Reveal Your Uncool Conservative Beliefs Here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_textbook

I just remember it being a shitshow because you could go to the university bookstore right before the semester started in the hopes that the books in the "HIST 211" bin were right but it's possible some miscommunication happened and that was the book for the other instructor's session. You could never know for sure unless you got the syllabus from the first day of class. The non-university bookstore was even worse, because half the time they'd just label whatever book was returned from last semester with no knowledge of whether that was what this semester's instructor would use

norms of academia don't really change fast enough, i think because it's creepy hierarchical so no one wants to call out gatekeepers

many fields don't do close readings of primary texts even at the graduate level for good reason. but there are quality free textbooks in most topics now, imo it's immoral to assign a big expensive one at this point and you should be shamed for doing it or at the very least for writing one. i had a professor who writes a big bloated, full of colour stock images, just a stupid fucking textbook, now in its 37th edition. met his daughter and she told me he used the profits of the book to buy a summer house. fucking prick

ditto articles should all be free, pre-prints should all be posted. everyone agrees on these things and yet nothing changes

The textbook business is in the doldrums. It's close to crisis point. There is a huge amount of IP theft and reselling which has radically impacted margins. It also doesn't help that enrolments are down so there is a glut of books and fewer students. The long-term options are similar to the music industry - slash prices for digital or bring in some kind of value add like integrated LMSs. Margins have been good in the past, possibly too good, but textsbooks can take years to work on and have a limited shelf life,

xp - our textbook buyback was pretty good. me and a friend one year went to the largest freshman dorm after finals and before move out, and offered to take their textbooks back to the bookstore for them, and split the buyback fee. I think we did okay for a one afternoon half-assed sales effort. It helps to go to a school with a bunch of rich ppl.

there is no across-the-board good option, it all sucks

at another point this same friend went to the same freshman dorm and made $ selling oregano.

a couple instructors were of the "class notes should be what you need, but if you want a reading you can buy this textbook on cd-rom" variety (lol i'm old) and a few just tried giving us as many disparate materials under fair use as they could. these were... horrible and not as good as a real textbook

the problem with the open textbook bit was that some of the professors who actually liked to instruct (as opposed to doing research/publishing) would use textbooks as a revenue stream. so you ended up with books printed/bound by the official bookstore, or a required textbook where your professor was one of the authors (the case with a calculus instructor)

Yes, that's the biggest racket - assigning your own book.

the worst was this one German class where you had a specific textbook for both semesters and it came with this CD-Rom that had activities that we were required to print out and turn in.

I believe I either lost the cd rom or it stopped working or something, so I tried to find a way to acquire another copy from the publisher - no dice unless I bought a whole other textbook, they said.

fortunately a friend in class burnt me a copy - in return I did one of his homework assignments and spelled his first name wrong on it

end all four-year arts/humanities degrees and allow only 1 year max to study those subjects and, if studying arts/humanities, make a trades subject a mandatory "major," decreasing four-year degrees to something like 2 or 3 year trades (maybe vocational) degrees; subjects in trades/voc schools would only be available on estimated demand in the workforce in the student's estimated graduating year

all u need to know u can read in the Bible anyway imo

stuck in the ice age

so basically, a community college associate degree plus vocational studies? xp

well college associate degrees are 2 years of general education, including science, generally. where i'm from, you can choose a concentration, but i would do away with that

in terms of helping you get a job, quite a few science subjects are also equally as useless as arts/humanities subjects

restructuring an associates to include arts/science to maybe 1-1.5 years, then doing all requirements including main subjects for your trade to finish in 3 years would be good

You sure have all the answers huh?

My god TWU was right all along

xxp is this hypothetical or are you in a skilled trade that uses that kind of platform?

knowing people who went the skilled trade route, you end up with union training plus a set number of hours and tests as an apprentice. even then, although only a GED is required, having an associate degree is useful

In think btw that this thread should be for the uncool conservative beliefs only and there should be a spin-off thread/s to hold the opinions on same because damn, yanks, nobody wants to read ur ilx educational biographies

otm. Let's get back to discussing queer theory, okay?

it's good

any major that has the word "studies" in it is bad

maybe not agricultural studies. is that a thing?

mh i don't work in a skilled trade

i don't know any skilled trade that would require an associate's?

what i'm saying is if you are a student that wants to study arts/humanities, you would be required to do a trade

Is creative writing a trade?

Nope it's a hobby

Pretty much anything creative that you don't get paid an hourly or piece rate for is a a hobby and the fact that the very odd person makes a greater or worse living in a creative field doesn't alter that

i wish. if somebody'd put a giant inflatable rat in front of my house to get me back on course i'd be productive as all shit

I have no idea where that is coming from but I'm all for it remy

re: is writing a trade? i'd welcome a creative work union. (tho was once nearly a wga member)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflatable_rat

Hourly or piece rat

rats in the gutter
stars are a looker

let's see

I have my dad, who got an general associates degree and then ended up working as a floorlayer since it was a family shop, later went into the office to do managerial work/job estimates off blueprints/etc and spoke at a carpenters union national convention a couple years back

my friend was in the machinists union, worked on the floor for some years, and the company pulled him into QA as a QA engineer and is paying for him to finish an engineering degree (he was in college a year or two after high school but dropped out)

I have a bunch of coworkers with high school-aged kids and all of them cite pretty specific fields of study that their kids are pursuing in college? I feel like the "college is creating humanities grads no one will hire" period peaked a while back

unless you're talking about the ivy leagues, those mostly churn out people bound for grad school and business degrees and probably should be nuked

rmde at humanities-shaming

Thread title pointer badly wanted bytimes itt

mh

i'm going to guess your dad benefited from the high employment rates in the us and how cheap getting a degree was in years past (60s/70s/80s)

your friend in the machinist union had a skill, which is what i'm arguing in favour of -- those that get employer funding for a STEM are seen as remarkably valuable from her/his manager's view, and should be seen as rare, not an answer to high unemployment gap between STEM or engeering vs arts degree holders

that your coworkers' kids cite specific fields of study that they want to pursue in college doesn't mean much. what are they studying? what is their socioeconomic background and where do they live?

the hypothetical trades/arts degree i make reference to would theoretically be 'blind' to socioeconomic status and, to a certain extent, location, because availability of trades degrees would depend on that trades' job availability by the student's graduating year

i was talking about knowing human people

feel like there's a conflation of college as this aspirational class signifier and college as a requirement for employability that makes "college" both necessary and archaic re: humanities

college should be fun and not useful imo

That is a cool liberal belief and u have an entire site for those

yeah I tend to think so! but that is a very bourgeois standpoint -- if it was considerably less expensive or state-sponsored, it'd be a good time to find where you really want to go with life

as it is, the money outlay, combined with the immediate debt and societal expectation of return, means the amount of instruction and time spent are some value proposition where we're getting proposals for two years of instruction pounded into you with no time for reflection

why not just join the military

sorry that was an xpost to darragh' fine dismissal

btw that was my real stance
I drive by a billboard every day that now has an ad for the National Guard promising 100% tuition compensation

I would never dismiss silby I am only pointing out stuff

I meant more dismissing the liberal students to argue in the hallway

Not in the hallway. Nowhere on campus.

you should honor your parents whether or not they deserve it

Wow

there's a pretty wide spread between someone just being a mediocre parent and physical/sexual abusers