e-learning - future of education?

Bi24.pl has started

2008-10-07T09:43:00.003+02:00

Bid24.pl a new polish reverse auction platform has started (1.10.2008).
Bid24.pl offers reverse auction self-organized tenders at reasonable price.

More information at www.bid24.pl

Bid24.pl przetargi elektroniczne

2008-09-17T09:35:00.002+02:00

Bid24.pl - przetargi elektroniczne

Start 1.10.2008

Marathon 4:47 (Warsaw Marathon)

2007-10-10T12:44:00.000+02:00

Tomasz Ćwik

2007-02-20T11:03:00.000+01:00

Welcome to my home page. Page is almost ready. You can find there many publications from my MBA course.

More details at Tomasz Ćwik
Tomasz Ćwik - wersja polska na Tomasz Ćwik

Anonymous comments are blocked

2007-02-20T10:37:00.000+01:00

Sorry, but becouse of spam I had to blocked Anonymous comments.

Technorati profile

2006-12-24T22:28:00.000+01:00

Technorati Profile

Blog assignment

2006-12-11T23:00:00.000+01:00

Richard Gatarski's Blog Grades

Five Masters
Forty4, e-grasshopper, blogproof. Boguslaw and maniana, have really impressed me – in particular Forty4. They have all been active bloggers, focused their posts on DBE-matters, as well as helped and interacted with fellow students. I learned a lot by reading their blogs and comments. Thank you!

Full assignmnet is here

Wiki-Based Web about Cracow MBA

2006-10-13T11:06:00.000+02:00

Wiki-Based Web about Cracow MBA - does anybody want to join and make some pages about our MBA course?

Copyrights issue

2006-10-03T15:44:00.000+02:00

This post refers to copyrights issue of our blogs

There is really interesting discussion and lesson between Rille and Fredrik on aedbe blog. Copyrights are always problematic. In my blog I tried always thinking about copyrights. Now I am even lost what is copyright violation and what is not...

Not-mine thought or texts

Of course there are not-mine materials on my blog but their are marked and always linked to the source. Well, I usually tired to write italic what I have pasted on my blog. Always there is a link to the source I have copied-pasted
Sometimes like on the post The end of the books? I just said stright "This text is taken from the The end of the books? article published in The Guardian" - hope it is enough not to violate copyrights (but I didn't check if Creative Commons
license is enough to Guardian, I hope it is enough)
I used one image that is found at google image search without giving a credit... I've corrected it. I will make my own image in Gimp.

Copyright management

Copyrights management is very important in publishing/e-learning business. There are thousands of images, texts, quotations, lyrics that are copyrighted. You need to use a computer systems that calculates number of copied printed/sold or number of used images. It is quite complicated when you use for example quantity-license rather then time-license. (you e.g. may have permission to use an image 100 000 times and it maybe used in many textbooks and in many releases). Such system must calculate each use of the image in all books you have published!

Internet is full of information. Some of them are for free but some other... copyrighted. Personally, I like much more free content but we must take assumption that all is copyrighted (unless marked).

E-learning blog - Summary

2006-09-23T20:09:00.000+02:00

Time is over!
My countdown clock definitely shows that time of writing blog is over (now the timer shows time after deadline). That’s why I decided to write summary posts.

What I have done?
Well...During 4 months (with some breaks) I tried to discover the possibility of e-tools that may give opportunity or threat publishers or just change the environment in which traditional textbook publishing house operates. Additionally, I went though many DBE tools that maybe or may not be use in e-learning.

Writing my blog I did it from the perspective of students/pupils in the age of 3-19 because WSiP (company I work for) operates in that segment. E-learning is for sure much more developed in the professional business trainings and in academic education. Today we can easily study on-line!

E-learning is the future of education!
However, we can not easily predict when the blackboard will be totally rid off from schools and would be replaced by electronic devices but I am convinced that process is only question of time. Why? It is cheaper, more attractive, more convenient and probably gives better results. Even it will not be implemented as a primary method of education in each levels (from many reasons) e-learning tools maybe used as supplement to more conventional methods.

Access to information (learning materials)
Nowadays, Internet is everywhere and we can find any information in it. Access to the information is not the problem anymore, the problem is to select them and find the best source of it. Thanks google that process is more and more easy but still not perfect!

Development of Web 2.0 and community-made-content always rise the problem of reliability of information. Look at wiki technology that from one side gives unlimited and free access to knowledge but from other sides still make suspicions of the value and reliability of the information.

Free information is a threat to publishers!
Open source movement and wiki based websites offering a free software and free access to knowledge maybe a dead-threat to publishers that take their profits from selling for instance books. Despite many of them says “we do not sell books, we sell knowledge” who will want to buy the knowledge if it would be (almost) for free.

Thanks!
Thanks to Rile for the course and assignment form and thanks to my blogger-mat! Special thanks to Borys, BelaMBA, Man1ana, e-grasshopper, DzejDzej, Blogproof for intersting blogs and comments. I wish I didn’t read all of the posts yet. ( I hope I will manage to do it)

It was new experience to write that blog. Even now I know I didn’t go through all of problems of e-learning. Probably each next day I will discover new tools and new ideas because internet is probably the fastest developing business environment.

LONELYGIRL15 not so lonely anymore...

2006-09-19T15:34:00.000+02:00

Our time in Sweden

2006-09-17T02:45:00.000+02:00

Well, We are now in Sweden, Stockholm, Hotel Oden - I do not recommend.
We were sitting in the hotel and ... Integrate. Quite interesting. We met some students from Russian MBA and changed some opiononions. It is 2,45 a.m. I can not go to sleep without that post. :)
Tommorow is going home time. Good but I will miss it.

Forty4 from Sweden.
PS.
I wish that PC do not have an USB port.....

Less than three weeks left

2006-09-08T14:23:00.000+02:00

posted by rille @ 14:16

Today I took a look at the situation. According to my notes there are 28 registered blogs, of which many are just one post. On the other hand, some of you are doing just fine.
I do not know how many students are in the class, but more than the registered blogs I guess. Most likely those who have not yet created a blog will not make an acceptable assignment.
Neither will those of you who have made only one or two posts...

Please feel to publish what you think about the assignment. Either as posts in your blogs, or by commenting others thoughts on this subject (but I might miss reading such comment).

And I hope you bear with me as I grade your efforts. Quite a complicated task...but you will help. More on that later on.

***

I confirm that such way of assignment is more time consuming. But let’s remember, that lot of that time we spent on learning blogging. Next time it will be easier.

I must say I like that form of assignment very much. I like it not only because it gives a real possibility to learn a lot and forces writing systematically. I like it because it gives a possibility to follow activities of other students. I can read their posts, exchange opinions, discuss. Thanks to that I will learn not only about e-learning (subject of my blog) but also about other problems or e-tools. Even if I did not follow all blogs at the moment (despite there are few of them) after you/we will grade them I hope I will have possibility to read them later on. (so dzejdzej please don’t delete your blog please!)

Unfortunately, despite good idea about blogging form I must say that it hasn’t worked as I expected. We have only few blogs that are published with more then 5 posts...

this text is also posted as a rill's blog comment

e-learning hardware - short overview

2006-09-02T11:35:00.000+02:00

The last element of successful e-learning system are hardware devices that support it. From the side of e-learning company/organization it is important to provide sufficient server infrastructure, capacity and data transfer. But that can be easy and is not discussed here.

To start e-learning operations we must also find out if our learners are ready to e-learning; are they equipped with necessary devices.

Maybe all bellowed devices are so obvious for many of us (PC, mp3player) but describing them I just wanted to pointed out how common they are today.

Laptop (desktop)
It is obvious that computer is one of the main device use in e-learning. In 2005 (most recent official data) 40% of polish houses (not people) had a computer (comparing to 36% in 2004). 30% had a internt connection. What is much more optimistic to e-learning - computer was in 56% (internet 38%) houses with at least one child.

Despite it is not so good achievement it shows that more then half of potential polish e-learning (in terms of school education) clients have possibility to e-learn! I think that time for e-learning really comes..

Statistic data about internet and computer according to polish Central Statistic Offices:
2005 polish only
2004 English only

mp3 players, mp4 players

Polish gadget of the year 2005! How can it be useful is obvious. I wonder while publishers do not start making podcasts with some parts of textbooks that would be easy to download and listen with mobile devices...
I can also imagine the educational web page that allow students share or publish their more or less professional podcasts.

Sony reader
Lets look a little bit in the future...
Sony corporation design in my opinion very nice and very user-eyes-friendly (as they describe) reader that allows to store many ebooks and read them easily. In my opinion it doesn't matter how many ebooks can it store, how much does it cost? The main think is that book can be read from much more user-friendly and mobile and pocket devices. As we know that it is not the problem of technology but rather starting mass production - then the prices will go down rapidly.

Reading from the Sony® Reader is unlike reading from any other digital device you've ever seen. Its breakthrough electronic paper technology provides clarity and resolution that rival paper itself. The 6-incscreenn1 is as easy to read in full daylight as indoors, and can be viewed from nearly any angle. Forgot your reading glasses? Enlarge text up to 200%. It's the way on-screen reading was always meant to be a book-like.
More you can find here

Other display technology
The problem of development of e-books (as a part of e-learning) is still the fact that paper is more user-friendly than any screen. From other side, individual printing of e-books is much more expensive then commercial printing. Printing on demad describedibed in post Publication on demand - the bridge between paper and e-book ) is a solution that in some situation mausefulfull but still make costs of printing. E-ink development is still in progress but also still in immature...Looks we have to wait a couple of years...

Learning content storage costs

2006-08-31T14:18:00.000+02:00

Thinking about the e-learning content I decided to investigate the costs of "content storage". In other words I try to compare the costs of the instrument that carry all the knowledge to the learners. Below you will find out the costs of making:

books - traditional paper textbook - costs include printing and paper costs of book in circulation of 10 000 copies
CD - production costs of 10 000 CD
web server costs - hosting costs of server with capacity of 10 GB and the annual traffic of 2400 GB (that should be enough to serve 10 000 clients)

All cost do not include costs of preparing the "content". (writing book,editing, programming etc.)

Costs of production of paper textbook are almost 14 times higher that being stored at www server....

e-learning content

2006-08-31T11:52:00.000+02:00

Individual publishing

E-learning content, similarly to traditional books is one of the most important part of the whole product and have the highest influence to project/course success. Contrary to paper books, where only text and pictures (or images) are required in e-learning curses there is much more elements. I present below short list of most popular of them. (according to YDP)

All those elements require a lot of work to be prepared however, may be cataloged and re-used to many different courses.

Collaborative publishing

Wiki software (as part of Web 2.0) makes it possible to publish a website with very little technical knowledge but puts a greater emphasis on collaborative rather than personal publishing. Wiki technology may significantly increase the speed and spread of information and knowledge potential e-learning page may contain. Lets look at wikipedia that is in my opinion - just perfect!

Similar to Wikipedia - elearning courses my rise in enormous speed and size. Critics says that wiki-based-product because of the lack of "central editors" may have not good enough quality and accuracy of any entry. I do not see any problems with knowledge quality and totally agree with wiki community that points out that if a user spots a mistake, they are free to correct it for themselves, and that any vandalism is usually eradicated within five minutes.

However, I see the problem with knowledge-verification process. If each e-learning page is free and open and is used to learn and verify the learners knowledge - a special pages with test result will appear. However, that is because there is no question that could not be answered by "internet"!

Evolution of Web 2.0 may rise the problem of necessity of existing of editors and publishers. Will authors (or group of authors, or internet society) will need anybody that will take care of publishing their thoughts, books, courses? Even today they don't need anybody. Publishing becomes very easy. So what publishing houses will do in 5-10 years form now?

Links

Opencollege - licensed elements supporting e-learning - http://www.opencollege.com/
E-content libary samles (by YDP)

e-Learning Management Systems

2006-08-31T00:51:00.000+02:00

Learning Management Systems

For company that would like to start e-learning business there is common question about decision what Learning Management System should it use. After few hours of searching the net I can say that there is many of them available on the market (also own system can be programmed and implemented). Some of them are commercial other are distributed as an open source sortware. Decision will not be easy and need a deep investigation in terms of matching company requirements. Bellow you can find short overview of systems that I found in the internet. I haven't made any comparison of them in terms of features, development and costs of implementation.

LON-CAPA - http://www.loncapa.org/ - Open Source

LON-CAPA is a full-featured, web-based course management system similar to commercial systems. At Spring 2006, LON-CAPA was serving over 16,000 course enrollments per semester at MSU alone, and approximately 40,000 course enrollments system-wide, ranging from middle school to graduate level courses. Disciplines include astronomy, biology, business, chemistry, civil engineering, computer science, family and child ecology, geology, human food and nutrition, human medicine, mathematics, medical technology, physics, and psychology.

moodle! - http://moodle.org/ - Open Source

Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including websites), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a 50,000-student University. This site itself is created using Moodle, so check out the Moodle Demonstration Courses or read the latest Moodle Buzz

Moodle has a large and diverse user community with over 100,000 registered users on this site alone, speaking over 70 languages in over 150 countries. The best place to start is Using Moodle, which is where the main international discussions are held in English, but we have a variety of groups discussing other topics and in other languages. .

LEO - Leo e-Learning Platform - commercial (polish product)

Young Digital Poland designed LEO to be a comprehensive and versatile Internet based eLearning platform, which allows effective management of complex e-learning and e-teaching processes.

The platform has been designed to manage multiple virtual schools, which, within the Leo environment, are called the e-Schools. E-Schools are created by a Platform Administrator who controls the platformÂs resources and keeps responsibility for integrity of all the system. Once an e-School is created the LEO platform provides all the necessary tools for tailoring the educational content and maintaining detailed control over all learning processes running within the platform.

Other free e-Learning Management Systems

ATutor
Dokeos
Fle3
other systems in Wikipedia category

Links
List of polish e-learning web pages using Moodle! software
What is Open Source? - elearningg course that uses Moodle!Managementt System

E-learning system elements

2006-08-30T21:39:00.000+02:00

In my opinion e-learning may make learning process easier, more attractive and as a result more effective. However, success of e-learning requires integration of many elements. Quality of those elements, their co-operation and their features will decide about the whole product (e-course). Three main elements are as follow:

e-Content - electronic courses covering various subjects
e-Learning Management System (LMS) - which:

effectively delivers electronic courses,
manages and monitors learner's activities
organises learners' and teachers' interactivity

e-learning hardware - not only on the server sides but also on learners side (incl. broadband connection (server and user, PC and mobile devices)

All of aboved elements I will try to decribe in three next posts. It will be published soon!

Podcasting

2006-08-24T12:24:00.000+02:00

What is podcasting?
Podcasting is the method of distributing multimedia files, such as audio programs or music, videos, over the Internet (using either the RSS or Atom syndication formats), for playback on mobile devices and personal computers. Detailed definition you can find as usually on wikipedia.

How can it be usefull for e-learning?
Podcasting can be use to distribute all learning materials including school lessons in the form of voice recording of the lecture or perfectly and professional prepared lessons that my be viewed or listened on mobile devices. Podcasting has been developed because of the increasing popularity of mp3/ipod players. Short school lessons, especially e.g. history or other (that do not require sophisticated explanations with video tools) maybe downloaded to mp3 players and be listened (eg. on the way to school :). The usefulness of having such possibility to learners is out of the question.

Podcasting may be/is also use at professional trainings, broadcasts from conferences, meetings and many other events.

How to make your own podcast?
Podcasting is easy! It can be done by everybody using simplest audio or audio and video tools! (computer headphones with microphone, mobile phone, mp3 players with microphone). E-learning professional postcast require more professional tools. Then it may be prepared and sell via internet or delivered to textbooks as a supporting materials.

Podcasts are also easy to share! It is enough to publish it (usually in mp3 format) somewhere in the internet. Many podcasting services offer some space for your own podcasts. This will help your postcast be available to broad audience. Publishers may deliver podcasts to defined audience (that for instance, that have been bought textbook). It may be done by delivering with textbook special codes that allow to download podcast form company’s web page. Such podcast my become a interesting marketing tool and may increase product value.

This post in podcast form!
download mp3 file - not in function yet
listen this post - not in function yet

Helpfull links - general links

What is podcasting at graph - http://www.geeksouth.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/01/Podcasting.jpg

Podcast directory - easy to search via keywords - http://www.podcast.net/

Yahoo podcast, many catogories (incl. learning) - http://podcasts.yahoo.com/

Polish podcasting group - tips how to make podcast (polish only) http://www.podcasting.com.pl -

Interesting podcasts

How to make your own podcast full of product placement commercial :) - helpfull tool showing how podcast make money http://www.podcast.net/show/47271

MBA Podcaster, some podcasts about MBA - http://www.mbapodcaster.com/podcasts.asp

15th Birthday of Polish internet!

2006-08-18T23:03:00.000+02:00

Today Polish internet celebrate its 15th birthday. 17 April 1991 Mr Rafal Pietrak (physicist from Warsaw University) connected using IP protocol with Mr Jan Sorensen from university of Copenhagen.

Despite 4 million of internet users and 4th place in terms of number of articles in Wikipedia we are in my opinion far from the internet society.

Anyway, Happy Birthday!

Wikipedia, Wikiversity, Wikibooks, Wikistudy - will Wikimedia dominate?

2006-08-18T13:18:00.000+02:00

The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. (also known simply as Wikimedia) starts many project which main objective is to maintain and develop free-content, wiki-based projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge. Many of that projects are still pre-mature but each of them may quickly develop to the size of Wikipedia and became one of the main internet learning tool that is continuously developed and what is most important is for free!

Wikiversity
This weekend (August 4th-8th) Jimbo Wales announced that the wikiversity project has been officially approved by the board, and the project is going to be moved to its own server within the month. Initially, there will be 3 languages, and the project will be in a "beta" version for a 6 month trial period. Discussion about how/when/where to move material can happen in a local discussion page, or at Wikibooks:Staff lounge. Material not in the "Wikiversity:" namespace should not be deleted off this server unless it has undergone an official transwiki AND it has been confirmed by Wikibookians that it does not meet Wikibooks' inclusion criteria.

WikiBooks
Wikibooks is a collection of open content textbooks. Wikibooks site is a wiki, meaning that anyone, including you, can edit any book module right now by clicking on the edit this page link that appears near the top of each Wikibooks module.
The project is still small, but we hope to mimic the growth of our sister project, Wikipedia, while maintaining sufficient quality controls.
Wikibooks went online on 10 July 2003, and there are 21,049 modules currently on the site.

First books for pupils on WikiBooks in Polish is in progress - Math for secondary school!
http://pl.wikibooks.org/wiki/Matematyka_dla_liceum

Wikistudy
Wikistudy is the home to textbooks that are directed towards specific syllabi and academic exams. The main part of Wikistudy is for books dealing with core subjects. There is also a section for non-core subjects. Because it is directed at specific syllabuses it is divided into two sections, which themselves are divided by country.

Spam problem

2006-08-18T09:38:00.000+02:00

My blog is spamed! I got unwanted comments that do not put any "comments" to my blog (insted of some links). Do you have the same problems? Any solution?

E-learning is it threat or opportunity?

2006-08-17T10:04:00.000+02:00

Writing about e-learning there is common discussion - is it threat or opportunity of development of e-tools to traditional textbook publisher?

In terms of WSiP that published textbook for more the 60 years in the form of paper (however, paper book changed in last decade significantly) it maybe rather threat.

But from other point of view, as many publishers says, publishing houses sell "content" not form of the "content". In that point of view e-tools are only the mean of delivering the same (or maybe more multimedia) content to the learners. But is switching from paper book to e-learning tools not too high progress to traditional publishing house? Will they be good prepared to face the competition with more it-developed companies? Will they really be able to cooperate with authors to make e-content like they did it in terms of book production? And the most important question! Will authors (willing to give/sell their knowledge) will really need "e-publishers" to have it delivered to learners or will they be able to do it by themselves using wiki technology, blogs, podcasts or using other e-learning tools?

In my opinion some e-tools may force out traditional textbooks form the market, other may become interesting form of supporting them, some other may even increase their sells! Anyway, textbook publishing houses (WSiP) must start doing something in e-business to be good prepared when the e-learning time will ultimately come!

Publication on demand - the bridge between paper and e-book

2006-07-27T21:09:00.000+02:00

What is print on demand?
Print on demand is a new idea related to development of digital printing. Digital printing my be prescribe as a typical laser printing but made by huge, commercial presses, usually with high efficiency. Digital printing allows to print color or black and white publication in low circulations on reasonable prices (costs of print do not depend on circulation– almost no economy of scale) with a very short time. Contrary to traditional (book) publishing and, printing on demand (POD) is done usually after receiving order (not before) - that’s why is called print on demand.

Publication on demand system
According to the concept of long tail (shortly - taking profits of niche products, that occupied last positions of your product sales list) WSiP decided to sell its print out books in POD technology. Additionally, it wanted to sell books of other commercial publishers and academic publication using POD concept.

Wsip created and developed a software that allows students via internet to:

search the publications database and take out from that books, articles or any other publications interesting fragments

combine all that fragments together - students or other person receives a personalized books. (For instant, student interesting in Digital Business Enhancement is able to search database, find some chapters or fragments from different textbooks, combined them and through that he makes its own textbook about DBE)

put an order to print – system makes a printable pdf file that would be delivered to one of the many POD spots - located on universities. At that spots publications is printed and blinded professionally. Books can be also delivered to his door within 2-3 working days

Results?
It looks like a brilliant idea. Who would not want to have possibility to pay only for the interesting parts of the books and have it delivered quickly? But unfortunately, project do not succeed. Problems? (despite the organizational problems). The resistant of authors to allow its book be printed in fragments at POD spots. That is because copyrights fees would be calculated from single page.

Addditionaly, they simply do not want to share with their profits of its book with WSiP. They also afraid of “taking over” by Print on Demand substantial part of traditional print outs – the traditional part of full textbook may decrease.

Future?
Anyway, the whole idea seams to be interesting. It is some bridge that combines traditional textbooks (physical) and electronic (e-books) form of the “content” delivered to learners. It gives much more flexibility of building an own, personalized textbook. Just look at our MBA classes and delivered material. It is very rare we have on source of information, one textbook. Usually it is a set of articles, extracts from different textbooks delivered to us.

Similar systems (POD system) work on some universities (e.g. Oxford) and they succeed.
To sum up the main point of existing of POD is that paper is still more readers-friendly than the screen. But how long?...

Links:

http://www.printondemand.com/

Print-on-Demand - A Technological Revolution in the Publishing World by Grzegorz Boguta

http://www.wyczerpane.pl/- polish web-page with sold out books printed on demand

Oxford POD program

Dictionaries and encyclopedias will die first!

2006-07-26T17:27:00.000+02:00

Dictionaries and encyclopedias are types of books that need to constantly searched. That's why they are just suited to be in digital form that makes it easier. Additionally, electronic versions of them are easily accessible (via internet) or portable (if on CD). That's why their physical production (circulations) fall staidly and publishers that specializes in it suffer seals decline.

Agora's case
However, last year Agora - publisher of Gazeta Wyborcza (GW - one of the polish biggest daily newspaper) in cooperation with PWN (publishing house) published 20 volume encyclopedia that was added to their paper. Each of the volume was added to Wednesday's issue of GW. Company do not exactly announced their incomes but at that project and other books series (added to daily newspaper) Agora made in 2005 180 mln pln ($60 mln) and all books projects were reasonable profitable.

In spite of that in my opinion (probably common opinion) people that bought that encyclopedias do not do this to satisfy the need of "getting knowledge" but rather "having" or "collecting" it (book). They probably will not do it again soon.

Electronic versions
Today, thanks to internet we can easily find all information. In my opinion the biggest and the highest volume, however not always giving best results encyclopedia is Google. Google is answer for everything. All of us also know perspective project based of Wiki technology - Wikipedia. It is still growing up and the results are really good! Using them is easy, more comfortable, may be support for all possible digital supplements like sound or movie and what is very important is still (almost) for free.

Some tools:
Encyclopedias:
Wikipedia 1,2m + articles in English and 253 000+ in polish!
Dictionaries on-line
Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary
Polish-English dictionary

The end of the books?

2006-07-22T15:54:00.000+02:00

This text is taken from the The end of the books? article published in The Guardian.

Is it really end of the books? That questions is asked by almost of all publishers.

"Perhaps the biggest issue for the future is whether electronic versions of textbooks will supplant the traditional paper versions. E-books have the advantages of being easily searched and annotated, instantly accessible, portable and capable of being linked to other multimedia. Dictionaries, encyclopedias and technical manuals are especially suited to being published in electronic form. "

Some publishers still believe that traditional books are better!

Rod Bristow, president of Pearson Education UK, the leading textbook publisher in the UK, believes there will be no diminution in the role of the textbook. "It's very hard to deliver what you get in a textbook more effectively in other ways. Textbooks are extremely convenient," he says.

But as usually, the future is unknown! However....

"Simon Midgley thinks we will see a multiplicity of media in future, rather than one medium replacing another. If you look at the history of media in general, when a new medium comes along, it does not usually replace an earlier one; it just adds to it. "Books came first, then radio, cinema, video and computing. None of these things has replaced the book. That's great because it enriches choice for the customer."

Polish textbooks market - short overview

2006-07-18T13:49:00.000+02:00

About the company
Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne SA is one of the largest Polish book publishing house. It specialises in the publishing of books for primary schools and junior and senior high schools, but offers also supplementary books for students and teachers, teaching methodology journals, encyclopaedias, school dictionaries, works on psychology and pedagogy, as well as multimedia resources. WSiP has been publishing textbooks for several decades. It is the only Polish educational publisher which offers the full range of general education textbooks for all subjects, forms and schools, from kindergarten to senior high schools. WSiP shares are floated on Warsaw Stock Exchange. For more information please visit WSiP web page

Shrinking market
According to different sources polish textbook market is worth from 700 to 900 m. PLN (180-240 m. Euro). It is also most profitable book market segment, mainly because of high circulations and stable, however, slightly decreasing demand. At the same time, there is common opinion that textbooks are too expensive. Hard to deny that fact comparing average costs of set of book for beginners in amount of 140 PLN to polish salary level. Last wave of disapprobation of high costs of polish textbooks comes with new elections and new Ministry of Education. He is pushing really hard get down prices of polish textbooks.

Population of Poland (similarly to many European countries) is getting older. It means that fewer and fewer children are born. For companies operating on such market it means only one - potential market of polish textbooks is shrinking. Please look at the graph below.

Graph presents polish population in age between 3 and 16.
More information about population of Poland

What influance may it have to production of textbook? Will it facilitate and accelerate development of e-learing?

E-learning as a subject of the blog

2006-07-05T12:50:00.000+02:00

Finally, not without hesitation, I decided to start my blog with “real posts”. I decide to write about E-learning. I hesitated between “internet reverse auctions” and just e-learning. Reverse auctions is the subject I already went through and scored some experience while e-learning is the topic I really have no idea about yet, but want to investigate it and find out about new possibilities!. So … e-learning won!

However, I decided to start another blog, which will describe my project of reverse auctions. In that blog (out of assignment) I will describe my experience about implementing reverse auctions system in WSiP (already not the biggest polish book publisher; second position). This blog is on the side http://www.reverseauction.blogspot.com/.

So I start to search the net! Of course form WIKIpedia.

I would be grateful for any suggestion about e-learning tools.

Comments to Blogs

2006-06-27T16:21:00.000+02:00

Today I start to archive of my comments to our blogs. You can read all my comments here. Maybe it is not so important to all blog readers but I think help at least one person to track my activity of giving comments. Link will stay in section Links (on the right side).

New Group No.

2006-06-14T10:07:00.000+02:00

Today I decided to change the group # while e-grasshopper wrote:

---- You subscribe to the group to which you not belong to. Please change the group.
--Posted by e-grasshopper to Forty4 blog at 6/13/2006 07:14:03 PM

My new group # is 06. I wanted only to be a member of group with "4" (because of fantastic 4 figure). Nevermind. Waiting for today's opening bell. During this weekend I foucus on the subject of that blog.

Black Tuesday

2006-06-13T16:39:00.000+02:00

Today is Black Tuesday on Warsaw Stock Exchange. At least some analytics said that... At 2 p.m. polish main index WIG20 lost more then 7% and some of the polish biggest companies went down by more then 10%. Fortunately, there was slight recovery at the end of the day but in my opinion it's not the end of "going south". Tomorrow, hope we will have a little bit less stressful day...

Start

2006-06-12T11:16:00.000+02:00

Hi everybody,
Time to start...