the teacher had a large enough collection of notes and slides that they were able to make a rather cheap textbook available to students on campus for around 20 dollars
The original article links to Seth Godin's blog which advocates something very close to that.
this is what I think could be the answer/an alternative answer. I have a basic theory:
"Anything you want to learn is accessible online via existing content or smart people you can connect with. Someone just needs to organize it all"
The answer I usually get is something like, well, yeah Google, but that's a pretty primary way to go about it. If you want to learn RoR for the first time, you might pick up a book, but you'll probably scour the net utilizing different sites. So why not organize the content that already exists into a more structured manner that slightly resembles chapter ie- programming 101 go here, setting up apache go here, learning about sessions go here, interacting with MySQL go here, etc.
This (using the internet) is usually limited to things like programming and lower level classes though, I can see an entire software engineering curriculum being laid out with minimal references and books but I cannot see any such thing for degrees in math, science (such as physics), engineering (mechanical, electrical, civil), and so on.
Some things just need that extra bit that an established textbook can bring.
I've been trying to see if that's true or not. I still think any topic has enough information/resources out there. When you say things like math+science, are you referring to very advanced topics or simpler topics (or both) ie- algebra, high school chemistry,etc.
Other subjects are a bit more difficult and scattered, for physics hyperphysics does well
But I am indeed talking about advanced topics which are available in abundance for computer science and programming on the internet but when it comes down to it that is the extent which the internet provides (except maybe graduate papers, but that is usually too high a level to matter)
Say for example you wanted to learn thermodynamics with only the internet and a teacher. You can gain a large amount of theoretical knowledge from the teacher but without a book it will be hard for you to find examples on when/how to use integral and differential energy and entropy balances (Thermo might be a subject just on the boundary of finding information on the internet and having to buy a book).
The original article links to Seth Godin's blog which advocates something very close to that.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/06/textbook-ran...