Wormbog

Earlier this week I posted some of my thoughts about electronic textbooks and promised to share my thoughts on CourseSmart.  I was pointed to CourseSmart by Monte Vista Christian School who has purchased 70 iPads for use in their AP courses.

I created a CourseSmart account and browsed through some of the over 10,000 books available.  CourseSmart claims that the average student saves $65/textbook but this claim does not hold up in a traditional high school setting where books are used for multiple years.  I found a book that I was interested in using for a Python course next semester and requested a demo copy.  This is one of the great strengths of CourseSmart.  Within a couple of days I was approved for the evaluation copy and with that approval was given access to the fist 25 pages of every book in their vast library.  It is a great tool for instructors to quickly evaluate texts.

I was not as excited once I started to browse the book.  I have become accustom to the smooth interface of the iBook application and CourseSmart is nowhere near as slick.  The books are lower resolution scanned images of the original book.  They do not allow for highlighting and note taking is not intuitive.  In the positive column CourseSmart books are searchable and your content is available on the web as well as the iPad and iPod Touch.  If I where a college student or a high school with a 1:1 program I would seriously consider purchasing my textbooks through CourseSmart.

CourseSmart is off to a good start making textbooks available online.  I hope that they are able to work with the publishers to convert these texts into true ebooks that utilize the benefits of current ebook readers.  As online courses with their animations and video meld with traditional textbooks these tools will be even more appealing and will truly start to change the face of learning.