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Comment by jonhohle | Hacker News Reader

This seems so obvious that it's painful to think that it hasn't already been done.

It would be awesome to see a non-profit started which provided a repository for textbook content, a platform for mixing and matching content to meet the curriculum of a particular district, and a toolchain to produce digital copies of the books in the format used by the district - all open source and released under broadly permissive licenses.

If even a handful of school districts funded a project like this instead of purchasing moore textbooks, I would imagine this could be sustainable.

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> repository for textbook content, > a platform for mixing and matching > content to meet the curriculum

This would be awesome indeed, but there are some problems. From the things that i have seen so far, (ex: cnx.org), the content is predominantly of low quality. Simply put, ask the average person to explain something to you and he/she won't do a very good job. The other thing is that modularization completely brakes the flow of narration, and narration is a big thing to keep the reader engaged (story telling instinct).

In my work, I try to have two kinds of "nodes" -- one is generic lesson node where the explanation of some concept happens and the other are linker nodes where narration happens. Despite being a single author, and using space-age tools (dokuwiki with the include plugin;), I still find it hard to make things modular and easily composable.

I would venture to say that a small number of authors would be better at writing a book rather than a whole collective.

For corrections/feedback/exercises... BRING ON THE CROWD!

Agreed. I think it would even make sense to hire accomplished authors, editors, and academics for the narrative portions of chapters/lessons. It would likely make sense to have fairly coarse units which would be the responsibility of a particular author.

I skimmed through some of the CK12 content. While some of it might be good (I am not qualified to determine whether or not the content is high quality or affective) - the presentation is really poor. In addition to authors, I think you need designers who will present the information in an attractive and engaging way.

Hi there. My name is Doug, I work at ck12.

If you're interested in learning more, contributing, or giving feedback please email me at doug@ck12.org I'd love to hear from you (or anyone else). Thanks.

That's what I find to be the most interesting part of this project: instead of just relying on the instinct of the crowd, the idea is to put state money into funding the writing of these books, and using the Creative Commons licensing to make it free to copy and distribute and to allow instructors to make corrections or create customized versions for their classes.

ck12.org

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