eTextbooks: Boundless Releases New Cloud Platform, Hopes to Become the Wikipedia of College Textbooks
Today, Boundless launched their “Cloud Powered Education” platform.
Here’s a paragraph from a Boundless Blog Post Introducing the Service:
Educators can use Boundless to assign off-the-shelf content or easily customize their own title. Boundless offers content in 20+ subjects, peer-reviewed by academic experts. Educators can customize content to match their syllabi, giving their students an affordable alternative to traditional, expensive textbooks. Boundless makes it simple for educators to share content with their students in real time, through the cloud.
As one of the viable insurgents to the education establishment, Boundless has a secret weapon that the collaboratively edited online encyclopedia lacks — academic experts to supply and edit its content, making sure that the standards of quality are acceptable for higher education.
[Clip]
“In five to 10 years, I think people will look back at textbooks the way we look back at encyclopedias,” Ariel Diaz, chief executive and co-founder of Boundless, said. “The notion of carrying around this antiquated textbook will become very quaint, very quickly.”
[Clip]
[Boundless CEO and Co-Founder Ariel] Diaz said that Boundless is taking the content it currently has from more than 20 college level subjects as well as the platform it has built for students and teachers to engage with that material, and opening up the technology, processes, and learning tools the company has developed for educators to add or update online content themselves.
Read the Complete Article
See Also: Boundless Reaches Settlement in Lawsuit With Textbook Publishers (December 13, 2013)
See Also: 3 Major Publishers Sue Open-Education Textbook Start-Up (COHE, December 12, 2012)
Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), News
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.