Virginia's "Flexbook" Update

I mentioned more than a year ago about the report on the state of Virginia (in the US) effort to produce an only wiki-style textbooks for the science classes. These flexbooks will be used by high school students, and edited/written by teachers in the various subject areas.


The Washington Post has a more recent article on this effort. It looks like it is going online some time in February next year.

Virginia's experiment with the "flexbook," one of the first state-sponsored efforts to digitize course content with teachers, offers a glimpse at how the Internet could alter the curriculum.

The state is partnering with CK-12, a nonprofit organization in Silicon Valley that offers "next-generation textbooks" in physics, math, and biology online. The nonprofit also offers software to help school systems develop their own content. In the District, an experiment with flexbooks is underway at Jefferson Junior High School.

This is not such a bad idea. However, there has to be a strict quality control with something like that, especially when it gets to be quite larger later on, as it inevitably will. That's the problem with Wikipedia. The advantage of this Flexbook is that it appears that the editing/writing will be done by experts/teachers in each field, and will be looked on by others as well. So quality control may be higher.

Zz.