Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "let's talk about when companies wanted fixing books for resale to be a crime" video.

  1. There's also a movement to generate free course materials.
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  2. Back in the '70s, used bookstores used to have to tear the front cover off used paperbacks. Back in the '90s, the price of college textbooks was based on existing pre-orders. They set the price to make all their money back from the orders they already had. Everything after that was profit. What I'm doing, NOW, as a math professor, is purchasing the Learning Management System that accompanies the textbook for around $100. Included in the LMS are homework exercises that are graded automatically, for instant feedback. There's "View an Example," "Help Me Solve This" and "Ask My Instructor." They will give you a pre-test and auto-generate a custom study plan for you (and your deficiencies). They suck for graphing and can't (yet) automate the partial-credit grading of written work, so I supplement with a handful of "Writing Projects" that are graded by hand by a human, the old-fashioned way. But a LOT of students learn a LOT from what LMS's CAN do. The price of a new book is $100-plus. IMO, the LMS is WORTH $100 for a semester. The LMS comes with an eBook as part of the service. Students who want a hard-copy textbook may still purchase one, new, but I tell them "ANY EDITION OF THE TEXT IS FINE." So they can rent or buy used on eBay or Amazon or wherever. This way I can build a course based on a particular author and re-use the materials online for YEARS. I think the new books are a major scam, but the publisher can still get their $100 per pupil AND the pupil gets ALL KINDS of on-demand help. That help isn't always the greatest and some of the "Go to Read About This" just sends them to a chapter without directing the student to the actual part of the book that pertains to their question. That's why I make a video for every question the students might have. MY take on what we're covering. At my institution, the issue is quality control for remote and online courses. During COVID, the testing center stopped supporting written test proctoring. So I'm testing online with lock-down browser and cameras. But that's not the same as a WRITTEN EXAM under a TIME CONTROL with a PROCTOR overseeing the test-taking, to reduce cheating. You can spoof a lock-down browser and camera pretty easily if you want. Every time I bring this up, nobody cares. Academia is trying to get away from "high stakes testing" so that more students will "succeed." I consider anything less than mastery to be a failure, but I see more students "passing," who wouldn't have 3 or 4 years ago, when we still had the in-person testing under a time control. Now, Disability Services hands out extra time on tests like candy, and I have to accommodate those diktats. I think that if you give them extra time on everything, you're not really getting a fair measure of their competence. "He can get 100% if you just give him 10 hours!" Taking 10 hours to do what a competent person can do in 1 hour is not mastery. It's welfare, and may God help their employer when they show up and work REALLY REALLY SLOW.
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  3. BUT BE SURE TO RECYCLE TO SAVE THE PLANET, YOU RACIST BIGOT! The people telling us to do without and to recycle produce non-durable durable goods, to make more money.
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