOOCs are free as in beer, but the content is not open source in any way.

They have (yet) to monetize, and they most likely will do so. I'd seriously expect that they won't stay free as in beer, but either paid (though orders of magnitude cheaper than 'classic' courses) or freemium. Coursera Signature track (verification & official certification/uni credits for some courses) already can be considered as a freemium experiment.

edX's 6.002x: Circuits and Electronics also provides the textbook for free with similar conditions. The textbook in question is The Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits ($79.99 on Amazon) by Agarwal and Lang published by Elsevier

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