Open-Source Textbooks: Infrastructure for Customized Learning Materials

Writing a good textbook is akin to writing a useful software package. Both are highly creative endeavors that require a combination of sharp technical skills and artful design. In recent years, the software community has developed the open-source approach to software construction, in which improved results are obtained by sharing the talents of multiple developers. We propose to extend these ideas to the creation of study materials, specifically textbooks. With open source textbooks teachers can build upon a repository of existing materials. If no available textbook meets their requirements, they can mix from several sources to tailor an up-to-date customized textbook to fit the needs of their specific course. They can also add new materials that were not previously available in the repository, thus contributing to the collaborative process of creating new teaching materials. Using open-source study materials is expected to be highly beneficial both in educational terms and in economic terms. It will enable teachers to develop specialized study materials with relatively low effort and at low cost, because they will be based on reusing existing materials. This is already important in the context of traditional textbooks, and may be expected to grow in importance when moving to more advanced interactive learning materials for use in e-learning systems.