Poor incentives in educational aids

[steuard]

Today's xkcd comic raises point:

It seems awfully likely to me that graphing calculators have stagnated for some of the same reasons that textbook prices have skyrocketed. They're selected by people who don't have to pay for them, institutions tend to standardize on something and stick with it out of inertia, and their cost gets lumped in with the high cost of education (public or private).

I don't know what to do about graphing calculators (short of having everyone buy computers or something that they're likely to use ever again), but there are bound to be new possibilities in the works for textbooks. I'd think that some sort of free, "open source" textbook series could do quite well (especially if there were a reasonable way for college bookstores to print it on demand). Anyone out there know of such a thing in the physics world? (Intro physics especially.)

Comments

[jon-leonard.livejournal.com]

Part of the problem with graphing calculators is that they're not allowed to do too much: For something much more capable than a TI84, students won't be allowed to use it on standardized tests (SAT, AP tests, etc.). And while the interface on the TI calculators may be unfortunate, you really can get it to do just about all the math you'd need in high school. So there's not a lot of point in commercially developing something better for that niche, even aside from the test & textbook lock-in issues.

There's a definite temptation to write something calculator-like, both for quick computations at my computer and carrying around in my pocket: For some reason the computer computation tools are very powerful, and somewhat intimidating to learn. But there's still the adoption problem.

For textbooks, I think a lot of the problem is that it just takes a lot of editorial work to make a textbook usable. The markets tend to be fairly small, and the per-book portion of that cost is high. Open-source textbooks do exist, but last I checked they really weren't as good as the acceptable-grade commercial offerings.

[steuard.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure whether I agree with your point about standardized tests. It's an important factor to consider, but haven't the tests shifted to follow technology in the past? I'm pretty sure that graphing calculators weren't allowed on the SAT or AP tests when I was in high school (I happened to have one of the few models of Sharp scientific calculators that wasn't allowed, because it could kinda do numerical integration). But even if we accept that calculators won't gain any major new features, why haven't they at least gotten cheaper?

And you're right about textbook quality: I've yet to see a free textbook that I'd be comfortable asking my students to learn from. I keep hoping, though. (One thing that could really help would be if some author whose book fell out of print and got the rights back would release it under a Creative Commons license or into the public domain. There would still need to be pretty strong control of the project by one or a few people for the "release" versions, or else the quality would quickly erode.)

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

There are still (or were as of ~4 years ago, when I taught this stuff) restrictions on the kinds of calculators you can use on the SATs, severe enough to preclude the ones students may be used to using. (I think the concern with programmable calculators is that you could just write a lot of stuff to help you cheat in there.)

[jon-leonard.livejournal.com]

Well, if you were designing something useful that's calculator-like now, it'd probably do wireless, and maybe look more like an iPod touch with a numeric keypad, etc. That's pretty far from the tough-to-cheat-with design point. In terms of cost, yeah, they should probably be a lot cheaper now.

A possible path to an open textbook might be to do a chapter-length piece on something that isn't well-treated in whatever you're using for the main textbook(s). I often do page-length sheets for specific topics, but that's quite different from what a textbook should provide.