Apple Revolutionizes Education, Again
Online education and traditional education have been a seemingly unintentional collaborative endeavor of late, and today’s announcement by Apple, Inc., of it’s new iBooks 2 textbook service will serve to blur the lines between tradition and innovation even more. iBooks 2 promises to deliver movies, links, multitouch gestures, faster than light searches, photo galleries, visual quiz sections, and 3-D models among other interactive elements to textbooks. Available for download starting today, iBooks 2 is a free app. So, what about the textbooks themselves? Where will they come from?
“That’s where Apple’s new textbook authoring software comes into play,” said one tech expert and journalist. ”This free Mac app for authoring books will be made available as iBooks Author. iBooks Author will contain several templates, drag-and-drop controls, auto-formatting and the ability to introduce custom elements as well.”
That’s great for people who plan on writing textbooks, but what about textbooks already being used in elementary schools, colleges, and universities? Not to worry. Apple’s got plenty of partners lined up that will allow them to offer textbooks for an incredible $14.99 or less. In fact, the three major textbook publishers who have already signed on are Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and these are the very same companies who currently produce 90 percent of the textbooks used in classrooms today. This will amount to phenomenal savings for school districts, college students, and others with a vested interest in the textbook industry. This is revolutionary, in every sense of the word. Steve Jobs would have been proud today.
Despite all of this, Apple still wants to do even more for education. Today, the company also released a whole new iTunes U, which was formerly a loose collection of educational podcasts and videos that could be accessed through iTunes software only. This new, evolved iteration of iTunes U comes in the form of an app, and according to a spokesman from Apple, ”lets teachers do everything on their iPad.” This seems to be a giant step into the future of textbooks, and of classrooms and education itself. This is the 21st century education model come to life. It is what many envisioned 30 years ago when imagining the educational environments of the future, and then some. The new app will allow instructors to customize their topics, post memos and office hours, and enable lectures to be downloaded, or to stream to devices. This could go a long way towards making distance education and brick and mortar classrooms more similar in all the ways that are most important.
