alt Hacker NewsI'm a professor at a community college in Silicon Valley, and my students use online textbooks. I try to use Creative Commons or other libre textbooks, but sometimes I use paid textbooks when they are heads-and-shoulders better than their libre alternatives. Some e-textbooks can be accessed on a subscription basis. I admit I prefer non-subscription materials, but a colleague advised me that often the book that students learn from is different from a good reference book that students can use once they've already learned the material. For example, my colleagues and I have had great success with an online, interactive textbook for discrete math. While the subscription is unfortunately only valid for the duration of the course, once students have learned discrete math, they could buy a used copy of Rosen's discrete math textbook as a reference.
The nice thing about e-textbooks is not needing to carry around a bunch of heavy books. I remember the tomes I had in my college days, such as Stewart's Calculus.
Replies
just hint students towards anna's archive and then sky's the limit
> The nice thing about e-textbooks is not needing to carry around a bunch of heavy books. I remember the tomes I had in my college days, such as Stewart's Calculus.
I'm not sure how relatable this is for people outside of my age group (late millennial), but growing up we used to get chided about stuffing too much in our backpacks and shown presentations about how we were going to give ourselves scoliosis, but then had like two minutes between classes that might be on the other side of the building (meaning no time to stop at our lockers other than at lunch) and we'd get chided even worse if we didn't have our textbooks available for the days we happened to need them in class (which of course we were never told in advance, and some classes had multiple textbooks that wouldn't all get used every time).
I wish that we had iPads or Chromebooks or whatever back when I was in school not even because I would have wanted to have been able to surf the web or play games or whatever, but just to have a solution to having to pick between having a sore back or getting worse scolding (with a side course of hypocrisy either way).