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Is Higher Education Ready to Switch to Digital Course Materials?

By  Patrick O’Shea, 
Peter Baker,  and  Jennifer Kidd
November 28, 2008

Let a Thousand Wikibooks Bloom

For the past two years we have produced material by our students as wikibooks that became the principal textbooks in education courses we taught undergraduates at Old Dominion University. We have turned other material by our students into units in wikibooks used in business courses we have taught graduate students at the University of Denver.

Many of our students prefer the wikibooks to standard textbooks, find them to be credible sources of information, spend more time learning from them than from standard textbooks, enjoy the challenge of contributing to them, and consider their peers’ contributions valuable. And, of course, the students are glad to get free textbooks.

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Let a Thousand Wikibooks Bloom

For the past two years we have produced material by our students as wikibooks that became the principal textbooks in education courses we taught undergraduates at Old Dominion University. We have turned other material by our students into units in wikibooks used in business courses we have taught graduate students at the University of Denver.

Many of our students prefer the wikibooks to standard textbooks, find them to be credible sources of information, spend more time learning from them than from standard textbooks, enjoy the challenge of contributing to them, and consider their peers’ contributions valuable. And, of course, the students are glad to get free textbooks.

Some of our colleagues consider it a heresy to use a textbook written by students. How dare we trust a compilation of 1,000-word articles written by novices to provide a sound knowledge base for any substantial academic course?

We have no intention of ignoring established, expert knowledge. In fact, we argue that our student-written textbooks often include a wider range of more up-to-date expert knowledge than many standard texts do. The topics that we selected for students to investigate and write about give a thorough overview of the material, and we established guidelines for the use of sources and made sure our student authors followed them. More important, the wikibooks encourage users to engage in personal inquiry and to assess the quality, relevance, timeliness, balance, and completeness of the material they encounter.

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Everyone is swamped by information coming from all directions. It is impossible to keep up, even in our fields of scholarly specialization. Almost every day, students mention relevant, useful, sometimes even exciting information that is new to us as instructors. But too often the structure of the typical course does not allow such information to be added. That very abundance of information is what makes wikibooks possible.

The conventional premise of higher education is that information is scarce and must be assembled, evaluated, and presented to students by the instructor. Later the instructor determines whether students have learned that content. But the old model has two fatal flaws: It fails to take full advantage of the collective intellectual reach of students, and it encourages students to be passive. The result is that students miss out on opportunities to learn from one another and never master the skills involved in lifelong learning.

Although using student-written wikibooks can avoid those problems, some students are suspicious of the knowledge of their peers and are much more comfortable relying on the credibility of established experts. Other students are uncomfortable with their peers’ ratings of articles in wikibooks, preferring the professor to evaluate material. In our courses, we turn those concerns into teachable moments, allowing students to experience the thrill of contributing to the knowledge base of the entire class, while seeing firsthand the value of their peers’ additions. Students realize that the old roles of teacher and learner are not mutually exclusive.

The common academic paradigm has successfully captured the wisdom of the past and transmitted it to successive generations. It has given new scholars a mandate to add to the intellectual capital of society, after an apprenticeship under experienced mentors. The body of knowledge was enhanced in a slow, orderly fashion. For example, The New England Primer, one of the most successful textbooks of all time at the primary level, went 100 years without revision. Euclidian geometry could be taught successfully today from an equally venerable textbook.

But in the 20th century, academic disciplines began to divide and recombine into new, multidisciplinary fields of study. The process of change accelerated, and in the 1960s, it was estimated that 90 percent or more of all the scientists in the history of the world were then alive. In part because of that, and in part because of a desire for profits, it became common for a textbook to be revised after only three years. And then came the Internet.

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Only 20 years ago, a university’s reputation was in large part measured by the quality and extent of its library. Now many students have access at home to more information than even the greatest academic library contains. Not only is more information available, but our tools of access are becoming exponentially better — and those improvements are taking place constantly. Academe has yet to acknowledge how such trends are changing the educational process.

We view student-written wikibooks as instructor-guided excursions into the new intellectual landscape, where expert knowledge is ever more readily accessible. And we hope that writing and using wikibooks will help prepare students to navigate future changes in the global production and distribution of information.

Patrick O’Shea is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. Peter Baker is a Ph.D. candidate at Old Dominion University’s Darden College of Education, where Jennifer Kidd is a lecturer in educational curriculum and instruction. Other contributors to this article were Douglas Allen, an associate professor of management at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business; Dwight W. Allen, an emeritus eminent scholar of educational reform at Old Dominion; and Jamie Kaufman, a master’s candidate in education at Old Dominion.


http://chronicle.com Section: Commentary Volume 55, Issue 14, Page A29

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
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