Blog

Hi there, and welcome to my blog.

I founded Symtext to improve access to learning materials by connecting publishers, educators and students using our  “Liquid Textbooks” platform. Symtext has been a long time in the making, and the experiences that have gone into getting to this point are worth sharing,  I think, from both personal and entrepreneurship standpoints.  I hope to share a few of these stories along the way while talking a bit about Symtext’s role in the rapidly evolving worlds of publishing, education and software.

But let me first explain a little about why we started the company, by way of a very general example.  A college or university professor responsible for a given course is well informed about relevant textbooks, and knows equally well that while these texts are good there isn’t one text that’s a perfect fit for the course in question.  He/she thus faces a compromise.  And that compromise directly impacts what is taught because concepts not covered well in the best available text may not make it into the course.  (And students can’t be obligated to buy more than one text: it’s too expensive.)

Readers savvy about the educational publishing space are already thinking about publishers’ individual remixing platforms and about custom publishing generally.  And you’re not far off: there are plenty of opportunities out there to mix and match chapters from individual publishers, and coursepacks usually contain content from a variety of publishers.

But what if the chapters, pages, supplementary materials, images, podcasts, data sets, presentations and the like come from different sources, and must be presented digitally? What if the prof wants to include his/her own research, briefing notes and annotations within this multi-source collection?  What if they want to change content at the last minute?  Then, it’s not so easy.

Continuing in this vein, given what we know about how a more experiential approach to teaching impacts learning, we have designed Symtext to enable students to contribute their own materials via common web tools like blogs, wikis and commenting.  The end result of having contributions from publishers, educators and students together online is a highly interactive and engaging content set that we believe will have a positive effect on learning outcomes.

A final but very important point: publishers and educators need to know that their content is professionally managed.  We have created a marketplace of content that allows each rights-holder to establish precise rules about how their content may be used, including how their content may be “clipped” (into chapters, pages, learning objects etc.), and the price for each clip: from free to sky’s the limit.  (We also license this service to enable individual publishers to remix and resell their own content, at a fraction of the cost of existing republishing systems.)

With the sort of digital publication that features the ideal content set from multiple publishers, customized by professors and personalized by and for each student, you end up with a completely unique, highly valuable online publication, and a game-changing technology:

A Liquid Textbook.