Create, Innovate & Evaluate in Higher Education

A comment by Jason Green on twitter got me thinking again about a different lens through which to see the MOOC. The book, and particularly the textbook, are at the core of many of our classrooms. There’s no denying that having the content for a course all tied up in a handy, portable, near unbreakable format is convenient. Proof of this can be found in the fact that the yearly slaying of trees, organizing of content, printing and ordering of books and queuing in the bookstore to purchase them are almost as strong today as it was 30 years ago. Surely some people (I’m looking at you Cable Green) have encouraged a move towards taking those books online, but many of those models replicate much of the ‘prepare, organize and buy’ models of the paper book industry while saving trees and avoiding fleecing the student. Those books are still, however, finite and finished.

Creative Commons licenses provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators.

Of course we had to learn more. I contacted Joonas Mäkinen to get more information, and he explained to me that he’d helped organize a team to write a secondary school mathematics textbook over a weekend, in an event called Oppikirjamaraton (“textbook marathon”). The book was to be licensed CC BY, so that anyone could reuse or remix it in Finland or around the world.

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In the past year, leading technology companies have made big strides in bringing tablet computers into classrooms across the country. But while the availability of new devices is certainly critical, the successful transition to digital textbooks relies on many interconnected factors.