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Bill and Melinda Gates: Textbooks Are Becoming Obsolete

Posted by msmash on from the how-about-that dept.

Reader theodp writes: Thanks to software, Bill and Melinda Gates report in their 2019 Annual Letter, textbooks are becoming obsolete. Bill writes: "I read more than my share of textbooks. But it's a pretty limited way to learn something. Even the best text can't figure out which concepts you understand and which ones you need more help with. It certainly can't tell your teacher how well you grasped last night's assigned reading. But now, thanks to software, the standalone textbook is becoming a thing of the past" (if so, it'll be a 60-year overnight success!). The Gates are putting their money where their mouths are -- their education investments include look-Ma-no-textbooks Khan Academy and Code.org. Code.org, whose AP Computer Science Principles course for high schools "does not require or follow a textbook", boasted in its just-released Annual Report that 38% of all AP CS exam takers in 2018 came from "Code.org Computer Science Principles classrooms," adding that it had spent $24.2 million of its donors' money on curriculum and its Code Studio learning platform (30,300 hours of coursework), another $46.7 million to prepare 87,000 new K-12 CS teachers, $12.4 million on Marketing, and $6.9 million on Government Affairs. So, do we still need textbooks?

4 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. No Bill... by blahplusplus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... textbooks are not obsolete. Not everyone on the planet can afford internet especially schools in places where internet is costly/sketchy and teachers need classrooms where kids can focus.

    1. Re:No Bill... by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Most textbooks really don't go out of date that quickly. But those who write and publish them obviously have an interest in issuing a new edition every year or two, so parents are forced to buy the new edition at a premium instead of buying one second hand or using a hand-me-down from an older sibling. And of course if textbooks go online, publishers can charge the full price every time even without issuing new editions; they just need to be sure that access to a textbook cannot be transferred between accounts.

      --
      If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
    2. Re:No Bill... by serviscope_minor · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Excuse the selective quoting, but:

      By the time a textbook hits the market it's already a year or three out-of-date. [...] It would need to be[...] organized to match standardized curriculum,

      I think those things are somewhat in opposition. If you're at the level of standardised cirricula, then you're teaching intro level or a bit above. Anything much higher doesn't have standardised cirricula. On that note, most things that are intro level don't change fast enough to be out of date in three years (not everything, but most).

      On another note, textbooks don't need to be matched to a cirriculum. At uni the lecturers often gave a list of books they thought were useful if you wanted to learn outside of lectures. The cirriculum wasn't organised around those books (or vice versa). And sometimes books are just plain useful for learning stuff, for example, I love my copy of Horowitz & Hill and NR.

      On the other hand, a dig in the eye wit ha sharp stick would be a better bet than some of the things that pass for textbooks, especially at the mass eucation level.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
  2. Re:Textbooks are an expensive racket. by LinuxIsGarbage · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Textbooks to me seem like a perfect opportunity for "Creative Commons".

    The concepts have hardly changed in decades, why pay the publisher exorbitant rates for a rehash of last year's material?

    With a CC textbook, it could be printed and bound, it could be printed a chapter or excerpt at a time, or it can looked at entirely digitally.