Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
The rules are simple:
Web of links
Don't use LibGen.is - it undermines the publishing industry by distributing copyrighted content without permission. It has many text books available for free. This reduces publishers' ability to pay authors, fund peer review, and invest in quality academic resources. Support legal access options instead.
/s
Wikipedia's entry on Z-Lib has its Tor address on it as well, so you can avoid that link too. Massive repository of textbooks and indeed books of any kind, all just available for free download. Makes me sick.
Unfortunately those bastards have a more accessible address on the open web that anyone could reasonably use, with or without a VPN to hide their traffic from their ISP. Apparently it's also listed by Wikipedia. RAPSCALLIONS!
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...
I went to community college out of high school and dropped out after a year. I went back when I was 35, got my bachelor's in 2 years, and was the best student in my major and got an award. All I did differently was read the books...
You also had the work/life experience by then to be better able to filter out pertinent information from the material.
Most college textbooks are written in an overly complex manner and require some skill to extract and process the information from them.
So right out of highschool you could have read the textbooks but gotten very little out of them.
Some of that speaks to your maturity and drive too tho. You clearly had a desire to go back, a will to learn, and hopefully a purpose to use that degree you were earning.
At 18 years old, so many people just go to college because its the next step or their parents told them they were. They dont have the passion, maturity, or vision of how their life can be different with a degree
I mean, going back in my 30s school is wwwwwaaaaay easier than the daily adult life struggles. Also, I have ADHD, and a lot of my peers went to college and professional life while I took an extra 10 years to mature. Bbbbbuuuut, a bit of grit and luck I've sling shot up to them all thanks to going back to school. It's not a competition, but going from $25k to $100k correlates to an increase in happiness by climaxing the stress of seeing basic needs.
In Europe we just have scripts for each lecture. Professors may liberally take and modify content from books so you might sometimes wanna check out their sources in a library but you do not need books.
in Germany*
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!
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).
I always pirated PDFs of my textbooks, but in the few cases where I couldn't find anything online (typically when the book is niche and very new), I would always wait until I knew that I actually needed the book, because it was frustrating how often this meme came true.
I had this one professor I was really grateful for though. He was a big open-source guy, apparently used to contribute to freebsd and postgres, and he went out of his way to find open-source textbooks for all of his classes.
I had this one professor I was really grateful for though. He was a big open-source guy
I had the bizzaro version of this guy in college once. He sold his own 150$ "textbook" that you had to purchase from a copy shop next to campus. It was just a bunch of sections of other text books that were clearly copied and put together in a tabbed paper folder by the little printing shop.
Was also the same guy that wouldn't accept assignments unless you turned them in a specific blue folder, which you could conveniently buy from the same copy shop for 5$ a piece.
Still kinda pissed about it like 15 years later, but at least now I can kinda appreciate the hustle that dude had going.
He sold his own 150$ "textbook" that you had to purchase from a copy shop next to campus.
Would have been interesting for the entire class to buy one, take it to another copy shop, and all split the entire cost.
Then, next year, hang out outside the classroom and offer to sell it to people for $20-$50.
Blue folder would be a little tougher….
Break into his home or office the night you submit the assignment and steal all the folders. Steal all from the print shop too. Demand them back the next day or $5 a piece.
I don't know how long ago that was, but the hustle has long ago counter measured pirating or second handing the books by bundling the new books with a 1 time use code to make a profile into the online part of the course where you have to take tests. You could just buy the code on its own when I was going through this, but the code was like 80% the cost of a code and book.
They also do the thing where questions in the book will be scrambled from edition to edition, so using an older copy of a math book for example won't track because they've arbitrarily changed it just enough.
Well, fuck the professor and or the school on this case. I would have encouraged you to make an official FTC complaint. Too bad that may not be around for much longer.
One of my CS professors was a top contributor to Wikipedia articles on graph algorithms and just told us to read those in lieu of a textbook
One year we had to buy a "clicker" to give digital answers to multiple choice questions live in class. We only used them a handful of times and then found out we couldn't resell them after the semester because it was coded to a specific student and couldn't be changed or something.
I at least appreciated the professor apologizing to us when we reported it to him and promising to not do it to another class when he found out you can't resell them, but still... I may as well have just thrown $50 in the trash and gotten the same result.
I just create surveys and put a QR code in my slides. They answer the question on their phone.
Oops didn't mean to! Sowwy I won't do it again. (Does it again)
Hmm that sounds like a profit making opportunity for a technically inclined person.
It was, they sold the clickers
Cheers to one physics professor in university that taught us by his own textbook, but we actually borrowed all the copies we needed from the university library and it was actually relevant the entire course, including exam preparation
We had a prof who said he only used to book for the problems and they changed their order each edition. He would give us the previous years question numbers so we could buy the book used.
My friends and I ended up splitting a single copy of the book and texting each other the homework questions each week.
I had another prof who used an open source book and only charged us the price to print it. You could access it for free in PDF online, or even the source to generate the book in additional formats.
My maths prof wrote his own textbook, we had to buy it but it cost I think £40 new and covered everything we needed for a 3 year physics degree and you could easily find a used copy near campus. Still got my copy somewhere.
I think it was the only textbook I actually needed, all my lecturers wrote their own courses and extra reading tended to be from journals. Only other book I remember using regularly was the CRC Handbook and those were just scattered here and there around the department.
I remember one class where we literally never cracked open the book. But it was still mandatory to purchase because it had a code to access the online learning tool we had to use for the class.
My anthropology class had us buy four textbooks all written by the professor.
None of them was used at all during class.
I didn’t buy them, or rent them, or spend any money on them. And then I learned to look at the book author while signing up for classes, since the book(s) is/are usually listed.
That's something I'd want to take to the dean... But then the prof would just use each book ONCE as a workaround.
I worked for a professor like that.
Apparently the guy had complaints like this for years, forcing students to buy HIS BOOKS. ALL OF THEM.
They don't give a fuck.
It’s a club, and you ain’t in it - George Carlin
And it will never be illegal to do that because young people aren’t practically able to be politicians.
That is one busty gentleman.
That's what I thought!!
They promised to teach you how the world works didn't they? Enjoy your undischargable debt indentured servant!
One of my professors, instead of a textbook, created his own wiki-style online resource for the class. Completely free, frequently edited with improvements
One of the best classes I've ever taken
One of the first things I learned was to never buy books before the first class.
I had a professor get upset no one had the book on day 1. In her defense, she heavily used the book.
She couldn't understand that professors would make students a buy a book and never use it.
In another class a student had asked about the book a few days in, the professor's response was "we have a book?" He inherited the class last minute and didn't have time to look through all the materials.
My favorite was my cultural geography class (amazing class btw) where the prof told us not to buy the book and handed out 3 ring binders to everyone with the entire book printed out in them😂