If you had all the money in the world ... (summary)

dopamina

July 20, 2021

If you had all the money in the world ... (summary)

I’m a teacher, and I have always thought that getting rid of textbooks would be good for humanity :-). I’m thinking about the ‘traditional’ textbook, naturally. I would like to create a publishing company to change the traditional textbook.
For many years I have seen hundreds of textbooks lying forgotten in corners by students who hardly use them.
The problem is always the same. The publishing company asks one or two teachers to write a textbook for an entire subject. But usually you have good material for one or two subjects, the rest is usually quite bad. The result is that each teacher uses a small part of the book and forgets about the rest.
In many cases they illegally photocopy :-) parts of other books to complete his class material.
The case is particularly serious in regions like mine, where the government pays for all the books. So more and more books with little use are accumulating in schools and we all end up paying for them with our taxes.

What can we do to change that?

The ideal situation would be that the teacher could choose one chapter (or less) from a textbook, another chapter from another book, etc. Obviously, the only way to do this is to use digital books.
But how to organise all this in a legal, easy, and efficient way so that the teacher can choose different parts of different books and build their own digital book?

My idea is to offer teachers an application where they could do two things: on the one hand choose different educational items to build their own textbook.
On the other hand, they could write their own educational items to offer to the educational community.
As an incentive, teachers would receive some remuneration for each published item.
The main problem is how to organise all the educational items so that someone could find what they need. To achieve this, we would use the learning standards published in the current regulations in most countries.

First of all, we need a group of programmers and teachers working hand in hand. The programmers must create a platform where every teacher could upload resources. Nowadays there are many platforms for education (classroom, Moodle, etc), but they are platforms designed to work with teachers and students. Obviously there are many ways to upload something to the cloud, but the challenge is having all these resources organized according to the learning standards. So, a teacher could find resources for published standards with precision. The idea is that teachers could download several specific resources and build their own textbook. (To be continued).

en 1

Correct

Corrections

tillefoan

If you had all the money in the world ... (summary)

I’m a teacher, and I have always thought that getting rid of textbooks would be good for humanity :-).

I’m thinking about the ‘traditional’ textbook, naturally.

I would like to create a publishing company to change the traditional textbook.

For many years I have seen hundreds of textbooks l~~ying~~eft forgotten in corners by students who hardly use them.

"left" works better with "forgotten"

The problem is always the same.

The publishing company asks one or two teachers to write a textbook for an entire subject.

But while you usually ~~you~~ have good material for one or two subjects, the rest of it is usually quite bad.

Since you're referencing the material, "the rest" is usually followed by "of it", although it's not wrong to omit it. In this case the adverb sounds better after the subject pronoun.

The result is that each teacher uses a small part of the book and forgets about the rest.

In many cases they illegally photocopy :-) parts of other books to complete his class material.

The case is particularly serious in regions like mine, where the government pays for all the books.

So more and more books with little use are accumulating in schools and we all end up paying for them with our taxes.

What can we do to change that?

The ideal situation would be that the teacher could choose one chapter (or less) from a textbook, another chapter from another book, etc.

Obviously, the only way to do this is to use digital books.

But how to organise all this in a legal, easy, and efficient way so that the teacher can choose different parts of different books and build their own digital book?

My idea is to offer teachers an application where they could do two things: on the one hand choose different educational items to build their own textbook.

On the other hand, they could write their own educational items to offer to the educational community.

As an incentive, teachers would receive some remuneration for each published item.

The main problem is how to organise all the educational items so that someone could find what they need.

To achieve this, we would use the learning standards published in the current regulations in most countries.

First of all, we need a group of programmers and teachers working hand in hand.

The programmers must create a platform where every teacher could upload resources.

Nowadays there are many platforms for education (classroom, Moodle, etc), but they are platforms designed to work with teachers and students.

Obviously there are many ways to upload something to the cloud, but the challenge is having all these resources organized according to the learning standards.

So, a teacher could find resources for published standards with precision.

The idea is that teachers could download several specific resources and build their own textbook.

(To be continued).

Feedback

There are similar solutions on the Internet, such as TES. However, these aren't textbook pdfs so much as they are supplemental classroom resources like worksheets etc. Also, another problem you find is that a lot of teachers wish to be paid (in my country, they tend to not be paid a whole lot) for the work they publish on those sites, so a lot of those resources are behind a paywall.

dopamina

July 20, 2021

Thank you very much for your corrections. For me the payment is not a problem because the remuneration should be done by the school or the government (in my region). The biggest problem is how to organise the resources (learning standards, etc) and how to pay. Currently the payments only benefit the textbook publishers and almost nothing for the teachers.

If you had all the money in the world ... (summary)