An IDEMS CommonTech Education Project
Now in early prototype
No copies, forks or siloes.
Just a connected living textbook infrastructure
that continuously improves for everyone.
Under the hood
Open, Adaptive Digital Textbooks are made possible by a 3-layer system that enables localisation and adaptation in a single connected textbooks operating environment.
The foundational Resources Library layer holds the ever-expanding suite of high-quality and curated open textbooks, resources, and software that can be selectively shaped into local textbook versions.
The Customisation & Publishing layer allows educators to easily access, make sense of, and apply this complex structured data to create, publish and own locally adapted and customised textbooks variants from a single user-friendly platform.
The IDEMS Middleware layer makes it all possible: It transforms open digital textbooks and resources into malleable, reusable structured data. It creates, manages and maintains coherent meaning between structured Resource Library data and unlimited published textbook variants to maintain systemic interoperability.
Layer 1
A continuously evolving library of high-quality textbooks and teaching, learning, and assessment materials and software.
Layer 2
The core innovation, a middleware developed by IDEMS’ mathematicians and mathematical scientists. This groundbreaking layer lets local educators easily develop custom digital textbooks and resources for their courses, contexts and students–and retain a living connection with a single unified Open, Adaptive Digital Textbooks architecture. A customisation anywhere becomes an innovation that can be used everywhere in a system with no duplication and no siloed forks.
Layer 3
The textbooks adaptation, customisation, and publishing platform hub. Educators at the national, regional, school, or classroom level, with the support of expert AI agents, compile context-specific textbooks (based on permission level if set by an existing education system)–and gain the ability to integrate their own resources and innovations into existing resources. Authors can see how their work is used by others to improve existing, or develop entirely new, textbooks and resources.
The pioneering core
This groundbreaking layer makes local customisation and ownership, systemic quality and standards, and global collaboration possible at the same time. The result is a unified, living textbooks ecosystem that makes isolated forks and duplicated efforts a thing of the past.
The “brains” of the textbooks operation (built on IDEMS’ IP), this holds both open software/resources and complex meaning-making knowledge as structured, malleable data in a novel deterministic core. The expert-maintained core is the data foundation of responsible, auditable AI, which supports educators’ textbook customisation and contributes to the Brain’s continuous improvement.
This suite of expert small language model AI agents are developed for narrow use cases, supporting textbook publishing, adaptation and iteration by non-technologist educators and authors. Trained on the Textbooks Brain’s high-quality data, AI Hands are bounded, auditable, and resource efficient.
Together these power a novel Open, Adaptive Digital Textbooks Operating Environment.
Unlimited, low-cost local textbook adaptations and innovations, owned and controlled at the local level, maintain a living connection with a system of expert-maintained, accredited high-quality educational resources. It’s a bounded digital textbooks ecosystem that enables multidirectional global-local collaboration and innovation.
The result is continuous improvement of teaching and learning resources at the systemic and local levels, for measurably improved student outcomes around the world.
Status
Where are we now, what are we doing, what do we need (community, resources, etc.)?