CC is for Customisable Coursebooks and Creative Commons publishing

May 18th, 2010
by Valentina Dodge

Lindsay Clandfield over on Scott Thornbury’s blog in his guest post on C is for coursebook outlines what’s wrong with many coursebooks:

• They all look the same.
• They all follow the same syllabus.
• The grammar is wrong or misleading.
• Texts serve merely as a pretext to teach discrete language items.
• Texts and topics are Anglo- or Eurocentric and/or promote a western consumerist ideology.
• Texts and topics are safe, bland and vapid.
• Coursebooks are too big.

The 50+ comments that the post has attracted to date have reiterated some of the criticisms being made by many educators around the world.

1.    It’s difficult even for a teacher to identify the aim of coursebook pages
2.    Learning is non-linear, by nature course books are linear.
3.    Language learning is a dynamic, idiosyncratic coursebook aren’t.
4.    Publisher-driven projects often have the wrong focus.
5.    Coursebooks are often artificial and a construct of “some other world”.
6.    Cost are often prohibitive.
7.    Sheer number of different coursebooks can be overwhelming.
8.    Content is very often inappropriate.
9.    Coursebooks can alienate learners from the process of learning English.
10.    Coursebooks often teach a fossilized form of English
11.    They can be overly prescriptive and descriptive (to the point of giving the learners ‘nothing’ to cling to).
12.    They are predicated on a linear and incremental progression through a (fairly arbitrary) sequence of discrete grammar items.
13.    Materials that have been devised for a global market cannot easily accommodate local – and personal – needs and interests.
14.    The whole process is very top down.
15.    Coursebooks are mostly written for teachers (for parents, and head teachers, and ministries and inspectors and exam bodies ) rather than student
16.    There’s a belief that ‘progress’ can easily be measured.
17.    Publishers are bound to produce what is authorised by the ministries.
18.    After 20+ years of market-led material people are tired of it.
19.    Don’t include enough unscripted dialogues featuring non-native speakers
20.    …. and the list goes on…..

From the  50+ comments so far we can see some of the suggestions or ideas that need to be incorporated to make the ideal coursebook or course material/resources

• The internet
• More user-generated content
• Make it authentic because it is set up such that the student creates the content
• Adapt and change according to the teacher’s preference
• Make it customisable
• Allow teachers /students to add specific local content / their content
• Integrate with self-publishing elements
• Educators can work with major publishers rather than against them or outside of them
• Throw educators’ support behind innovations
• Push publishers to consider and incorporate more changes
• Teach unplugged
• Use the text book as a grounding and supplement it as is relevant to the learning styles and personalities of the learners

At present the Cambridge University Press material in the system is All Rights Reserved with the setting others may use but not change. I would simply add, real shift is happening now as educators are sharing content too. It’s great to be part of a project that promotes Creative Commons (CC) and seeing authors or course providers selecting “Others may copy and change your work.”.

This is an important move forward and I hope more authors will come on board prepared to do just that so that the 360° degree perspective can evolve further.

Material is currently being authored for the platform under the CC licence, that’s evolutionary I find!

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