Blog

Symtext Liquid Textbooks are live and in use.

A highly dedicated, highly talented group of people — putting in literally years of dirt-under-the-nails hard work, sacrifice and steely-eyed persistence — have produced something wonderful.  And we couldn’t be more proud.

Liquid Textbooks defy pithy explanation but try this on for size: they let educators build the ideal course. Using just the content they need, from multiple sources, professors craft a living curriculum that reflects their unique style and pedagogy.  Once published, Liquid Textbooks become a platform for interaction and engagement, within which teachers and students explore and learn.  Think about blending the dynamism and immediacy of web 2.0 publishing with premier higher education content. Consider ‘pouring’ content into courses as events and student progress warrants it.

Also think about the implications of recombining publishers’ materials with each individual professor’s perspective and each student’s participation.  You get high utility in the classroom (both physical and virtual.)  And you get uniqueness.  High utility and uniqueness creates value.  Value for professors, value for students, value for publishers.  It’s the basis for a new deal in learning materials among these three groups, and a deal that improves for each group the more they participate.

It’s also the basis for Symtext’s current mission: to unify the interests of professors, students and publishers.  Coming at a point in time when students worry about price and format, professors continue their quest for best fit content, and content producers wrestle with finding The Answer to profound industry change, this mission is both well timed and well received.  Now, and over the next few weeks, Liquid Textbooks will be introduced to a small sea of students at universities across Canada, supplied by over thirty different publishers.  The courses themselves are diverse, including subjects like business writing, art, entrepreneurship, marketing, psychology, criminology, strategy, computing…  it’s a long list.  The content itself is amazingly diverse: cases, textbook chapters, videos, images, news articles, book chapters, studies, professor annotations and, equally as important, student contributions.

Underpinning all this is the understanding — shared by publishers, educators and students alike – that great content is fundamental to great education. On that note, let me share a few things that have gone into making all this happen:

*A highly dedicated cadre of professors, educational design experts, and senior university administrative personnel helping to develop the requirements for Liquid Textbooks, subsequently determining it was something they needed, and would therefore demand.

* The support of publishers who, as a group,  understand and support where we’re going.  This is exemplified by these facts: 100% of rights-holders we contacted provided content for the courses we identified.  We fulfilled virtually 100% of our requests for content, with the only exceptions relating to cases where the publisher didn’t hold e-rights.  In the realm of the written word, in the vast majority of cases, we received production quality PDFs from some really helpful people committed to making the student experience the best possible.

* An unbelievable team. It’s typical for startups to get a bit maudlin at times like this, but the energy, creativity and persistence from technology, content management, and our Board is really extraordinary and I wish everyone could see it. It brings to mind all the stories you read about commitment, and what people will do when they commit to a shared vision. (It also makes me think everyone should start their own business, at least once.)

Put it all together — mission, team, product and customers — and you get Symtext as we are today: at the start line, and primed to make a difference.

~~~

You can reach Ian at ian @ symtext . com

.

Back