Product: Book: E-Book
WikiTextbook   (+3)  [vote for, against]
Students collaborate to create readable and understandable textbooks

An alternative to the textbooks, including questions and answers, illustrations and all, which students enter following hearing the lectures. The books can be reviewed for copyright infringement before publishing and selling.

There will be votes on each section and a discussion alongside the textbook. Videos can be linked in as well as animations.

No more incomprehensible chapters, no more waste of time, copying down the material from lectures. From now on, students pay former students for their work, so its an ongoing process of improvement.

A comparison to the relevant wikipedia entries will be appropriate.

Advertising of online teaching will be encouraged on the site so it is self sustainable. Teachers can be rated just like the textbooks themselves, so that this system will be open and fair.

All "homework" will have solutions with step by step explanations.

Students can test themselves with a wikitest on each textbook, allowing authors to create tests and rate the tests too. Perhaps for a fee (or perhaps for free) students can take an "official wikitextbook test" to prove their understanding.
-- pashute, Aug 31 2011

Wikiversity http://www.wikiversity.org/
[mitxela, Aug 31 2011]

While I don't think students are the best learning method psychologists, this is intriguing.
-- RayfordSteele, Aug 31 2011


I like a combination of this idea with a version of the "hackerspace" that is extended to a broader subject range. [+]
-- swimswim, Aug 31 2011


The serial use of textbooks by successive classes can lead to wikilike improvements. I am thinking specifically of a history text I had in 8th grade in which Julius Caesar and his horse were explicitly "augmented", with speech balloons added containing their thoughts on this.
-- bungston, Aug 31 2011



random, halfbakery