TET – The Evolving Textbook
TET project is based on the collaborative development of an evolving digital textbook. Content will be created by both teachers and learners and the platform will support them in their daily educational activities and stimulate innovative learning and teaching practices.
Background
The need for this project was identified before the Covid19 pandemic, as education is increasingly shifting towards online education. This is an essential component of many modern teaching methodologies, such as Blended Learning. With the outbreak of Covid19, this shift got an even bigger push, as in many countries classical face-to-face learning had not been possible for a long time.
For this reason, the project consortium wants to provide educational materials that:
- would be regularly and dynamically updated with the shortest possible time delay,
- would allow learners to participate in the co-creation of the educational materials, making it most suitable for them, and
- would exploit pedagogical, social and cultural differences in participating partners’ countries to create adaptive educational materials.
Aim and objectives
The main idea behind the TET project is to make higher education textbooks digitalized, easily adaptable, and suited to learners’ needs and wishes. The project consortium will develop a platform that provides the learners with tools to co-create the digitalized textbook. The main innovation of this project is the inclusion of learners in online textbook creation and evolution. Learners will have the opportunity to express their opinion on current materials and propose additional content.
This project aims to achieve the following objectives:
- create innovative approach to provide more attractive higher education that will be adapted to individual learners’ needs and expectation,
- extensively use digital tools and methodologies for creating the evolving textbook by providing teachers and learners with means to dynamically co-create educational materials,
- better support competitiveness and employment by increasing digital readiness and capacity of learners,
- improved process of determining and evaluating the knowledge and competences of learners,
- improved practice to deal with differences in educational outcomes that are connected to distinctions in various countries’ pedagogical approaches, socio-economic states, and cultural specifics,
Outcomes
The main result of the TET project will be an innovative, digital and ever-evolving textbook that will allow easy and frequent modifications, adaptations of educational materials with the active involvement of learners. They will be able to express their views on current materials, suggest improvements and also add educational materials they believe will improve the textbook.
The TET platform will be accessible and inclusive for a wide range of users: teachers, educational materials creators, administrators, other technical staff, and learners. The platform will need to support quick and simple additions of new materials and their structure, content and user management, effective graphical representation of materials, and dynamic user interaction. A suitable database system will also need to be constructed to allow fast data storage, search, and retrieval. The main enhancement in comparison to the similar digitized and online textbooks will be the concept of textbook evolution: the TET textbook platform will evolve in time with the help of learners. The platform will be designed to be content independent and will be easily transferable to other fields and topics if necessary.
