<p>Fun for those of us with time on our hands.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Apple, which approached a handful of colleges universities last spring to start work on the classes, unveiled its new platform at a Thursday press conference in New York City. Most of the courses -- which anyone with a computer, iPad, iPhone or iTouch can download for free are posted by major research institutions such as Duke and Yale Universities...</p>
<p>Inside Higher Ed ...Unlike previous versions of iTunes U that offered audio and video podcasts but few supplementary materials, the new offerings are more like self-contained courses where students can download handouts and worksheets while following recorded lectures.</p>
<p>Apple understands design and entertainment. Its understanding of education is limited to selling boxes and tablets. Unless it is well hidden, the most important part of learning is still MIA. </p>
<p>This is a yawner that could only please the Cupertino fanboys.</p>
<p>Having the partnerships is one thing but having actual product on the shelves (or servers) is quite another… With one student in college and another to follow, I would love to see $15 textbooks, even if I have to pay full price for the gadget…</p>
<p>Add to that the risk for the publishers of DRM and I really don’t see Pearson, etc. actually putting up with this.</p>
<p>Two semesters’ worth of buying textbooks for DD1 has given me some stunning reminders of how messed up the textbook industry is, and how complacent universities are. DD1’s math class text last fall came in a Playboy magazine style plastic shrink-wrap that included a card with the access code to access the online homework system. This meant you had to buy the school’s special edition. Awesome, after paying tuition we now need another $50 to get the card…</p>
<p>This semester the above was out-done by the English department that mandated a custom e-book ($90) that was largely a stitching together of a few writing style manuals (a chapter here, a chapter there) as opposed to picking a SINGLE textbook and sticking with it.</p>
<p>Against such odds, I don’t think Apple or anyone else would have much of a chance. I wish them well.</p>
<p>for example: there is a great class on virology at Columbia that you can listen to on ItunesU: W3310.001- virology(free subscription). You can download right to your iphone and listen in the car. This might interest parents like me who are a little obscessed with viruses and are now finally mature enough for college at age 50!</p>
<p>This semester the above was out-done by the English department that mandated a custom e-book ($90) that was largely a stitching together of a few writing style manuals (a chapter here, a chapter there) as opposed to picking a SINGLE textbook and sticking with it.</p>
<p>So far, schools still pick what textbooks they use, don’t they?
At older D’s school, they generally used original source materials ( in hum classes) in her science classes they did use textbooks but we were able to find them online for a nth of retail.</p>
<p>iTunes university is fantastic. I started with Cornell’s Sick in America series. Dr. Robert Martinson’s talk “Chronic Illness and Healthcare” demystifies the biggest sources of our senseless overspending in healthcare, that is, extra spending without extra benefit. This is a must-see for anyone who proports to put forth an opinion on our healthcare system. </p>
<p>UCTV’s series on Diet and Nutrition is eye-opening. The Nutrition and Metabolism talk walk through the evolution of dietary recommendations for healthy eating or for weight loss that followed successive major research trials to where we are now, with a focus needed for m</p>
<p>Cont’d (see my post above)
… for most of us, on fewer carbs. </p>
<p>The wester civ and literature lectures are great. </p>
<p>iTunes university can be helpful to current students, but it is a boon for the rest of us who would like to learn about a subject in a more in depth way than can be achieved by a magazine article, a news show or any but the best documentaries. It has far less breadth of subjects than the teaching company, but it’s free.</p>
<p>No amount of koolaid can diminish the limitations and dangers of Apple’s proposal. This is nothingbut a cynical attempt to make IOS a required platform. Whatever is producedby iBooks Author can ONLY be sold via Apple and iTunes. Do we want our text books to be chosen by a device maker that built a closed ecosystem? That is heresy. As far asthe price charged, that is not necessarily a saving as the books are hostage of a system that doesnot allow trades or resales. The book publishers see this as yet another ploy to combat the resale of books. A rotten industry found a willing partner.</p>
<p>Do not let the glorified youtube fool you. That is NOT what education is all about. If passive and non-interactive learning was effective, we would have a much smarter nation.</p>
<p>Is there a big difference between the fruit-shaped monopoly and the oligopoly established by the Big Textbooks?</p>
<p>the iPad is as good a platform as any for e-publishing, and I’d rather spend $15 and keep the book in e-form instead of paying two or three times as much for use of the book for one semester (rent/buy and sell)…</p>
<p>The risk here is that we could end up like Kindle, where books can actually be cheaper on paper than on ebook format (ask Ken Follet about this :-))</p>
<p>Where I hope this can make a difference is in K-12 schools.
There are relatively few publishers & textbooks are very expensive. Districts don’t have enough books in the classrooms, let alone enough for kids to take home & some schools have quite old & tattered books that are out of date.</p>
<p>If electronic media can help some schools to get more material out to children- & possibly even get them more interested in the subject matter- even if it was just a fraction of their coursework- it could keep more kids engaged in school.</p>
<p>There are plenty of differences. For starters, a company such as Apple should not be placed in a position to approve or reject textbooks … something they could do. </p>
<p>The iPad might be a good platform for publishing, but its closed ecosystem is unacceptable in an era of open systems. Attempting to make the IOS centric to everything is a path in the wrong direction. It might be acceptable to attempt to corner the music business by forcing people to genuflect in front of Itunes, but it is wrong for the world of education. The requirement that authors who produce e-books through iBook be restricted to Apple’s distribution is ridiculous. The penetration of Iphone/Ipad/Ipods in education is well below 10 percent, and most definitely composed by members of the wealthier schools and students. </p>
<p>Apple is not at the forefront of the progress in e-publishing. Plenty of other companies such as Kno or Inkling have much better ideas. Apple is not interested in changing education nor interested in reducing the costs and the inequalities in resources. They are interested in peddling tablets to educators who are looking with glossy eyes at any tool-du-jour to mask their own ineptitude. </p>
<p>Apple’s proposal is bad, but the recent success of the company (and its bulging coffers) will probably blind more than one easy to corrupt fool who will push forward plans to abdicate the decision about the type of textbooks our students have to use, and most importantly the type of technology that is required.</p>
<p>PS From the generous souls in Apple Valley you have to swallow a software EULA which for the first time attempts to restrict what you can do with the output of the app, rather than with the app itself.</p>
<p>Could not disagree more. The K-12 is the area where the Apple “Modest Proposal” could do most damages. I am not too worried about the changes that affect the college crowd. After all, a 600 dollars iPad will not represent a drastic change in a student budget, and it could be recouped easily through cutting some of the asinine markups extracted by the book publishers and corrupt academic officials. </p>
<p>On the other hand, the K-12 is in dire needs of true savings. This is accomplished by maintaining books for much longer and resist the urge to constantly change textbooks. Adopting a technology that requires constant updates in both hardware and software is a recipe for disaster. A 600 dollar Ipad that needs to carry a dozen 15 dollar books per student/user (and repeat every year) will not save money. The key is that nobody owns the book and cannot transfer it. Something Apple and the bandits who joined them are fully aware of. This is a ploy to extract more revenues from a sector that has never made intelligent investment decisions nor shunned from being corrupted.</p>
<p>We do need 15 dollars books in our schools. Not the glossy, filled by crap, overpriced versions! We need books that last, not the last fads. Most of the world does much better than we do, and they do not rely on iPads. They rely on better teachers and paper and pencils. We believe in anything that does not require work and effort and will allow to waste more time. Hence, the … iPad craze.</p>
<p>What is your point? That some books are outdated garbage? Does that come from the absence of a faddish platform? The reality is that this industry has been abusing the public coffers for all it can. If World History books should be more recent, what about basic subjects such as math and english? Is Spielvogel’s 8th edition better than previously, and worth more than … 100 dollars? Hell no!</p>
<p>And, fwiw, pushing updated versions of the same books is the bread and butter of the publishers. In the case of Apple, the decision of ignoring ePub3 and CSS standards gives us an update path to … Hell. The Apple leaders either blew it or are even more devious than one could imagine. My money is on the latter.</p>
<p>I suppose I’m not even convinced that a 1998 World History book should be “out of date”. Does World History start in 1945?</p>
<p>Not far from me is one of the best private schools in NJ, which still uses math textbooks from the early 1990s. Why? Much less crap such as color pictures of current events remotely related to math, many fewer pages devoted to screenshots of calculators, fewer topics, etc. All of these things make books more expensive and more readily obsolete.</p>
<p>Why can’t school districts or states hire their best and most experienced teachers to write the books for the schools to use in open formats (like those xiggi mentioned, along with PDF, Open Document Format, etc.)? A Creative Commons copyright would be nice. The idea of tying a textbook to a particular company’s hardware is pretty awful, IMO.</p>
