Apple iBooks
In January 2012, Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of marketing, introduced a new generation of the free iBooks app for iPads, which for the first time offered textbooks starting at $14.99 or less for high school students.
The iBooks store is stocked by works from publishing giants Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt, which make up 90 percent of the U.S. textbook market, as well as digital textbooks authored by educators and smaller publishers.
Educators can browse for textbooks by subject area, and users can rate and review works in the bookstore. As of press time, there were some two dozen texts for life sciences and for physical sciences, and more than 30 texts for math and the humanities.
Authors of iBooks textbooks can continually update their content. Students, once they’ve purchased the digital book for their iPad, can view the updated versions at no additional charge, and they can keep the book in their library indefinitely.
iBooks textbooks feature interactive photos, videos, and diagrams, along with 3D images that can be manipulated and rotated with a touch of the screen. Students can highlight sections of a digital book with the swipe of a finger and create digital index cards inside the book without leaving their current page.
“It’s certainly something we’ve been dreaming about for a couple years,” said Bill Rankin, director of educational innovation at Abilene Christian University in Texas, at the time of the launch. “It’s equivalent to the democratization that happened under Gutenberg. … [Apple] isn’t just offering digitized versions of print material. This is a new-generation media object.”
The quality of digital textbooks in the iBooks store varies widely, however. Some are simply digitized versions of basic textbooks, with a few videos or animations embedded throughout the text, while others aim to take full advantage of the digital format.
The iBooks authoring tool lets anyone create digital textbooks for the iPad, making it easy for small publishers, startups, and even educators to create their own texts. For instance, a company called YourTeacher has created what it calls “a textbook with a teacher inside” for algebra and pre-algebra students.
The books, which are aligned with the Common Core standards and sell for $9.99, include videos of a teacher working out various math problems, as well as practice problems and a self-test widget that gives students immediate feedback. The company claims that Houston’s KIPP Academy piloted the books last year and saw up to a 30-percent improvement in students who were using it.
CK-12 Foundation
The nonprofit CK-12 Foundation aims to increase access to high-quality educational materials by offering free and open STEM content, as well as content for English, history, and economics.
These materials include a set of learning tools containing digital textbooks, concept-based learning, SAT prep, and FlexMath, a web-based interactive Algebra I curriculum. Additional interactive math and science subjects are currently in development. The tools are fully customizable depending on school, teacher, or student needs.
CK-12’s FlexBook System is an online platform for assembling, authoring, and distributing interactive, multimodal content. Teachers can rearrange chapters, add or remove content, and also edit the content. “Concepts” are small bits of information and lessons that can be added directly to a FlexBook or assigned to students for independent learning. “Interactive learning objects” feature videos and other multimedia, while the system’s “exercises” help students track their progress via immediate feedback. Other teaching materials that accompany the FlexBooks give educators answer keys and ideas for differentiated instruction, as well as access to assessments.
Last fall, the CK-12 Foundation said it was upgrading its FlexBook system to offer multiple modalities, including textual descriptions, video lectures, interactive models, flash cards, quizzes, definitional and difficulty scaffolding, concepts maps, and more.
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