Free Textbooks A Reality
August 25, 2009
This new post ties in nicely with the beginning of the fall semester. I saw this article over at Ars. If you don’t already know, I read Ars daily so expect more posts about stuff I read over there. Anyway, the story is about Flat World Knowledge and one of the best business ideas I’ve heard in a long time. Flatword are offering free open-source textbooks to students and educators. The company aims to make mony by offering DRM free PDFs or audiobooks as well as customizable printed textbooks and class materials. As a student this is good for me in a number of ways.
If my school ever adopts this model, I’d be spending about a third of what I do now on textbooks. That in itself is newsworthy. I’ve mainly taken liberal arts classes during my school career and textbook costs aren’t nearly as bad as they seem for my friends taking science and engineering classes. Still, big bulky textbooks cost a lof of money and trees whatever the subject is. If I can purchase a $30 PDF instead of an $80+ textbook I’ll pick the PDF every time. I say that because I don’t see me going with the free web-only option. I actually like books. I like writing in them and I like coming back to them later when I have a problem. It’s so cool to re-read a section of text years later and see how I’ve matured as a thinker and student. Having a PDF sounds like the next best thing to a bound copy. I totally agree with the article on this matter.
But that’s just the beginning. The best advantage to the Flat World model has to be the customizability it offers. According to their homepage, Flat World allows teachers to reorganise the textbook. I watched the video tutorial and it seemed pretty easy to do Until I noticed that it also ties in with WebCT. How cool is that? I think Flat World gets an ‘A’ for effort (sic) on that one. I think this represents a great approach that will hopefully encourage professors to stop using the textbook as a crutch. Develop a lesson plan and use the material to support your effort. I’ve sat through tons of classes where the professor just tries to “teach” 12 chapters for no other reason than that’s how many the book came with. It’s not fun for me and it doesn’t seem very exciting for the teacher either.
So all I need now are some professors to adopt these things. Browsing the offerings I noticed mainly management and economics texts. Letting students chose the medium is a great idea but the real benefit I see is for teachers.
