Professors Worry About the Cost of Textbooks, but Free Alternatives Pose Their Own Problems

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Professors Worry About the Cost of Textbooks, but Free Alternatives Pose Their Own Problems
Beth McMurtrie, 2019/01/09
The results of this Babson Research Group survey Freeing the Textbook: Educational Resources in U.S. Higher Education, 2018 (48 page PDF) are not entirely consistent (professors claim to be deeply concerned about the price of textbooks, but most of them use commercial textbooks, with 98 percent of the texts used 'copyrighted' (ie., all rights reserved). But the suggestion that the survey finds 'problems' and 'issues with quality' in OER is a misrepresentation of what the study actually says; neither of these show up in the results at all (with the exception of one short comment on page 31). More...