Textbooks have long been crucial to providing the content of education because they organize information and make it convenient and manageable for learners. The printed textbook, however, is becoming overly expensive for students, not to mention the world’s poor -who desperately need better learning. Also new information is being added to human knowledge so rapidly that a textbook may be out of date by the time it appears in print where digital online textbooks - downloaded from the Internet - can be regularly revised and updated.

Clearly, traditional printed textbooks alone will not be adequate to meet the world’s educational needs. Fortunately, powerful new technologies can greatly overcome those limitations. The first electronic textbooks arose through the convergence of print, video, sound, film and graphics with a variety of delivery media including cell phones, digital radio, TV and wireless Internet connections. These will converge and the resulting educational instrument may in a decade cost as little as ten dollars.

This article, published by G. Parker Rossman in his three-volume online book on the future of lifelong education, explores the potential of online textbooks, which can be tailored to the needs of each individual learner.

Read more: Future of online ‘textbooks’ and modules

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