Apple continues to transform education, now taking aim at the broken educational textbook industry. The creation, publishing, approval process, and distribution of educational textbooks for elementary, secondary, and university education have been ripe for a customer revolution for over 20 years. On-demand printing and the Internet both helped to accelerate the process. Visionary undertakings like Nature Education’s Scitable offering (high quality free life sciences’ learning materials) have also helped to pave the way. But it took Steve Jobs’ vision of transforming educational publishing to make this a reality.
What Apple has done is 1) to make it easy for students and teachers to access high-quality interactive learning materials for free from Apple U (via iTunes), 2) to provide tools (ibooks author) that will make it easy for more people to create and to publish high-quality, interactive educational content and 3) to provide a win/win business model that keeps educational publishers in the game by letting them sell electronic textbooks at lower price points (e.g., $14.99) to a much larger number of students worldwide.
Apple is spawning a huge, vibrant ecosystem of incumbents and new players (including students and teachers) that will thrive around students’ outcomes: successfully mastering new concepts and skills.