
India to make CBSE textbooks available online for free - 3dfan
http://m.economictimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/good-governance-cbse-books-to-be-made-available-online-for-free-says-smriti-irani/articleshow/50245429.cms
======
flak48
Hilarious since all CBSE books have been easily available on the NCERT website
since several years as PDFs.

The new government seems to be taking credit for making an app to download
these PDFs.

~~~
kranner
I wish they would remove the huge diagonal watermark across every page as
well. It makes the text quite hard to read.

------
saurabhtandon
Making books and other materials available online is a first step but am
concerned about the quality of the content. Many times the books were not
clear about the point they are trying to make, the experiment how its
performed, etc. They often added some content, especially towards the end of
the chapter, which was just a paragraph or so and did not explain what it is.
Other thing is that students don't get to know about the practical
applications. Consider calculus or binomial theorem, most of the students as
well as teachers don't know about its applications. Unfortunately, if your
teacher isn't that good, you would not understand and appreciate the subject.
Given that internet is still not widely available, the students cannot search
for additional material or get their questions answered.

~~~
nekopa
Step 2: Improve the books.

Step 3: Better learning and quality students

Step 4: ?

Step 5: Profit.

Trite, I know, but I feel this follows a similar argument to the one given for
electric cars:

Right now, individual ecars don't help the environment because we still have
inefficient sources of electricity. But, if everyone has an ecar, we would see
huge increases in efficiency when we upgrade our power stations to green
energy. 1 wind power station could affect 1000s of car drivers.

So if everyone has access to these books, an upgrade of the book could have a
positive effect for millions of students..

Then: profit!!!

~~~
sremani
Textbooks + Video Annotations (ala Khan Academy) really do the job of
individual custom learning of a curriculum. So, your step 4, multimedia
annotations. Profit may not the appropriate word, it would be rightly
Profit/Benefit.

------
sanjeetsuhag
This isn't new. NCERT books have been online for several years.

~~~
sergers
article outlines that previously NCERT has been available, now they are
extending it to CBSE books.

~~~
arihant
CBSE books are NCERT books. In fact, last year CBSE forced schools to only use
NCERT texts. So I don't know what they mean by that.

Also, the article mentions that NCERT books were available for month and a
half. Which is false. NCERT books have been available for free for years, they
just also made them available on a few e-book formats a month or so ago, in
addition to already available PDF. Cheap headline grab.

All CBSE books that they can publish that are not NCERT is an almost empty
set.

~~~
indians_pro
irony here is that parent user's id is the name of the publishing house which
is one of the chief competitors to cbse, especially when it comes to high
school books.

------
pavanky
While this is good news, CBSE is just one of the many (although the largest
and possibly the best) school systems in India. This particular one is
controlled by the central government and they are releasing books being used
by this particular school system.

------
kopos
Am from India and was a passout of the CBSE curriculum school eons ago. And
did not know that NCERT had these books in PDF since many years!

Thank you for the information.

------
parennoob
As others point out, the NCERT textbooks have been available online for a
while, if slightly more difficult to download. But why stop there?

I wish they would put the source online as well, with instructions on how to
build it (preferably using Free/Open Source software). Now _that_ would be a
bold and groundbreaking move.

------
kjsingh
Ah you mean this which is already online yo
[http://www.ncert.nic.in/ncerts/textbook/textbook.html](http://www.ncert.nic.in/ncerts/textbook/textbook.html)

------
jimhefferon
What is the format, I wonder?

HTML can do animations, lots of graphics, etc., but sometimes struggles with
math. PDF (from LaTeX) does a great job at math but making it do executable
things is tough.

~~~
RogerL
My book uses Jupyter Notebook, which uses MathJax for LaTeX generation, and of
course Python or any of the other 30 or so kernels available for software. I
haven't done JS with it for animation because I also want to support print,
but it is trivially possible.

We still have a ways to go before online computer/math texts are seemless, but
we are on our way.

~~~
jimhefferon
Can I ask you what book? I have a professional interest in these things.

------
_nedR
This is good. But I wish India would release all the content it generates as
public domain, like the US. It was paid for by the people. It should belong to
and be made available to the people.

