Keywords university textbooks; Publication; Problems; Countermeasures
As the main position of cultivating high-quality talents, the quality of higher education is directly related to whether it can deliver high-quality comprehensive talents to the society. Teaching materials in colleges and universities are one of the important factors that determine the quality of education in colleges and universities, and play a particularly important role and position in talent training. The state not only attaches great importance to the construction of basic education textbooks, but also attaches great importance to the construction of university textbooks. The Ministry of Education has successively planned the 2 1 century curriculum textbook and the "Eleventh Five-Year" national planning textbook for general higher education, and is currently selecting the "Twelfth Five-Year" national planning textbook for general higher education. University Press also takes the publication of university textbooks as a new development direction and devotes itself to the publication of university textbooks, which promotes the construction and development of university textbooks to a certain extent. However, due to various reasons, there are many problems in the publication of college teaching materials. This paper only talks about some author's views on the problems and countermeasures existing in the publication of teaching materials in colleges and universities at present.
First, the problems in the publication of college teaching materials
1. Homogeneous publishing is serious.
Taking "physical chemistry" as the key word, the author searched on Dangdang and found 299 kinds of related books (including physical chemistry textbooks, learning guidance books, experiments, etc. ). And there are many versions of textbooks for public courses. The author takes "University Computer Basis" as the key word, and then searches 1380 kinds of commodities from Dangdang. It can be seen that the phenomenon of homogeneous publishing of college teaching materials is serious. The main reason is that the publishing threshold of college textbooks is low. For specialized courses, some colleges and universities will subsidize teachers to publish their own teaching materials in order to reflect the achievements of curriculum construction. Or one institution takes the lead and several institutions jointly compile them, so that the circulation of such textbooks is basically guaranteed, the publishers have profits (although some books have extremely low profits), and the authors can also get some remuneration. For the public * * * course, even if it is used by only one school, the usage is also very large, so it has become a section that many publishers compete for, which has caused vicious competition among publishers and brought better economic benefits to teachers. Therefore, publishing houses and college teachers are eager to publish public course textbooks. As a result, almost every college has a textbook of computer basics and supporting experiments, and there are many versions of textbooks for public courses such as pedagogy, psychology and educational technology in normal universities.
2. Lack of excellent teaching materials
Although many university textbooks have been published by domestic publishing houses in recent years, there are not many truly excellent textbooks, and even some textbooks are getting worse with the revision. The author thinks that there are two main reasons: (1) When evaluating the workload and professional titles, many colleges and universities often pay attention to teachers' scientific research achievements, but seldom consider teachers' teaching work and textbook compilation. In addition, the sales of teaching materials in colleges and universities are generally not very large, and the writers' remuneration will not be too much, so teachers (especially experts and scholars) are not enthusiastic about compiling teaching materials. Even some textbooks with good quality have become worse after revision. To a certain extent, this also shows that the academic atmosphere in colleges and universities is impetuous, and schools and teachers often pay more attention to immediate interests, while ignoring the construction of courses and teaching materials that are crucial to the future development of colleges and universities and personnel training. (2) Some publishers lower the publishing threshold of teaching materials for the benefit, which is especially obvious in the publication of public teaching materials. On the one hand, they give teachers great benefits in remuneration, resulting in vicious competition among publishing houses; On the other hand, their requirements for manuscripts are very low, and there are also problems in the editing and proofreading process. Therefore, the phenomenon of shoddy teaching materials for public courses is more serious, and excellent teaching materials are extremely scarce.
Copying textbooks is very popular among college students.
As we all know, the teaching materials department of colleges and universities is the department responsible for purchasing books for students. However, due to corruption in the process of book purchasing, some schools cancel textbooks, and even teachers can't ask students to purchase books in a unified way. Students buy books entirely voluntarily. In addition, compared with basic education textbooks, the pricing of university textbooks is relatively high, and the general textbooks are priced at 30 ~ 40 yuan. On the contrary, the cost of plagiarism in colleges and universities is very low. Copying 1 A4 paper costs about 50 cents, which is lower than the cost of buying books. So many students are reluctant to buy books and copy textbooks instead. The author once published a new book. The author is a very authoritative expert in this field. There are nearly 90 students in the class, and only 29 students have bought this book. The prevalence of plagiarism in teaching materials in colleges and universities has caused great impact on the interests of publishers, publishers and authors.
Second, some countermeasures to solve the problem of textbook publishing in colleges and universities
1. Strengthen industry management and supervision, and control low-level repeated publication.
At present, the Ministry of Education and the General Administration of Press and Publication have set up a strict review mechanism for basic education textbooks and a special textbook examination and approval committee. Only textbooks approved by the Ministry of Education can be provided to teachers and students in primary and secondary schools, and the inspection of supplementary books in primary and secondary schools is also very strong. To a certain extent, this standardized the publication of supplementary books for primary and secondary school textbooks, and also ensured the quality of related books to a certain extent. For university textbooks, the supervision of relevant departments is not enough at present. The author believes that the relevant departments can refer to the practice of compiling textbooks for primary and secondary schools and moderately increase the supervision over the publication of textbooks in colleges and universities. On the one hand, improve the requirements of project establishment, and strictly demand the title of editor-in-chief and the qualification of publishing house; On the other hand, strengthen the quality audit of published college textbooks, including the ideological, scientific, original, editing and printing quality of textbooks. This can not only control the phenomenon of low-level repeated publication from the source, but also improve the quality of finished books.
2. Use policy guidance to encourage experts and scholars to write excellent teaching materials.
To compile a good textbook, the author is required to have both profound academic attainments and practical teaching experience in this field. This requires a lot of authors, and it is difficult to find such authors. In reality, due to the influence of assessment factors, teachers' enthusiasm for teaching is not high, and the enthusiasm for compiling teaching materials is extremely low. In order to change this situation, relevant departments should formulate relevant policies (such as increasing the proportion of teaching achievements in evaluation and giving certain publishing subsidies). ) Encourage teachers, especially well-known experts and scholars, to actively compile excellent teaching materials.
3. Give students appropriate benefits
In view of the widespread phenomenon of copying textbooks in colleges and universities, on the one hand, publishers can appropriately reduce the pricing of single printed sheets, on the other hand, they can actively find bookstores around colleges and universities, reduce intermediate circulation links, and even sell books directly to students to benefit them. The pricing principle of university textbooks by the General Publishing House is 1 page, 0. 1 yuan. If students buy books, they can get a 30% discount at 7 cents per page, which is similar to the cost of copying, but the collection value of books is much higher than that of copying, so students will be much more willing to choose textbooks between textbooks and copies.
These are just some experiences I have gained from five years of publishing teaching materials in colleges and universities. In fact, the problems existing in the publishing process of teaching materials in colleges and universities are far more than these, and some solutions proposed by the author are still immature, which are only for the reference of relevant personnel. In short, there is still a lot of work to be done by relevant departments, universities (including university teachers) and publishing houses to put an end to the phenomenon of low-level repeated publication of university textbooks. However, we believe that this day will come as long as all sectors of society work towards the common goal of improving the quality of university textbooks.
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