United States researcher develops adjustable school textbooks

For years, high school students have received identical textbooks. Even as students have different learning styles and abilities, they are force-fed the same materials. A non-profit organisation based at Rice University in the United States believes we can do better.

"Imagine a digital textbook where because I'm a different person and learn differently, my book is different from your book," said Richard Baraniuk, founder of OpenStax, which received a US$9 million grant to develop a prototype textbook for biology and physics. "Because I understand things in a different way from you, the book itself should change. It's exploding this whole idea of this paper, canonical textbook and creating something that's much more like a pathway a student explores."

OpenStax will spend two years developing the personalised, interactive books and then test them on students in and around Houston, Texas. The idea is to make learning easier, so students can go on to more successful careers and lives.

Baraniuk isn't just reproducing physical textbooks on digital devices, a mistake electronic book publishers have made. He's fundamentally rethinking what the educational experience should be in a world of digital tools. To do this means involving individuals with skills traditionally left out of the textbook business. Baraniuk is currently hiring cognitive scientists and machine-learning experts.

"Education in the future is going to be this type of team enterprise. Certainly there are going to be subject-matter experts and teachers. There are also going to be an increasing number of cognitive science experts and machine-learning teachers and practitioners," Baraniuk predicts.

Baraniuk wants to use the tactics of Google, Netflix and Amazon to deliver a personalised experience. These web services all rely on complex algorithms to automatically tailor their offerings for customers.