Once we have these open source books then it becomes significantly easier to build additional tools on top of that source material - exams, practice questions, lecture videos, study notes etc.
Most of the ed tech players I see are simply developing tools that are trying to fit into a broken system. Simply put - the current system needs to be scrapped and replaced with something better, built with the internet in mind and built to be a major disruptor of GLOBAL education.
I am currently working on a side project trying to bring it to MVP stage. This is the idea I have in mind: Let's build a new platform that rebuilds education for the 21st century - start with writing open source textbooks. At the beginning, they don't need to be perfect, they can be revised as the platform grows. Then build a bunch of innovative self-study type tools using the latest in technology to make learning efficient, easy and fun. In terms of monetization - simple advertising and premium services (tutoring, live streamed classes with teachers etc.) and of course a simple credentialing system with the possibly to have proctored exams to add validity. Long-term vision would be this: a type 1 civilization university - all major subjects would have a course with a free textbook and an amazing set of tools to self-study it (or affordable options to get tutoring/view live streamed lectures with real teachers). Add in localization tools to translate all of these courses into the top 20+ languages. Each course would have a rigorousness protected exam for students to get a employment worthy credential. Eliminate all admission requirements and allow everyone to attend for free.
Writing a bad article is easy. And pervasive in science education.
I'm suggesting there's a level of excellence, at which even a small fragment of an article, for any audience, takes a surprisingly large gathering of expertise. So large as to be implausible with current social/technical/incentive infrastructure. And I'm speculating that it's an interesting level of excellence, with benefits that might justify the investment. Or at least the discussion of the possibility.
> write the high-level draft and then allowing a community of people to edit and revise it
I'm unsure how to describe why I don't buy this.
Imagine a draft newspaper article, which says "Foos do qux". The fact-checker objects, "But some foos don't do qux". The reporter "fixes" the draft with "Most foos do qux". The newspaper fact-checker says "yes, that's great", and it goes to press. Then someone who actually understands foos, points out to a colleague, that the entire focus on qux was misguided, confusing, and engenders misconceptions, and that indeed, the very concepts of foo and qux are badly flawed. "It's news media - what do you expect?" the colleague responds.
So there's a concept that you can wordsmith you way out of getting something badly wrong. You've likely seen some process where two parties have profoundly different concepts, but instead of discussing concepts, are engaged in text tweaking.
But what if, in excellent content, even high-level organization is sensitive to expertise-intensive details?
"Ok, for the foundational concept, we have proposals for atoms, a different definition of atoms, molecules with atoms as a degenerate case, atoms in molecules, nuclei, electron energy, electron clouds, configuration spaces, trajectory spaces, ... . Let's explore the correctness, accessibility and fruitfulness of each foundation." What if you can't even write a draft title, let alone structure a presentation, until after a massive collaborative process among educators, research scientists, and creative catalysts?
> the incentive problem...to encourage people to contribute
An MIT project to create cell-biology VR content approached the need for expertise by pulling in researchers for interviews about their areas. But there was a reoccurring difficulty... getting the researchers to leave. Such was their enthusiasm.
So I offer the hopeful possibility, that a project with just-the-right sweet-spot shape, might accomplish things that seem impossibly difficult, when seen less clearly.
> open source books
I'm sympathetic to OER. But in the context of transformative improvement...
Chemistry education research describes chemistry education content using adjectives like "incoherent", and as leaving both teachers and students steeped in misconceptions. It's not clear to me that a reasonably scaled OER effort can move that needle.
Years ago, NSF almost decided to create a national science education wiki, analogous in scale to wikipedia. That might have had critical mass for transformative change. But they didn't.
My experience has been, that of the few first-tier astronomy graduate students that aren't mistaken about the color of the Sun, as many learned it in seminar coverage of common misconceptions in astronomy education, as learned it in their own atypically extensive and successful astronomy education. Current content is really, really bad. A "Primer" will require much better.
AI doesn't help much if your large textbook publisher's science education content is written by inexpensive liberal arts majors with no science background, consulting with "scientists". If one instead uses science graduate students, double majoring in education, with misconception lists in hand, you might get that Sun color right. Maybe. And interviewing researchers about their own research areas is even better. But...
Say you're writing a children's picture book about atoms. What magnitude of domain expertise support do you need? How about a small room full of MIT physics professors? Is that enough?
Can you see a bare atomic nucleus with your naked eye? Why not? Did you just now say too small, rather than beyond-violet "color"? That much is easy. But what if you wish to discover that a couple of atypical atomic nuclei can be seen with your room-lit naked eye, can be made to brightly fluoresce visibly (a multi-step spin-isomer decay, with one step visible)? So you can include a photo, of a glowing green dot in a vacuum vessel, in your picture book, to reinforce that nuclei are real physical objects. My experience has been that a room of MIT professors, most with some nuclear physics background, is likely an insufficient gathering of expertise. Unless it's a lunch for a visiting professor, whose focus is nucleus simulation, who self-describes their focus as a (with emphasis) "small" subfield, and who perhaps thinks all this obvious. Reflect on that: A room full of MIT physics professors is insufficient domain expertise to write an excellent children's picture book about atoms. How might we then go about writing a Primer, if it takes such an awesome gathering of expertise?
Before Primers can be airdropped, they need to be written. And I suggest we're not yet even at the point of recognizing and acknowledging the primary challenge there, let alone scoping, funding, and addressing it. It's not pedagogy and ed tech that's blocking the road to a Primer. It's the sciences. And their incentives and funding.
It's something I'd love to be working on, but finding people to work with has been a challenge.