UOP Teams Up With Symtext to Offer Customizable Textbooks

The UOP team is happy to announce that we’ve begun working with Symtext Corp., a new and innovative platform for educators, learners and publishers, that allows users to manage and deliver digital instructional materials.

The Symtext platform allows educators to create something called Liquid Textbooks – which are individually customized digital textbooks that can include a wide range of materials, including:

• texts from diverse publishers
• personal material
• presentations
• videos
• photos
  
• podcasts
• basically anything else a teacher/prof could think of
  

For professors, this new ability to completely customize content means that they have the opportunity to create the perfect course book by combining a variety of learning materials from multiple sources. They also have the opportunity to enrich content with annotations and personal comments. Students also benefit because the liquid textbooks are generally cheaper, and they have the opportunity to add and share materials with classmates, or comment or ask questions within their digital textbook.

So far, forty-two UOP (new & backlist) titles have been made available through the Symtext platform, which in turn have been ‘chunked’ into 523 separate parts. At the moment, the platform only supports English material, so our French titles are not available through Symtext.  

Other publishers are taking part in the project as well. Over 70 publishers are making material available on the platform, including Oxford University Press (Canada), McGraw-Hill Ryerson, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Harvard Business Publishing, MIT Sloan Management Review, Broadview Publishing, Jones and Bartlett, University of Western Ontario's Ivey Publishing, Wilfrid Laurier University's School of Business and Economics case group, and the University of British Columbia Press.

The Liquid textbooks are available online, through Print-on-Demand, and will shortly be available for Apple’s new iPad.

See how it works:



For more information, check out this article in the Toronto Star:
http://www.thestar.com/business/smallbusiness/article/813864--symtext-aims-to-build-the-textbook-of-tomorrow

Or Symtext’s website: http://www.symtext.com/

And if you’re really interested, and would like to see a list of available UOP titles in the platform, you can contact Rebecca Ross at rebecca.ross@uottawa.ca or 613.562.5800 x2854