Electronic Education Report Newsletter

Schools use a variety of materials for core courses taught online, among them the traditional print textbook, digital textbooks, materials created in-house, materials offered free from open-source sites on the Internet, and materials from course providers, according to a new report, Moving Online: K-12 Distance Learning Market Forecast 2010, from Simba Information, the parent of EER.

For online courses, the leading source for core course materials—by far—is the company providing the software that the school or district is using for those subjects. According to a survey conducted by Simba and Market Data Retrieval (Shelton, Conn.) for the report, 48% of respondents employed by schools or districts offering online education, said core course materials now in use for the school year 2009-10 most frequently come in from the course providers.

Open-source materials most frequently were used only by 9.3% of school and district respondents, although 13.6% of respondents predicted use of open source materials in core courses in the next two years.

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