The Hindu Business Line : Make your own textbook

IT is a problem teachers, particularly technology teachers, face - culling useful course material for their students from different sources, and making it available to their precious wards, in and outside the classroom.

Precisely such a problem was the starting point for O'Reilly, a technology publisher. And thus was born SafariU, (http://safariu.oreilly.com), O'Reilly's new solution, which is a Web-based platform to create, publish and share textbooks. O'Reilly is a publisher in areas such as Open Source technologies, operating systems, programming languages, Web design, networking and system administration.

On the SafariU platform, customised textbooks can be created and published. One can select book chapters, sections or pieces of writing needed from the vast Safari database.

As the http://www.oreilly.com/news/safariusandoe.html site says, "SafariU costs you nothing to use and offers your students more focused course content at less cost." There are no fees or charges for faculty members to use SafariU. Teachers who create SafariU products for purchase by their students must meet a minimum annual amount of services consumed by their students, currently set at $700 a year.

Early identical attempts in the late 80s saw the McGraw Hill programme where staff of any McGraw Hill-approved US University could request a book specially intended for their classes. Since the teaching in most US universities is more chapter-based, it made sense to have books that had the latest articles on hand. Teachers could have a hardbound book, which was available to students who had signed up for the class as well as those who hadn't, while the authors whose articles were published also got a royalty. This also saved students the bother of xeroxing chapters that often were unreadable when reproduced.

SafariU has been called an online evolution of this concept. As Professor Kent Sandoe from the Information Systems Department of Chico State University puts it, "The textbook industry is about to go through a major revolution. It's being challenged for the first time the way Napster challenged the recording industry and forced it to rethink the distribution of music."

Personalised education resources

C.J. Rayhill, CIO & GM-Education Division, O'Reilly Media, says, "O'Reilly has been around for 25 years and we've gained a reputation as a technology publisher that gets real work done. Some may even remember us from the early days of the Web when we published the Whole Internet Catalog and created GNN, the first significant `Yahoo-like' Web portal. We are active in technical communities, serve-host conferences, provide online articles and commentary through the O'Reilly Network and serve up all of our book content online with our Safari technical library service."

Explaining how the idea of SafariU came about, Rayhill says, "O'Reilly has been servicing the academic community by providing evaluation copies of our books to faculty members interested in adopting them for their classes. However, we've never specifically targeted the academic and corporate trainer market through specific product development. Due to the drastic rise in textbook prices and the cutting-edge nature of computer science and information technology courses, we felt there had to be a better way to service this market." They began, she says, by interviewing hundreds of professors and instructors about what they wanted "from a publisher like us. The three common themes they wanted were: (1) Depth of content in the technology area so they didn't have to find content in multiple places (2) Both print and online option for their students and (3) The ability to share supplemental materials and projects with each other in a P2Pfashion."

So, a small group (C.J. Rayhill, CIO and GM of this new Education Division, Allen Noren- Program Director and Nathalie Mainland-Marketing Director) set out to address these needs through SafariU. "The platform has some inherent advantages. There are other products that have one or two components of SafariU services, such as custom books, e-books and learning object exchanges but no integrated services were available within a single facility. In addition, a faculty member can take advantage of the services without the need for a sales representative. Also, teachers are given complete access to the full content of the Safari library and to all of its online article content, to browse and search for material that can help them in their teaching," she says.

Scott Gever, Adjunct Instructor, Perl Programming, Foothill College, Los Altos Hills, an instructor with 18 years of teaching experience, was among the first to create a custom textbook, Introduction to Perl Programming using SafariU, taking his laptop home on a Friday and getting a book ready by Monday morning.

His students appreciated having core material all in one place and being able to study in a café or outdoors without needing a computer.

For India too, "This is the only service that we are aware of that dynamically creates your custom book and provides you with immediate access to a Pdf to review your project online," Rayhill says. "We are already working on the next generation system that incorporates much of the feedback we heard from our initial testers." As far as custom print textbooks are concerned, it's probably cost-prohibitive to ship them from the US, she says. "I am currently in India visiting various universities and colleges with our prospective partner, Liqwid Krystal, to talk with University and Government officials on how we might better serve teachers and students in India. We are not going to be offering the current form of SafariU here but work to make it suit educational needs and fit institutional patterns here."

Those interested in using the online services of SafariU can contact Anand Adkoli of Liqwid Krystal in Bangalore. For printing custom books, Aziz Shroff of Shroff Publishing in Mumbai is the person to be contacted, she says.

Rayhill also met Dr. Balaveera Reddy, Vice-Chancellor of VTU in Belgaum and Professor Sadagopan of the IIIT in Bangalore.

paromita@thehindu.co.in

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