textbooks

Generative Textbooks – A Brief Example

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There was some interest in my post yesterday about what I called “generative textbooks,” but based on people’s comments I don’t know that I explained the idea very clearly. The idea of a “generative textbook” is that, instead of containing instructional content, it provides the learner with a series of prompts they can use to … Read more

Everything Old is New Again: Textbooks, The Printing Press, The Internet, and OER

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There’s much to learn from history. Sadly, as Audrey Watters has frequently noted, it might be impossible to find a field of endeavor outside educational technology where more of the participants are so utterly ignorant of its history. (I hope you’re aware of and looking forward to her upcoming book on Teaching Machines.) Even within … Read more

OER Cost Savings and Adoption Rates: New Methodologies, New Data, and New Results

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At the OpenEd Conference in 2013, Nicole Allen and I challenged the OER community to save students one billion dollars. Five years later, SPARC have collected a significant amount of data in order to answer the question of whether or not we have achieved that goal. You can read more about the data collection methodology … Read more