Flat World Knowledge, a free, open source textbook publisher, has announced plans to add support for direct integration of its books into campus learning management systems (LMS) like Blackboard and ANGEL.
Typically, college professors and publishers will only make supplementary materials available on an LMS or link to outside sources and e-books. With Flat World's LMS-supported textbooks, they will be able to include content in its entirety directly on the platform and split up chapters into various folders according to their syllabus.
Eric Frank, Flat World Knowledge co-founder and chief marketing officer says that they are aiming to have books available with LMS support by Summer in time for the Fall semester.
Flat World Knowledge will also be partnering this year with an education assessment software company and will begin to add general education courses to its current selection of books that consist mostly of business texts.
“Branching into general education courses will have a tremendous impact on community colleges in particular,” said Frank. “Not only are general education courses the bread and butter of community colleges, community college students are feeling the greatest pinch from the high cost of traditional textbooks."
These announcements are a big step forward for the company which just completed beta testing on about 15 universities across the country. Thirty more universities have recently signed on to participate in a second in-class trial for the spring semester.
The professionally-written and peer-reviewed digital books are free.
Students can annotate them, and professors can add to and control the content. Flat World makes money off the optional purchase of customized printed versions as well as additional study aids like flash cards.
While certainly innovative, long term success will depend on how widely the books are adopted, and it also faces competition from e-textbook shops like CourseSmart which already offer a much wider selection -- over 5,000 titles and more than one-third of the most popular-selling text book titles.
Flat World Knowledge by comparison has only 21 books in the pipeline written by 40 different authors. Ten will be published between the third week in February and the end of March.
The startup was founded in 2007 by two former textbook execs who are familiar with the current inefficiencies in the industry- high costs to students which results in piracy and secondary market for used books that become outdated with a few years. This problem will likely to be even more relevant this school year in light of the recession.
A “formal launch” of its open source platform and texts is scheduled for February.
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