For the past couple of years, Siyavula, a Cape Town, South Africa-based company, has been organizing content hackathons, collaboratively creating math and science textbooks in about three weekends. Earlier this year, open content textbook publisher Flat World Knowledge hosted a hackathon to crowdsource a computer science textbook.  Last month, a group of Finnish math teachers spent the weekend creating a high school math book.  And last weekend, Boundless, a Boston-based startup offering a free, open alternative to textbooks, organized a weekend-long hackathon to produce an intro-level college physics textbook.

Content hackathons are a way to bring educators and subject-matter experts together to curate and organize the content into a structure that helps students learn as effectively as possible, said Boundless co-founder and CEO Ariel Diaz.

“Our focus is not just to have the information but to have it in a format that’s helpful for users,” he said.

Physics academics and Ph.D. students collaboratively create an introductory-level physics textbook at a content hackathon organized by Boston-based Boundless.

Over the course of the weekend, he said, nearly two dozen physics academics and Ph.D. students from Harvard, MIT and other local universities and colleges lent their expertise to the project. Boundless created a list of about 500 learning objectives they believe a physics 101 textbook should cover and pointed the participants to online open educational resources. The content “hackers” broke off individually and in teams to author the content appropriate for each objective and later peer-reviewed each others’ work. The group didn’t finish the textbook over the weekend, but Diaz said they plan to ready the textbook for the new school semester in January and intend to host more subject-specific and general content hackathons in the future.

For Boundless and other open-content publishing platforms, the hackathons are way to accelerate the creation of content. And, they provide students and teachers with free (or low-cost) instructional material that reflects a potentially broader range of voices from top subject-matter experts. For now, the draw for volunteers is to be a part of a new open education movement, Diaz said, but going forward, they could be given advisory roles and other kinds of credits for their participation.

Momentum behind open educational content in general is increasing. In September, California Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation that funds free, digital open textbooks created by California’s universities for college students and establishes an online library to host the books.  Last month, British Columbia announced its support of a similar initiative.

But the rise of free alternatives to traditional textbooks isn’t without hurdles. Earlier this year, three major publishers sued Boundless, claiming that its textbook alternatives violated their intellectual property rights.  And last week, Flat World Knowledge, announced the end of free access to its open textbooks. Since launching in 2007, the venture-backed company has offered free Web-based versions of its content while charging for print and digital (PDF) versions. But, saying that its freemium model threatened its long-term growth, the company abandoned the free plan (though it does sell books at a cheaper-than-traditional $19.99).

Still, setbacks notwithstanding, open content — just like the larger open education movement advocated by online course startups Coursera, Udacity, Khan Academy and others – is increasingly going to be part of our future. It’s early days for the companies and communities organizing around it, and business models and best practices for bringing curated content and textbook alternatives to students still need to be figured out. But interest in more content collaboration, through offline hackathons, online forums and other platforms, is clearly growing.

Image by Spectral-Design via Shutterstock.

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With each new launch, someone inevitably declares the impending end of physical textbooks, as though those tech giants control the levers responsible for the successful adoption of new technology in schools. But while the tech industry plays a significant role in the transition to digital textbooks, making devices available and affordable is just the beginning. Rallied by leaders at the top, momentum is certainly moving in favor of digital textbooks – earlier this month, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan declared that “over the next few years, textbooks should be obsolete” – but challenges for states and school districts still remain.

Schools, districts need more flexibility to purchase content

At their best, digital textbooks offer a learning experience that boosts engagement, adapts to student learning, tracks performance and ensures up-to-date content – all while potentially saving costs in the longterm. According to a report from the Digital Textbook Collaborative, which was convened by the FCC and the US Department of Education, the cost of implementing the shift to digital varies from $250 to $1,000 per student per year, but the cost savings from increased teacher attendance, reduced paper costs, online assessments and other factors are estimated to be $600 per student per year. However, some say estimates on cost savings assume tablet prices that are less than actual costs and, without funding support, the upfront costs are difficult for many school districts to manage.

Beyond the initial technology costs of getting to a one-to-one student-to-tablet ratio (from the historic student-to-computer ratio of 3.75 to 1), Geoff Fletcher, deputy executive director for the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA), said the current procurement processes for textbook content aren’t aligned with the dynamics of the digital world. “The business model right now doesn’t take advantage of the enormous flexibility because all the money is locked into one approach,” he said.

As it stands now, in most states, Fletcher said, decision-making power regarding which textbooks should be adopted by schools is centrally held by the states. The textbook publishers, who have long dominated the education content industry, benefit from that model (my colleague Laura Hazard Owen provides a nice snapshot of that market here), but Fletcher said more states need to encourage the development of content marketplaces by giving schools and school districts the flexibility to select the content their students will use.

Aside from the funding challenge, there’s the infrastructure hurdle of expanding broadband services to communities with inadequate Internet connectivity.  According to a 2010 FCC survey, 80 percent of schools say their broadband connections do not meet their needs and FCC reported this year that 19 million Americans still lack broadband access.

The good news is that the FCC and Department of Education are actively pushing change at the federal level and, over the past couple of years, 22 states have adopted policies encouraging digital textbooks, the SETDA reports. But as new digital content starts entering classrooms, the organization says local districts need to ensure that their policies accept the use of new devices and provide adequate professional learning to teachers.

User experience matters

Osman Rashid, CEO of digital textbook startup Kno, said that in addition to making devices and content available, providing a user experience that engages students is critical to the success of digital textbooks. While Apple’s iPad, which supports the use of interactive educational software, leads among new technology in schools, Amazon is trying to make a bigger push with the Kindle, attracting budget-conscious educators with a lower price. But except for the Kindle Fire, Amazon’s devices, which were built mostly around text, don’t offer students a markedly different or more engaging experience. They may lighten the load in students’ backpacks, which is a positive step but hardly the only benefit we should look to digital textbooks to provide.

To help ease the transition to digital, several schools have adopted “Bring Your Own Device” programs that save money by enabling students to use tablets owned by their families in class. But while many BYOD programs are producing encouraging results, schools need to be prepared for additional technological and instructional support. Not only do schools need to add bandwidth to support new devices (of varying ages and types), they need to prepare teachers to work with a range of devices. Most importantly, the programs need to build in safeguards to ensure that students whose parents can’t afford devices aren’t left behind. In the short term, schools can provide tablets to students who don’t have their own. But in the long term, the equity issue could rear its head as wealthier students bring in technology that outstrips their classmates’ in speed and performance, said McGraw-Hill SVP Vineet Madan.

“BYOD looks attractive,” he said. But “you won’t really appreciate the gap or performance difference until you’re two or three years into it.”

With many of these challenges, it’s up to the schools, districts and states, not industry players, to figure out solutions. But the SETDA’s Fletcher said that in addition to providing devices, there is another key role that companies like Apple and Amazon play.

“These are folks who want to show schools what can be, not just respond to the customer,” he said. “That kind of partnership is crucial in helping to make these kinds of changes in educational technology.”

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On Wednesday, the Seattle-based tech giant announced that it was rolling out Whispercast, a new service for managing content across a fleet of devices that has particular significance for schools. Through Whispercast, a teacher or school administrator could purchase and distribute content to students across a class or grade level, as well as restrict additional purchases and web browsing on the device.

To start, the service will work across Kindle devices, as well as Kindle apps for iOS and Android, and in the coming months it will expand to the Kindle Fire, Amazon said. The service can also extend to devices students may have owned previously.

As schools increasingly bring more technology into the classroom, no doubt Amazon wants to be sure that it captures as much of the market as it can. While Apple’s interactive iPad has made significant headway in schools – in the second quarter of this year alone Apple sold one million iPads to schools – Amazon can now not only offer schools lower-priced devices but an easy way to distribute and control content for students.

Amazon has previously pushed into the e-textbook market with a textbook rental service, mostly geared toward college students, but with Whispercast, it is making a bigger play in K-12 education. Amazon’s site features case studies that show Whispercast in use across various grade levels.

In addition to targeting schools, Whispercast also applies to businesses and non-profits, which can similarly benefit from the central procurement and distribution of digital content.

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Professors once saw the mobile phone as the enemy to productive learning, with students tuning out of lectures to text and call each other. But this massive invasion of smartphones and tablets also provides opportunities for new educational possibilities.

Students now have access to adaptive learning technologies, more robust in-classroom engagement, mobile checkout processes, mobile price comparisons in on-campus stores, and even peer-to-peer resource sharing. These services are collectively used by millions of students, who find them engaging and valuable resources.

Equally important are the types of educational content that students can access, the ability to leverage this content from a wide range of producers (not just traditional publishers), and the institution’s ability to support, deliver and manage that content. Surprisingly, most campuses aren’t doing this well at all.

Current mobile solutions: Are universities doing it wrong?

Universities often have some sort of mobile platform, but too many are doing it all wrong (if they’re doing anything at all). They tend to work from the front end to the back end, taking a piecemeal approach that dumps all of the existing campus information systems (school sports trackers, events boards, educational content, bookstore resources, etc.) into their own separate mobile experiences, sometimes even developing for entirely different operating systems. The result is a disaggregated online experience that’s far from engaging for students. With so many other outside resources available, if students don’t like what the university has to offer, they simply won’t use it.

It’s certainly not an easy task for a university to create a holistic, engaging online experience, and there are plenty of roadblocks. Professors are a notoriously stubborn group and getting them to adopt mobile platforms isn’t simple. Plenty of training, education and practice are necessary. It’s also not cheap. And then there’s the daunting challenge of trying to keep 18- to 21-year-olds engaged for more than a few minutes.

Ultimately, schools must understand that to build a successful online infrastructure, they need to develop an easy-to-use and captivating student experience. Students want, and will best benefit from, a single and complete experience for all the information they need, not a disaggregated clump of independently developed experiences.

Creating a platform to engage and hook students

When universities consider developing a mobile platform, they need to answer four key questions: 1) What apps do students want? 2) What kind of devices need to be supported? 3) What needs to happen to get professors on the platform? and 4) What’s the plan for deployment?

There are some schools that are doing this well. Hult International Business School, which has physical campuses in San Francisco, Boston, London, Dubai and a handful of other locations around the world, has a fantastic online/mobile infrastructure. It was recently recognized by Apple as a “Standout School” for its use of technology, and it’s clear why. Not only has the school given iPads to over 1,600 students and made use of on-demand tutorials and digital textbooks, it’s gone a step or two further to create its own online apps, portals and infrastructure for students and faculty.

Schools are missing a fantastic opportunity here. By meeting students online, they can hang onto those students who would otherwise gravitate towards third-party apps. Universities are in the best position to deliver this new mobile experience — after all, the student is already on the physical campus and enrolled in the school. But if they don’t get it right, they’re in danger of losing students and professors.

Mehdi Maghsoodnia is CEO of Rafter, which provides software tools for cloud-based distribution of course materials. Rafter is also the parent company of textbook rental service Bookrenter.com.

Maghsoodnia will be discussing the development of a unified platform for personalized learning at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference Friday, September 21.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Robert S. Donovan.

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Since the Chicago-based company launched last year, it has charged students on a per-course basis for access to its digital test prep and curriculum-focused courses, which include licensed textbook content from dozens of top education publishers, including McGraw Hill, Pearson, O’Reilly Media and Cengage Publishing.

On Tuesday, the startup is announcing that it will continue to offer its professional and certification courses on a per-course basis, but will shift to a subscription model for courses appropriate to high school, college and graduate students.

As opposed to paying up to $100 (or more for multi-platform access) for an interactive SAT or AP Algebra prep course, students can pay $20 a month for web access and $30 a month to use hundreds of courses on the platform from any device.

“The end goal of what we’re trying to build is a platform that lets students be free to explore and, overtime, build their own learning platform,” said co-founder Ashish Rangnekar.

Just as people may be more willing to explore new genres and content with a subscription service like Netflix or Spotify than they are on a platform like Apple’s iTunes, BenchPrep’s bet is that the new model encourages students to start using an increased range of courses and stay on the platform for potentially 15 months, instead of just the three to six months it might take to complete a single course.

With the new model, the company also gains greater flexibility in terms of other services and products it could ultimately offer down the road. Course Hero, for example, a web-based learning platform that uses available online information, offers subscription-based access to its library of courses, flashcards, tutors and other study guides (as well as free access to limited resources).

Rangnekar has previously said that BenchPrep’s focus isn’t necessarily content, but delivering it in a personalized, adaptive learning environment. The new model moves the company further away from being a distributor of discrete digital courses and positions it as a broader, more consistently used platform for online learning. It’s also in line with the nature of many education textbooks and products — especially those for test prep — in which students use the material for a short period of time and then move on to something else.

It may take students (and their parents) a bit of time to adapt to the new platform, as they might be prepared to pay for a single SAT prep course but not think they need additional resources related to an entire year of a college education. But Rangnekar said universities, libraries and other institutions the company has spoken to want to offer BenchPrep as a supplementary service to students and a subscription model enables that to happen.

More than 275,000 students currently use the platform, averaging 78 sessions and nine hours a month, the company said, adding that by the end of the year it will offer 500 courses.

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In addition to opening up the platform, the company has updated the core product and navigation to make it more visual, tablet-optimized and to lay down the groundwork for a more social experience. In refreshing the platform, co-founder and CEO Ariel Diaz said they took their cue from student feedback.

“We respond completely to students. That’s really our core driver, which is different from a lot of educational products because they’re selling to institutions or professors,” he said.

The new version is easier to navigate with photo thumbnails for each chapter in the table of contents, and it also includes an improved search feature to help students more quickly find relevant content. Students can also highlight sections and take notes, and, Diaz said, they plan to release a notebook feature in the near future that includes all of a student’s notes and highlights, organized by chapter, so that they can have instant study guides.

New version lays groundwork for social

While Boundless isn’t social now (Diaz said some students are apprehensive about sharing in a learning environment because of potential honor code violations), the updated platform provides the foundation for future community features — with an activity feed, for example.

“We’re starting to think about how the community and social features will play into it,” he said. “We’re making sure that they’re helpful, not social just for the sake of being social.”

As the platform progresses, Diaz said, they plan to make the content more “modular” so that teachers will ultimately be able to assign the same section on neurons, for example, whether the class is on psychology or biology or neuroscience.

For every course, Boundless cites the original source, both to be compliant with Open Educational Resources standards and to provide students with a richer experience. “With textbooks, you don’t see any sources – the textbook becomes the de facto authority which is silly because if you do deeper research, material is sourced in a research paper or other documents,” he said.

Publishers allege copyright infringement, unfair competition, false advertising

In April, Boundless Learning announced that it had raised $8 million from investors, including Venrock, NextView Ventures, Kepha Partners, Founder Collective and SV Angel, just as three major publishers filed a lawsuit against the company. In the suit, Pearson, Cengage and Macmillan alleged several violations, including copyright infringement, unfair competition and false advertising. Last month, Boundless filed a motion to dismiss the latter two claims and, while it didn’t argue to dismiss the copyright infringement claim, it said it’s without merit.

The company said it’s currently in use by students at more than 1,000 universities and plans to file a formal response to the full complaint, including the copyright claims.

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Given the size of the K-12 textbook market — $8 billion, as my colleague Laura Owen pointed out in a post on digital textbooks earlier this year — the opportunity is certainly there. But, considering that the procurement processes are largely controlled by state governments and school districts (and can often involve a decent amount of bureaucracy and red tape), it can be a difficult field to break in to.

To get around that hurdle, Kno isn’t targeting the schools themselves, but the parents.

“While the schools figure out what they want to do with their strategy… we believe that we can make this available to parents,” said Osman Rashid, CEO and co-founder of Kno, Inc.

The company’s pitch is that, for $9.99 or less, parents can rent an interactive, searchable textbook for a year and, at the very least, save their kids from having to carry a 25-lb. backpack to and from school every day. The books, which span several subjects, such as chemistry, English and biology, include links to videos, audio files, images and 3D models. They also come with digital flash cards and quizzes, as well as a journal that stores all of a student’s notes and highlighted content, which they can review even after the yearly rental expires.

Students can also write on the books and type notes (although functionality is limited with the current tablet keyboards and finger-based writing options).  In the coming months, the company plans to roll out an analytics feature that tracks student engagement, which the company said can be a leading indicator of student mastery and performance.

In January, Apple announced its own entrance into the K-12 market with an iPad-based textbook initiative launched in partnership with HMH, Pearson and McGraw-Hill. And, given its longstanding relationship with the K-12 market and the speed with which schools around the country have adopted the iPad, the tech giant has a built-in advantage.

But, for his part, Rashid said: “Apple being in the market is awesome. Ever since they’ve entered, I’ve never had to explain what a digital textbook is. As a startup, I’m saving a lot of my marketing dollars.”

Aside from Kno’s price (which is lower than Apple’s price of $14.99 or less), he said that his company aims to offer a deeper educational experience, the ability to access the books on multiple platforms (not just the iPad, but the Web, Android and Windows 7) and a larger catalog of books.

Through its partnership with HMH, Rashid said they cover about 48 percent of the market with a K-12 curriculum based on the Common Core standards, which have been adopted by 45 states. He said they already partner with Pearson and McGraw-Hill for their college offerings and hope to bring them over to the K-12 market as well.

As for its penetration in the higher education market, Kno said it offers 250,000 textbooks and journals in partnership with nearly 60 publishers and reaches students at about 5,500 universities and colleges.

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I talked with McGraw-Hill Education SVP of Strategic Services Vineet Madan on Friday about the company’s own vision for the future of iBooks and interactive course material in general, as well as how it makes sense for the company to have seemingly competing investments in iBooks competitors like Inkling and CourseSmart. Madan also made it clear the company has concerns about maintaining consistently high-quality textbooks that are published with iBooks Author. Here are some of the most interesting points from our conversation.

McGraw-Hill saw the iPad early on but chose not to partner with Apple on iPad textbooks right away

It turns out the publisher wasn’t too keen on the original version of iBooks, according to Madan.

“We’ve been talking with them since iBooks first came out. We said iBooks was insufficient in its form — prior to yesterday — for delivering education content…. It wasn’t a suitable delivery medium for that content. We talked to Apple about what we thought was necessary and ended up working with them to bring that to fruition.”

Instead, back in 2010, McGraw-Hill took a minority stake in Inkling, which has been making interactive textbooks for the iPad for two years, primarily for the higher education and non-education market. They’re also investors in higher-ed focused CourseSmart, whose chilly response to Apple’s entry in the market I wrote about yesterday.

iBooks 2 is only a “first half-step” to the future of e-textbooks

Using interactive material to get students engaged is great. But McGraw-Hill sees a future where students not only learn using digital books but can also can be tested and have the material tailored for particular needs.

“The next step is can you start tracking information about how students are learning and what they’re learning. You need rigorous tested assessments, something the current version of iBooks doesn’t yet support. But you need strong assessment in there and you need to link the data with how students are navigating content to provide tailored instructional paths.”

They don’t lose money charging $15 for a digital textbook instead of $75 for a physical book 

Madan explained the math to me: The high school textbooks they publish sell for between $65 and $85, or an average of $75 each. Each book is used for five years on average, which is $15 per use, per year, or the same as what Apple is setting the price for textbooks in the iBookstore.

But wait; it actually gets better for the big-time publishers: “We are then out of the business of printing books, shipping books, being responsible for warehousing when this scales,” said Madan. That can lead to new investment in more interactive and enriched content.

Even McGraw-Hill execs wonder where school districts will get the money for iPads

In the higher education market in the U.S., mostly everyone has the right hardware and has enough bandwidth. But the story is different in primary and secondary education.

“But in K-12, the big open question that went unanswered yesterday is school districts and their funding environment. They can pay $15 a book, but that’s if they choose to spend $500 to $800 to buy iPads first.”

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CourseSmart, a digital textbook company, that happens to be backed by some of the biggest players in academic publishing — including some of those who Apple announced as partners today — sent a long-ish statement right after Apple’s announcement on Thursday.

The company, which currently has 20,000 digital textbooks and an iOS app, points out that buying iPads and forcing a specific device standard may not go over well with all schools. (“Are they asking students to shell out hundreds of dollars from their cash strapped pockets to purchase a dedicated device instead of using what they already own? Did they really just announce plans to develop a ‘secret’ learning management system with the iTunesU App?” they ask rhetorically.)

But then Coursesmart starts defending its territory: professionally produced e-textbooks from the established academic publishing industry. Not just anyone can make a textbook, they say.

“This content needs to  not only be developed by subject matter experts, but, more importantly, edited through an academic lens in order to ensure learning takes place and our youth is prepared to compete in a global economy. Publishers and authors will remain the drivers of high quality content.”

CourseSmart’s texts are mainly for the higher education, and Apple seemed pretty careful to target K-12 with its e-textbook authoring tool. But still — while Apple says it wants to be additive to the industry, its very presence is upsetting to some of the established players. Will Apple start targeting college and university textbooks next? CourseSmart implies that they think so.

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Chegg, a Santa Clara, Calif.–based company that made its name in textbook rentals, has made its first piece of software that it says will aid in the transition by offering digital textbooks that act an awful lot like physical textbooks. Except, you know, you won’t have to drag 50 pounds of paper and binding around with you.

On Wednesday the company is announcing its first digital textbook e-reader. No, not a device: Chegg actually doesn’t care how you get its software. The key is that the eTextbook Reader is written in HTML5, so students can access their digital books on any platform: a campus library computer, a phone or their own laptop. Chegg’s eTextbook Reader is optimized for viewing on an iPad, Mac and a PC, but Chegg product manager Brent Tworetzky said other optimized platforms (Android and others, we imagine) are coming soon.

Now, there are other digital textbook apps and readers out there already, but Chegg hopes to stand out by mimicking or improving the same behaviors students currently use when reading textbooks and especially when studying them. That means, for example, enabling students to navigate an e-textbook the way they would a physical book, whether that’s by looking through an index, scanning the table of contents, flipping through the pages for notes left inside, or visually scanning for a particular chapter. And the software tries to imitate these physical book behaviors so that every different kind of reader or studier is covered. That way no one can say Chegg doesn’t work with their particular method of learning. Said Tworetzky:

We need to be able to solve for the student who highlights a lot, and the one that puts marks in the margins; for students that like to study in groups, for those that make study guides. . . . We wanted to make a digital textbook that supports all those behaviors. Some students prefer physical books, but we’ve created a reader that students prefer over a physical book.

What makes Chegg’s eTextbook Reader a study tool and not just another way to read e-books are three useful features. There is a highlighting feature that pops up a menu with the option to look up a word in a dictionary or Wikipedia, and it has the ability to save highlighted sections as notes. You can also make an “x” or “?” in the margins or post digital sticky notes that you can reference later. There is also a crowdsourced Q&A feature that lets you put a question out to the million-member Chegg community and receive almost-instant replies (which are ranked based on reputation), and there is a feature called Key Highlight, which, when turned on, shows you the most important parts of a chapter or book based on areas of the text that see the most student activity (highlights, note-taking or lookups).

The crowdsourcing, the customization, the ability to access your books anywhere: All of these are great ideas we normally associate with the web. Chegg has subtly molded them to fit our old-school study habits. Helping students cross that bridge between physical and digital textbooks is a great way to approach the coming transition to a fully digital education world someday.

And luckily, Chegg is not starting from scratch. Though this is its first foray into e-reader software, it already has an army of college students for whom Chegg is a go-to resource for buying or renting textbooks. Getting enough of them on board for eTextbook Reader shouldn’t be too much trouble. But still, Chegg knows that this transition isn’t going to be fast for everyone.

“Though e-textbooks are a nascent business, by 2015, at least 25 percent of students will be using some form of e-textbooks,” said CEO Dan Rosensweig. Getting in on it now is good timing, especially as more and more companies — like, say, Apple — find their way into the space.

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