Will publishers be the good guys of the Open Education revolution?

By Pierre-Antoine Ullmo. Textbook publishers are under pressure. Open educational resources (OER) are a clear threat to their monopoly in the classroom. Our school memories are full of textbooks; the ones we struggled with, the ones we carried on our backs until physical exhaustion, the ones we wrote in, or the ones we never even opened. The ones we got “for free” from the school and we had to give back at the end of the year or the ones we paid for. Many of our teachers were almost reading aloud from our textbooks; textbooks were the driving force of our lives at school and at home. Textbooks signed by unknown authors, teachers, or school inspectors were considered as the ultimate source of knowledge; the authoritative reference. More...