Hot on the heels of the $8 million announcement from open source textbook concern, Flatworld Knowledge, comes another announcement & launch, this time from “liquid” textbook-maker Symtext, with an undisclosed investment from Flow Ventures:
We’re happy to announce that we’ve made an investment in Symtext, a Toronto-based startup. Led by digital media industry veteran Ian Barker, Symtext has created a platform for building “liquid textbooks” which combine content from e-books and other digital content into unique learning tools. Containing both licensed works and royalty-free works, Symtext allows professors to create unique liquid textbooks for their courses and provides students with an interactive learning experience that goes beyond traditional textbooks. [more...]
According to Symtext, they let you:
Create your own Liquid Textbook.
* Select just the content you need, from the diverse world of publishers providing it
* Create fully customized, multi-media course content by embedding your own content with the clips (chapters, podcasts, presentations, articles, etc.) you selected
* Provide a personalized, experiential and economic online learning experience for each student
* Use our suite of analytical tools to compare, contrast, improve and share your Liquid Textbook
Visit the Symtext blog to find out more, such as:
But what if the chapters, pages, supplementary materials, images, podcasts, data sets, presentations and the like come from different sources, and must be presented digitally? What if the prof wants to include his/her own research, briefing notes and annotations within this multi-source collection? What if they want to change content at the last minute? Then, it’s not so easy.
Continuing in this vein, given what we know about how a more experiential approach to teaching impacts learning, we have designed Symtext to enable students to contribute their own materials via common web tools like blogs, wikis and commenting. The end result of having contributions from publishers, educators and students together online is a highly interactive and engaging content set that we believe will have a positive effect on learning outcomes. [more...]
