Is Higher Education Ready to Switch to Digital Course Materials? Let a Thousand Wikibooks Bloom

For the past two years the authors of this article have produced material by their students as wikibooks that became the principal textbooks in education courses they taught undergraduates at Old Dominion University. They have turned other material by their students into units in wikibooks used in business courses they have taught graduate students at the University of Denver. Many of their students prefer the wikibooks to standard textbooks, find them to be credible sources of information, spend more time learning from them than from standard textbooks, enjoy the challenge of contributing to them, and consider their peers' contributions valuable. The authors view student-written wikibooks as instructor-guided excursions into the new intellectual landscape, where expert knowledge is ever more readily accessible. They hope that writing and using wikibooks will help prepare students to navigate future changes in the global production and distribution of information.