FlexBook

FlexBook is a textbook authoring platform offered by the CK-12 Foundation. Launched in 2008, FlexBooks reduce the cost of textbooks for the K-12 market both in U.S and worldwide. Derived from the words "flexibility" and "textbook," a FlexBook allows users to produce and customize content by re-purposing educational content using different modules. FlexBooks can be designed to suit a learner’s learning style, region, language, or level of skill, while adhering to the local education standards.[1]

Features

FlexBooks are designed to overcome some of the limitations of traditional textbooks. Anyone – including teachers, students, and parents - can adapt, create, and configure a FlexBook.[2]

Some FlexBooks features include:

Licensing

Each CK-12 FlexBook is created under Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) License,[4] giving its author/user a right to share (i.e., right to copy, distribute and transmit the work) a right to remix (i.e., right to adapt the work). However, conditions of Attribution and Non_Commercial apply.

Examples of use and collaboration

In March 2009, FlexBook was lauded as “an adaptive, web-based set of instructional materials” by Virginia officials when members from Virginia’s K-12 physics community along with university and industry volunteers developed an eleven chapter FlexBook titled “21st Century Physics FlexBook: A Compilation of Contemporary and Modern Technologies” in just 4 months.[5] In September 2010, NASA teamed up with CK-12 to add a chapter on “modeling and simulation” to the existing Physics FlexBook created earlier.[6] In November 2011, teachers from a school district, Anoka-Hennepin, Minnesota, reportedly, saved the district $175,000 by writing their own online textbook instead of buying $65 textbooks – earlier, costing the district to the tune of $200,000.[7] Wolfram has teamed up with CK-12 to produce interactive FlexBooks with Wolfram demonstrations embedded into the FlexBooks.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Creative Commons
  2. ↑ About us
  3. ↑ NY Times
  4. ↑ Creative Commons Licenses
  5. ↑ OER Consortium
  6. ↑ NASA News, NASA teams with ‘CK 12’ Foundation on Physics FlexBook (2010). Retrieved November 18, 2011
  7. ↑ HuffingtonPost

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Thursday, August 27, 2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.