Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
California will adopt open source, digital textbooks next year
Some very intriguing news over at Ars about California’s move to digital textbooks. I’m not sure they’re on a sustainable model yet and California will have to work out all the kinks. This comment in particular made me conclude this:
“We’re pretty excited about what we’re seeing,” he said. “We actually have one commercial publisher who is submitting several of their textbooks [as open sourced material] for review, so this will be pretty groundbreaking, and I think it will be a paradigm shift for the publishers as well. They’re taking a paid resource they used to charge the districts for, and basically allowing the districts to download it for free.”
In my opinion, California should consider establishing a governance body of key education materials stakeholders and find a way to both incentivize content submissions, ensure “polish”, and ensure there’s a strong pipeline of contributors. They’ll need a “community manager”.
I think the great news is that this approach appears to have been in the works for many years, it intuitively makes sense, and I’m sure there are many willing to contribute. Just think – perhaps PhD students should be required to contribute as part of their graduate coursework?? There’s many ways to make this work, but I really hope they don’t expect people will just come out of the woodwork with open source, “polished”, “free” textbooks that integrate and that anyone can use for all purposes.
The first link is to Arnold’s written statement, the second is to Ars’ interview where I pulled the quote above.
http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_12536333?nclick_check=1
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