Open-source digital textbooks Visualize this: A calculus teacher
downloads an open-source digital calculus textbook. She deletes
a chapter that isn't relevant to her class and replaces it with
one from another open digital textbook that she's used in the
past. She reads through the book, embeds several YouTube videos
where relevant and an occasional humorous photo to keep
students' interest, adds links to related websites and study
aides, and uses a special app to create quizzes within the text
that test the students' knowledge of the course material. Once
it's complete, she makes it available to her students, who
download it at no cost. The promise of open-source textbooks For
ed-tech neophytes, this may sound like a Utopian dream,
conceived by a former student whose hefty backpack caused years
of exorbitant chiropractor bills and whose interest in math was
killed by his stultifying calculus textbook. But for tech-savvy
teachers and students, this is the new face of education.
Jumping on the digital bandwago