Textbooks

There's a new group at:

http://groups.drupal.org/learning-content-authoring-system

It's for creating a distro to help authors write learning content, like Web sites that replace textbooks. The distro will have tools to help authors follow learning science principles, like outcome-based learning.

An learning content authoring system (LCAS) is not the same as an LMS. An LCAS instance will house content for, say, one course. Multiple LMS will use LTI/SCORM/TinCan to load content from the same LCAS instance.

The Google Books module http://drupal.org/project/google_books is a filter module and an API for the Google Books service, that permits a user to insert rich Google book data, cover images, and inline book readers into nodes via filters with data retrieved from the http://books.google.com domain. The API also allows data to be pulled into flat arrays indexed by the text biblio field identifiers like 'author' or 'title.'

This page...

http://coredogs.com/article/textbook-writer-tools-writing-active-textbooks

... describes a tool for writing online textbooks. The textbooks:

• Embody best practices from learning science.
• Can be written and sold by individuals and small groups, without needing a publishing company.

Kieran