Can Digital Textbooks Replace College Instructors?
https://www.edtechdigest.com/2023/08/11/can-digital-textbooks-replace-college-instructors/

#education #college #edtech #digitaltextbooks #digital #books #teaching #professors #distruption

As we move more into using digital textbooks for online courses (Yay for convenience, accessibility, and environmental consideration), WHYYYYY is there still no solution that addresses both the need for DRM (which is another argument altogether) AND allows the student a better UX by enabling useful, searchable, index-able highlighting and note-taking. $8K+ for SANS courses, and the digital copies of the books are completely useless to have any notes, comments, highlighting.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of the idea of digital textbooks. Let’s me get ahead on some reading from my iPad on the go, keeps me making progress when I forget a text at home… they can be very useful. And, I get copyright protection, I do, but at the price paid for some digital textbooks, you’d think there’d be a market for Adobe to make some kind of functionality that was ACTUALLY a good note-taking and markup utility that still works within the DRM framework.

Beyond that, I do have to wonder what the ACTUAL cost to an org would be if the textbook material wasn’t DRM-protected. Wouldn’t the lion’s share of customers (IE: large orgs, government) still be paying for the content. Is the juice really worth the squeeze on something like this (and I’m assuming it’s pretty frequently pirated given they invest in it to begin with).

#DigitalTextbooks #EducationSoftware #DigitalRightsManagement