In January, the Finnish Non-Fiction Writers published Quality! Study Materials on the Changing Information Environment. The book has 24 articles ranging from the digital native’s typical week to copyright. I started to read the book a bit sceptically, as the list of contributors suggested to me an overall negative approach to e-materials. Most articles in fact turned out to be overviews on educational materials and publishing, and their content is quite well-known to a reader familiar with the field.
A pleasant surprise was a contribution from Timo Tossavainen, who previously has had negative reactions to online media. In his two articles here, Tossavainen shows an open investigative viewpoint, and he weighs the pros and cons of traditional and electronic materials. He believes that would take only two years to build a kind of lecture bank that would cover the Finnish high school math curriculum, and it could be combined with GeoGebra communities. The teaching of mathematics would benefit from the interactivity of e-materials, although writing mathematics by hand is still faster than, for example, producing symbols and formulas with a tablet.
Also interesting are Jukka Vahtola’s thoughts on how textbooks have managed to avoid the fate of encyclopaedias and dictionaries. According to Vahtola, the solution has been the service business model. You no longer sell a book but a total solution, including teachers’ guides, tests, assignments, slides, digital packages and support. The purchase is made by a teacher, not by a financier. In Finland, there is less and less competition today, because the publishing industry is so concentrated. It has no need to innovate or develop new product concepts.
In her article, Anna Kallio replies to a question which puzzles many teachers: Are their materials available to the employer without compensation? According to Kallio, the copyright initially belongs to the person who created the material, and it cannot be assigned to the employer without a contract. Permission for other uses should be granted via contract.
One of my favorites was an article on university education by Sari Linndblom-Ylänne, Telle Hailikari and Liisa Postareff. It stated: “The same learning environment can promote the learning of some students and slow down the learning of others.” It is, therefore, unnecessary to advocate strongly for only certain types of learning materials. Quality, like the materials, takes many forms.