Textbook Innovation
April 20th, 2009
In looking at the challenges faced in K-12 education improvement today (both in this country and around the world), one of the things that needs a fresh new approach is one of the oldest elements of education: textbooks.
Here’s the problem in a nutshell: textbooks - as they currently exist - are limiting, expensive, and difficult to update.
In most school districts textbooks are are a relatively large line item expense, which means that it’s an expense that is easy to defer. And deferring the purchase of new textbooks means that advances in pedagogy and curriculum get deferred. Which means that what’s going on in some classrooms in this country is ten years out of date, just because the classroom curriculum is locked-into the textbooks in use. This is especially true in poorer school districts, obviously, and even more true in other parts of the world.
Enter a new Silicon Valley organization called the CK-12 Foundation, which has developed an open-content, web-based collaborative approach they call “FlexBook.” Imagine an online library filled with up-to-date high-quality content that allows teachers to assemble their own customized textbooks.
School districts and teachers can use this platform to customize and produce Flexbooks to suit a particular style, region, language, or level of skill, while adhering to the local education standards. Once they assemble a textbook that meets their needs they download, print, and distribute it locally.
The content in the online library is developed by expert education practitioners, and licensed under Creative Commons license.
This concept has huge advantages all the way around: textbook content is updated more easily, textbooks can more readily be targeted to the local needs of a particular school district, and the cost is dramatically lower. The inventory and distribution costs of traditional textbooks are taken out of the equation completely, and the printing costs are on-demand at the point of use.
This concept - an open educational resource with online content that can be mixed and modified to suit a teacher’s need while adhering to curriculum standards - has the potential of being an incredibly powerful game-changer in bringing affordable high-quality education in every corner of the globe. Very cool stuff.
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