Pearson Learning Solutions has announced project Blue Sky, which allows an educator to custom build a set of learning resources from the Pearson library of content as well as open-content resources, such as MIT Open Courseware, Wikitionary and 23 other providers.
This pilot test is limited to psychology, but Pearson is soliciting interested professors from other disciplines. Using free content, in addition to selections from Pearson’s library of content, should help keep textbook costs down, especially since some courses don’t use every chapter from a book.
McGraw-Hill offers something similar in its McGraw-Hill Create product, which allows the teacher to custom create a textbook from books, articles and more. Additionally, their Connect product allows instructors to integrate learning objects such as multimedia and assignments into their school’s LMS.
Now the next step is getting all publishers to allow for searching and inclusion of their resources. You could take the best from McGraw-Hill, Pearson and Open Education Resources to create one text to rule them all…for your course.
Pearson is leveraging Gooru, a search engine for learning, to gather the open education resources. One cool thing about Gooru on its own is that you can create a collection of learning resources that others can learn from. Items in the collection can be images, videos, web pages presented in a more cohesive way.
