It's no news that students can access information at the click of a button. With the Internet, students learn the most up-to-date classroom material from industry experts, news Web sites, and online encyclopedias and journals. However, in most school districts, these resources aren't in classrooms. Instead, they're still in textbooks -- and in many cases, they're dated to the mid-20th century.
But in Virginia, things are changing: The state is piloting an open source physics textbook project that ensures students are learning the most pertinent subject matter. Though it's still in the beginning stages, it could revolutionize the textbook industry. Imagine an iTunes for textbooks: Teachers can download a few chapters from different publishers to use in a physics class, and students wouldn't need to thumb through hand-me-down, out-of-date textbooks.
Aneesh Chopra, Virginia's secretary of technology, said that this type of collaborative textbook -- called a FlexBook -- could be a platform to close the information gap.
"We're going to measure our goals by the improvement in the quality of our education system," he said. "If you think about transformation in the music industry, iTunes said it's not the CD, it's the song. The question for the textbook industry is: Are we prepared to disaggregate our content? We will have created a unit of value to deliver a greater return."
Three collaborative, independent circumstances led to the FlexBook pilot. First, Virginia's Joint Commission on Technology and Science (JCOTS) established an Open Source Education Advisory Committee that advised expanding the definition of a textbook to include online and electronic materials.
At the same time, NASA recognized that to prepare the next generation of workers with accurate information, it would have to start at the state level to update materials in K-12 curriculum. FlexBook project leader Jim Batterson, in collaboration with NASA and Virginia's Secretary of Education Tom Morris, formed panels of scientists, engineers and other experts to review the state's physics, chemistry and engineering curriculum. Their recommendations would be used in 2010 by the state's Board of Education when it reviews state science standards.
The panels found that the information was dated and suggested the creation of a wiki -- an open source Web-based application that allowed teachers to create content in real-time -- that aligned with JCOTS's interest in electronic academic materials. The missing link was a medium to put the idea into action.
Enter CK-12, a nonprofit organization founded in January 2007 that uses a Web-based compilation model to display educational content as an adaptive textbook -- coined the FlexBook.
"The tool can be as simple as a Web image of what might normally be in the textbook -- which is the current state of the CK-12 platform," Batterson said. "Teachers and students can print certain pages or run off copies of a particular chapter. The beauty of it is that you can run off one chapter and not have to run off 10 chapters. This flexibility is CK-12's innovation. With further development, a Web-based book that takes advantage of Web 2.0 would be desirable."
At the end of February, the joint efforts of JCOTS, Batterson's expert panels and CK-12 were released to a group of teachers who are using the physics FlexBook in their classrooms.
Eventually, the FlexBook project could involve academic publishers and other providers of educational text, but for now, the FlexBook material is produced at the source -- physics teachers. A team of teachers will develop supplemental material to currently approved physics texts that contains contemporary and emerging physics and laboratory modules.
"We requested statements from interested educators and developed three levels of editing," Batterson said, "because the state needs some way to assure the integrity of the material."
The first level of editing involved careful securitization of writers, each of which contributed one to two chapters to the FlexBook. Candidates were required to write a statement of interest, an overview of their capacity to contribute, a road map for using the instructional material and a summary of ideas and concerns. Using a scoring grid to select qualified participants, the secretaries of education and technology chose 13 people to write 10 chapters.
Once the chapters were written, they went through a peer-editing process, after which, the content was reviewed by a content expert to ensure the technical material's integrity. The first release of Virginia's physics FlexBook is labeled version 0.9. This will allow for a couple weeks of public comment and review before the release of version 1.0. The next round of modifications and additions will follow the same editing process and will be released as version 2.0.
"I believe this phenomenon will take hold," Chopra said. "It may be a little slower than the way iTunes changed the music industry -- in large part because we have a big bureaucratic procurement problem that slows the pace of innovation -- but we will see an explosion in content creators who validate the tool."
As teachers begin integrating the content, Chopra said he hopes that more schools can go without buying textbooks for the following semester. The CK-12 platform will be provided to schools at no cost.
"They're really our partners in this," Batterson said. "They're not just providing the platform, but they're supporting us by helping us to understand intellectual property law, get images uploaded and write text into HTML format."
In its first launch, the FlexBook is a basic Web 1.0 activity -- teachers use the content similar to a traditional textbook -- but in the future, it could be an interactive model.
"While it may not be seen in the first release of the FlexBook, a near-future goal is one of interactivity," Batterson said. "As students go through the chapter, the e-book asks questions that they answer online. The e-book reveals whether it's right or wrong, or helps them. Another goal is to have students on a computer doing activities such as modeling and simulation. As the e-book asks questions, students actually start to build mathematical models."
Beginning last month, the physics FlexBook is being put to the test, providing students and teachers with flexible content and 21st-century material.
*This story is from Converge magazine's Winter 2009 issue.
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