The Living Textbook: Towards a new way of Teaching Geo-Science

Textbooks of the future are completely different from the analogue printed textbooks we are used to. They are digital, provide different ways to view the same content, allow for multiple (individual) learning tracks and can be regularly updated. They are not stand-alone sources of information but link to all kinds of other information sources. In this paper we present the Living Textbook, that consists of a collaborative website (textbook), accompanied with an interactive diagram (concept map) showing the course’s concepts and their relationships. The Living textbook was implemented for a number of introductory courses in GIS and Earth Observation and was tested with a group of E-learning and face to face students. Results show that the development of an ontology forces teachers to rethink their course content, make links with topics of other teachers explicit and remove redundancy. For students, the main advantage of using a Living Textbook is the overview it provides of the course content and the expert knowledge network of their teachers.