There are lot’s of exciting open projects coming out of India, and I was very excited some time back to discover that the National Council of Education Research and Training had put hundreds of K12 books in several languages online. It was fun looking at a first grade textbook in Hindi, or a 12th grade history textbook in English. However, the interface of the website was (and is) horrible, most people I showed it to didn’t realize that they could actually download the entire text of the books there (and right now, the website is down entirely).

I began thinking about ways of mirroring the books, and presenting them in a much more useful format. I was delighted to discover that a software engineer in Bangalore, Prashanth Ellina, had already done so, setting up a simple website with links to all the books. We chatted online, and I was hoping to be able to meet him when I was in Bangalore, but that unfortunately did not work out. When I gave talks at IIPA and IGNOU in Delhi, I also used his site as an example of the kind of reuse that open licenses can enable.

But Prashanth didn’t stop there, he kept developing his idea, and has just launched a new project called “Notemonk“, which is a platform for people who are studying with these textbooks to collaborate. He takes out the detailed table of contents for each book (example), and for each chapter, collects relevant videos (like MIT OpenCourseWare, and other open lectures), and enable people to ask and answer questions (example).

I think this is a great example of remixing open resources, and I am excited to see where Prashanth will take the project. Since neither the open textbooks in India, nor his project, is very well known internationally, I asked if he would agree to do an e-mail interview. He graciously agreed, and below you can see him introducing his project in detail. Visit Notemonk and let him know what you think!

Who are you?
I am an entrepreneur working out of Bangalore, India. I co-founded Headrun Technologies Pvt Ltd to pursue various innovative trajectories under one umbrella. Prior to this I worked as a software developer at Veveo (A technology startup HQ’ed in Boston, USA). I consider myself an ardent supporter of the Open Source Movement and try to aid by releasing code to the general public every once in a while through my blog. I am at the stage of awakening to the Open Education arena and I believe there are exciting things happening and even more yet to happen over here.

When did you first come across these open textbooks? How? What was your first thought? What did you think about the content, and about the site itself?
About 3 years back I felt an urge to re-read my school textbooks hoping to learn the same information but with new perspectives. Simultaneously I was also looking for people with similar motivations online. While searching I came across NCERT‘s excellent resource and was thrilled to know that the Indian Government was providing easy access to beautifully designed text books. The NCERT text books are fantastic. They are much improved compared to when I was in school. The site itself looks and feels like a relic out of the earlier days of the internet.

How did you get the idea of making an alternative site to make these resources available (your first site)?
I starting reading the books after downloading from the NCERT site and realized quickly that a better organized site would make it easier to access the books. Initially it was to be just a personal library interface and then I thought it might actually be useful to others so I hosted it on my website.

How did you do it? Was it a lot of work?
At the time my day job involved a insane amount of Python/Linux hacking, CGI’s, System infrastructure building, Web back-ends etc. So I knew exactly the right tools and methods to get the job done. I spend about 3-4 evenings after work to get the first site done.

Did you receive any feedback, were there many users?
The interesting thing is that I wrote the site and put it up for general access and then completely forgot about it :) I was debugging something else on the website a few months later and happened to look at the Apache logs and found a steady stream of visitors pouring in. That is when I realized that there was a “need” for this resource.

Looking back I got almost no feedback which I think is mostly because I did not provide an easily visible email address or feedback form.

Are these resources openly licensed? Do you fear any legal problems? Have you had any contact officially with the people behind that website?
The legality is in the grey. I looked around for licensing terms on the NCERT page at the time and found no explicit document or text. However, I received assurance that the material is intended to be open, and I am working with them (NCERT) to have it explicitly stated as such on the site.

How did you get the idea of Notemonk? Was this the plan all along, or did you first do the first website, and then get this idea?
When studying text books in school my father taught me to first understand the scope of the book by looking at the contents page and then to skim through the book looking at the main topics and their subtopics. I would do one or two iterations of this process until the “Framework” of the book fit into my mind. This is incredibly useful because any content you consume from the book thereafter fits into the appropriate niche in the mind. This is the way I read any book thereafter (except for books where suspense has to be savoured :)).

This was one fundamental drive. Another one is a more recent feeling. When in school and college I realized two things. Firstly, the staff was underqualified and ill-equipped to act as agents of learning. That was mostly due to the economic conditions which paid teachers far less than in the Industry. Secondly, most students would not learn about things because they weren’t excited enough about understanding things. This is both due to lack of exposure and to lack of proper training. Education was simply not made enough fun for them. The proliferation of online communities in the form of Forums, Social Networks coupled with Online Video coupled with the above seeded a subconcious thought that something could be done to harness new age technologies to solve this age old problem.

So, after watching the first site grow and attract people, I thought of experimenting with the ideas I’ve had for a while. That is when I started building Notemonk.

Who is the target group for Notemonk? How do you see people using it?
Right now we are looking at engaging school students from India using NCERT text books. However we are already working on making the site more generic so we can support more syllabi from across the country and beyond. Indonesia has put up textbooks online. Tamil Nadu (a state in South India) has also done the same. We are going to make those accessible on Notemonk. At some point we want to actively involve teachers too.

It has been just a month since we launched the site and we have 500+ registered users and fledgling community asking questions and answering on various books and topics across the site.

What is some of the unique functionality you offer?

• Book outlines and discussion pages for every topic in the outline
• Ability for Q&A on any topic.
• Users can write notes on any topic and others can benefit by reading those.
• Every topic has associated Videos from Youtube. Users can suggest more videos too.
• A powerful notification system ensures students get emails when a book they are “following” has some activity – e.g. Followers get emails notifying them about new notes added or questions answered under the book.
• A basic social networking framework to help people find like-minded learners and to follow their activity.
• An innovative and fair “points” system to assess the user’s contribution to the community (You can read this to get a better idea of the scoring system)
• A redemption scheme – We share revenue with all users in the form of “credits”. A user with more “points” has a chance of earning more “credits”. A user can exchange his credits at Notemonk for a variety of gifts. We’ve designed this to be a formalized method to thank the community players on a monthly basis.
• We are actively working on adding more features.

What is the business model? Is this something you are doing purely voluntarily or would you like to make money in the future?
We do plan to monetize this in the future although all the base features will be free for all for ever. We’ve identified a few business trajectories but what we put in place will depend on the learning we are deriving right now. We are firm believers of the fact that a solid business can keep churning out quality products and feature sets for the benefit of consumers and are working hard to get there. Right now our focus rests solely on making a highly relevant and useable service.

How can you afford to hand out stuff to people if they get enough points?
It is a revenue sharing programme. Right now we do not have any revenue so we are investing for now and plan to continue to do so until we can get revenue started. If we make 5000 Rs running the site in a given month and decide to share 50% with the community that makes it Rs 2500 for that month. This amount is distributed to users based on their overall score. Users can either choose to redeem right away or wait to accumulate enough credits over many months.

What do you think of the potential of open educational resources in general, especially in India? And what about the sites where they are usually hosted?
The disparity between the number of people with quality knowledge and those without is very high. Traditional methods of learning involving going to schools and universities are not scaling as much as we would like them to. South India alone has nearly a thousand engineering colleges but even these are not able to provide education to all. Also, most of them are ill-equipped to train students owing to lack of trained staff and facilities. The same applies to primary and secondary schooling.

Open educational resources have the potential to make a real change in this space. If we can create the right tools and generate enough awareness thus connecting students to the tools, there is immense potential to revolutionize education and improve penetration to previously unthinkable levels.

Existing Open education resources are more concerned about making content available to students. This is a great place to start because content comes first. Most sites seem to be at this stage of development. I believe that we need to fasttrack to the next stage – creation of interaction models around content. Imagine being able to create a rich interaction model like that of Facebook only in the space of educational material. A framework within which students can be exposed to educational content, peers and seasoned teachers from across the world.

Anything else you want to add?
Yes. A call for help!

We are building a rich feature set along with a carefully crafted interaction model for Notemonk. Please consider dropping by at the site to get a feel for it. We would love to hear from you.

Thank you very much to Prashanth for agreeing to the interview, and best of luck with his venture. I think these kinds of aggregations of OER around certain topics (in this case, TOCs of common textbooks) is great. Students are not that concerned about which university the video comes from, they just want to watch it. However, it would be very useful to slice up the videos in smaller segments – 10, 20 minute pieces that each explain one concept. People who want to see the whole lecture could still subscribe to a play list, but if you are just studying the zinc substrates, you could plug in exactly that part of the lecture relevant to the chapter.

Stian

Current textbook initiatives give the impression that educational quality will suffer without textbooks. In response to economic crises, these initiatives focus on saving the textbook, by either reducing its cost or digitizing many of its components. However, this public perception, that educational quality will suffer without textbooks, begs the question. It assumes that the textbook enhances the quality of education and furthermore, that teachers and students know how to use the textbook effectively. But all evidence strongly suggests that the textbook, as currently constructed, is not a high quality resource and does not enhance educational quality. So if educational quality is not harmed, and may even improve sans textbooks, do textbooks still need saving? Or are there other resources that may better serve K-12 education?

Do textbooks enhance the quality of education?

Evidence strongly suggests that the average textbook, as currently constructed, is not a high quality resource. Several studies, beginning in the 1980’s, have elaborated on this evidence, concluding that the textbook is a hopelessly low quality educational resource. Low quality because of the way textbooks are written and processed; hopelessly low quality because the existing process of textbook creation is enforced by state policies. This process is known as the state textbook adoption process.

K-12 textbooks are not generally written by experts or even teachers; rather, they are written by teams of anonymous writers from development houses. According to The Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoption, a report by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, textbooks are “hurriedly put together by teams of hack writers from ‘development houses,’ known as ‘chop shops’.”  The identities of the writers remain largely undisclosed, and they are not the university professors often cited as contributors. In fact, several professors who have been cited as contributors to popular textbooks deny ever having read or seen the textbooks.   Experts are also not involved in reviewing the quality of textbooks, such as checking for accuracy of facts. This is because there is no review process for quality.

Instead, the review process is grounded in the textbook adoption process that is mandated in twenty-one plus states. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute defines it as, “The process, in place in twenty-one states, of reviewing textbooks according to state guidelines and then mandating specific books that schools must use, or lists of approved textbooks that schools must choose from.” Due to conflicting political and ideological views, state guidelines are fashioned to please a wide spectrum of demands regarding inclusion and exclusion of content. These demands result in a second set of guidelines from textbook publishing companies, who preempt the adoption process with their own checklists to speed things along. These checklists are not checking for quality; they are checking for politically correct representation of content and groups of people, in addition to checking for “morally questionable” facts, regardless of whether such inclusions or exclusions are accurate portrayals of the subject matter. Furthermore, California and Texas, as the most populous states, are the two major players in textbook adoption, which means their guidelines affect the majority of textbooks in America, as the market depends on their approval. Four publishing companies constitute 70% of this market, having built long-standing partnerships with the states. This makes it incredibly difficult for alternative textbook companies with a focus on quality to break in to the market.

The U.S. History textbook is a prime example and outcome of the textbook adoption process. The U.S. History textbook is subject to two major problems. In a testimony to the Senate in 2003, the American Textbook Council  summed up these problems as “dumbing down” and “increasing content bias and distortion.” According to the council, current history textbooks are more concerned with capturing and sustaining short attention spans than with relaying accurate and compelling history. They have become “picture and activity books instead”, with the actual text as the supplemental component. The language of the text itself is grossly simplistic, catering to all reading levels, rather than relaying events in compelling narrative. Instead, “states often apply “readability” formulas to ensure that textbooks use simpler words and phrases, resulting in a lowest-common-denominator approach.” The second problem is that history textbooks are censored with “increasing content bias and distortion.” Content bias and distortion refers to the differing political ideologies competing for inclusion and exclusion of facts. Since different people and groups have different ideas about what should or shouldn’t be included as relevant to U.S. or world history, the contents of history textbooks are screened and then screened again to appease all parties. This process not only produces mediocre results, but a politically crafted history of the United States, which often glosses over or even entirely omits relevant facts while elaborating on inoffensive details. However, since “one person’s distortion is another’s correction,” the details actually included in history textbooks are either highly insignificant or so generalized that they fail to deliver the meanings of those details in context.

None of this is evidence that textbooks enhance the quality of education. On the contrary, all evidence affirms that the majority of textbooks are low to mediocre quality resources. Such resources run the risk of decreasing, rather than increasing, the quality of education. In fact, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores in math and reading were found to be generally lower in textbook adoption states.

Do teachers and students know how to use the textbook?

If we believe that educational quality will suffer without textbooks, we are also assuming that teachers and students know to use textbooks. In other words, we are assuming that teachers know how to effectively leverage textbooks as teaching resources and students know how to learn from them as learning resources. For teachers, effectively leveraging textbooks requires more than simply assigning reading and lecturing on that reading during class–it means using the textbooks as a starting point for other perspectives and educational resources. For students, learning from textbooks requires more than just reading the textbooks–it means understanding and retaining what they have read. The National Center for Research on Teacher Learning reports that,

“For centuries educators asumed that student learning consisted of rote memorization of new knowledge–students listened to lectures and read books, their progress measured by their ability to recite what they had heard and read. But research in the past 20 years demonstrates that another form of learning is also important–the learning that occurs when instruction is inquiry-oriented, encouraging learners to actively think about and try out new ideas in light of their prior knowledge, to personally transform the knowledge for their own use, and to apply it in other situations.”

Teachers effectively leverage textbooks when they use them as starting points, subsequently utilizing other educational resources (which include materials, tools, media, and techniques) that instigate inquiry, activity, and creativity. “Mere regurgitation of facts and figures… is not sufficient for in-depth understanding” (How Teachers Learn to Engage Students in Active Learning). On the other hand, actively engaging students while exposing them to other perspectives helps them to fully grasp and retain what they have read.

Unfortunately, most teachers and students do not know how to use textbooks in this manner. Most teachers do little more than assign reading, only to lecture later on the same reading, and as a result, most students do not retain what they have read, if they have read at all. According to The Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoption, “Shadow studies, which track teachers’ activities during the school day, suggest that 80 to 90 percent of classroom and homework assignments are textbook-driven or textbook-centered. History and social studies teachers, for example, often rely almost exclusively on textbooks, instead of requiring students to review primary sources and read trade books by top historians.”

Further evidence suggests that this misuse of textbooks is affecting students’ performance. In a study on the impact of curriculum on achievement in twenty-five countries, Professor William Schmidt found that “textbook content in different nations correlated closely to what their children learned–and how they fared on tests.” Even though U.S. textbooks were hundreds of pages longer than other countries, U.S. students were still learning less. In History, especially, one of the most “textbook-heavy” subjects, “half of high school seniors scored “below basic”–the lowest outcome possible–on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in U.S. History.” (Too Little Too Late: American High Schools in an International Context)

But isn’t the California Digital Textbooks Initiative improving textbooks?

Among the plethora of new initiatives surrounding textbooks, the Free Digital Textbook Initiative in California is the most notable because of its ties to both state policy and alternative textbook publishing models. It is a plan heralded by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in response to the state’s economic crisis. The initiative provides for free digital textbooks for high school math and science, and lays out a set of state standards for those subjects. Content developers submit digital textbooks that are reviewed by teachers and experts in math and science to align to those standards.

The initiative’s appeal is that it purports to use a process different from traditional textbook adoption. Its initial phase boasts of alternative content developers, consisting of non-profits, such as the CK-12 Foundation, Connexions, Curriki, and individual authors. Content review to meet state standards is facilitated by the California Learning Resource Network (CLRN). In California’s press release on August 11, 2009, ten of the sixteen textbooks submitted were found to be acceptable, meeting 90% of the state’s standards.

The intent behind the initiative is a positive one, and the process thus described seems headed in the right direction. However, as it stands the initiative puts no real dent in California’s textbook adoption policy, as it becomes clear that none of these textbooks are required for districts to purchase and use. In order for materials to become a required text, they must meet every standard, including California’s social content standards, which none have been reviewed for.  For this review to occur, creators of the textbooks must go through the social content standard review process, which is not only costly and time consuming, but runs the risk of dumbing down their textbooks to the same level as currently required textbooks.

Even if we assume that somehow these textbooks will survive the reviews unscathed and maintain their existing levels of quality, nothing ensures their proper use in the classroom. With cut funding in the state, districts may be expected to access the texts only online, even when they don’t have computers for every student or the teacher/student training necessary to help them work with texts in digital formats. The initiative does not call for additional funding for hardware, training, or supplemental resources. Additionally, only textbooks go through the review process, which means that only textbooks can be required for use in districts. Other educational resources, such as digital materials and software, are never required statewide. Requiring only the digital textbooks and not the means to leverage them leaves teachers and students in pretty much the same boat as before, only this time without funding for the hard copies. Though the quality of textbooks may improve via this initiative, there is no guarantee that they will be used, or used properly. After all, the quality of instruction depends on more than just the textbook.

“Traditional textbooks have clearly failed students and instructors. Similarly, digital textbook trials that force a single format, device, or price point will also fail. No single e-reading format or device will ever satisfy all students.” –Eric Frank, Flatworld Knowledge

Conclusion

In conclusion, efforts are better spent building upon what we have learned about textbooks in the past few decades, instead of trying to save a dying resource. Textbooks may not need saving. Textbooks, as they currently stand, do not enhance the quality of education. They are outdated resources that have been enforced by outdated policies. Most teachers and students use the textbook as a crutch rather than a tool, and as studies show, this linear way of teaching has resulted in less learning and lower student performance. Though some current textbook initiatives may alleviate symptoms temporarily, they are essentially flogging the same tired mule. The future of education does not hold textbooks, at least in the traditional sense of textbooks; it holds the plethora of other resources that better serve it. We should focus on prioritizing the creation and adoption of these resources so that they are accessible, adaptable, and don’t fall into the same mediocre traps of the textbook.