this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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[–] [email protected] 138 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (19 children)

I'm a college professor. I'm very aware of textbook prices. Most students don't read the textbook anyway, even if its something you want them to read everyday.

For intro classes, I use openstax, which are available free online. For upper-level classes, I try to pick non major publishers, ie not pearson or cengage, with much more reasonably priced books.

My version of this meme would be the prof begging the students to actually read the book he/she picked out that is free or cheap so that they are prepared for class and the students rolling their eyes and instead just going to chatgpt or chegg...

[–] taiyang 15 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm a professor who uses OER materials too; I might have bit off more than I can chew this semester since a new class of mine lacks a free textbook and I said, to hell with it, and am curating weekly readings from stuff I can get off EBSCO our campus pays for. So far it's solid but I didn't have time to prep it all in advance so it'll be a wild ride every weekend!

I think I figured out a sneaky solution though; I made an assignment to had students find and report on an article for 5 to 10 minutes of class. They get real practice for grad school and I get crowdsourced sources. Win win!

[–] udon 3 points 2 weeks ago

This guy also found a pretty nice (similar) solution for this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3CY6RR4uns

They basically wrote their own textbook through class assignments, students are co-authors, seems to work great in their case. At least that's how he presents it.

I'm still a bit unsure how to handle that in my own classes. There are not always suitable OERs or the ones you find come with licensing issues (CC-NC and afaik it's not clear if you can use them because I do teach for the money).

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