It seems the online quiz/testing racket, that is only available with the ebook license, is just the response to the fact that there is a vibrant ebook/textbook piracy community.
I don't really get why this is even a hard thing, surely there is some wordpress/whatever "quiz" plugin that the teachers can use to copy/paste multiple choice question/answers in and the school can pay the minimal fees to host for all their classes.
Textbooks were a scam 25 years ago when I went to school, but many of them were sub $40 or so, and could be picked up for ~$20 used. A few of the science engineering texts were closer to $100 but it was rare to spend more than ~$200 a semester on books.
Frankly, students can organize for all kinds of social issues, I'm shocked they can't organize to force the school to assure that prof's aren't playing into the textbook scams that seem common now. A bit of student fee to host a couple year old quiz server, and download PDF copies of class notes/etc seems like it should be doable. Particularly considering all the schools which have been providing online courseware for 20+ years now, frequently complete with free textbooks/lecture notes/etc.
There are quiz things. The online textbook ones do more than multiple choice like you can have questions where students enter a formula, or they deal with questions where students might have to enter a number but they need to account for students rounding etc. They also can randomize questions or parts of questions so Joe sees "Kelly has 8 balls" and Sally sees "Kelly has 5". But there are open source systems like LON-CAPA that will do all that too. But the book published ones come with giant quiz banks full with questions relevant to the subject/book used while the open source ones require you to make your own or scour for other people's. The school also doesn't have to host it. And of course no one needs to mark it except in the situations where it fucks up. It's an attractive cheap solution for schools and departments at the cost of the students which kinda sucks.
Course notes are typically posted by the prof if they want on services like Blackboard or Brightspace or Moodle. My university student union had a random PC with an old exam bank.
I don't really get why this is even a hard thing, surely there is some wordpress/whatever "quiz" plugin that the teachers can use to copy/paste multiple choice question/answers in and the school can pay the minimal fees to host for all their classes.
Textbooks were a scam 25 years ago when I went to school, but many of them were sub $40 or so, and could be picked up for ~$20 used. A few of the science engineering texts were closer to $100 but it was rare to spend more than ~$200 a semester on books.
Frankly, students can organize for all kinds of social issues, I'm shocked they can't organize to force the school to assure that prof's aren't playing into the textbook scams that seem common now. A bit of student fee to host a couple year old quiz server, and download PDF copies of class notes/etc seems like it should be doable. Particularly considering all the schools which have been providing online courseware for 20+ years now, frequently complete with free textbooks/lecture notes/etc.