The iPad in Higher Education

Brian Chen reports that three universities have already begun an educational experiment with Apple’s iPad:

Seton Hill University, George Fox University and Abilene Christian University each pre-ordered bundles of iPads — sight unseen — with plans to experiment with how the tablet could change classroom learning. In interviews with Wired.com just prior to the iPad’s launch last week, officials from each university saw the iPad as having potential to render printed textbooks obsolete.

The biggest potential, of course, is to launch the dream of a digital textbook revolution, rendering printed textbooks obsolete. Still, the challenge (aside from getting traditional publishers to make their wares available for the device) will be for the iPad to overcome the same usability barriers that students have already experienced with Amazon’s Kindle DX:

“Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,” Aaron Horvath, a senior at Princeton, told the school paper last year. “All these things have been lost, and if not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.”

I think the iPad technology has the potential to give rise to truly innovative digital textbook design. But, will the traditional publishers rise to the challenge? And, if not, will this be an opportunity for an alternative textbook publishing revolution to take hold? Apple’s marketplace infrastructure for the iPad, provides a mechanism for independent textbook publishing to become a viable business model. Consequently, any academic with the ambition could “self-publish.” Or, alternatively, some enterprising soul could use this technology to design a modular publishing structure that would allow instructors to put together custom course texts, and also for academics to publish text material in this fashion.