Throughout the two years Matt MacInnis spent working as senior manager in international education at Apple, he had plenty of opportunity to watch teachers integrate technology into their classrooms as a learning tool. And he found it wholly disappointing.
“If you walk into a classroom today, and then you roll back the clock and walk into a classroom 50 years ago, you’d see certainly some modernization, but it would not be remarkably different,” he said. Technologies like radio, television, and computers offered great promise in the classroom, but haven’t dramatically changed the learning experience, which is still stuck in a model where “we download information into somebody’s head and they’re supposed to march off into the world and manufacture cars,” in MacInnis’s words.
More interactive tools could engage students and fundamentally change the way they interact with their teachers—and each other—while they learned, he believes.
With the promise of Apple’s new iPad looming, MacInnis quit his job in 2009 and founded a company called Inkling, a San Francisco-based startup that has developed a software platform for digital textbooks on the iPad.
Electronic versions of books are nothing new—look at the Kindle—and other companies such as CourseSmart also offer e-textbooks. But Inkling’s product is more than a static PDF rendition of the bound text. Where most digital versions of a biology book would show the same diagram of the parts of the brain that appears on the printed page, for example, Inkling’s version can remove its labels and ask its user to identify the cerebellum by touching it. If the user gets the question wrong, the Inkling software can offer hints. Wonder what parts of a history text the professor thinks are most important? Students can check the professor’s own notes. Want to share notes with a friend, or take a quiz at the end of a chapter? Flip around a model of a molecule? Inkling allows students to do that too.
For MacInnis, it’s less about reproducing a book than creating an interactive experience a student can have with a book.
So far the company only has six texts available, four published by McGraw Hill, one from Cengage Learning, and one from Wiley. “The reason we don’t have 10,000 textbooks overnight is that we don’t just plug in to the database of the publisher and suck down PDFs or XML of their existing content and put it on a screen,” MacInnis says. “The iPad is not a book, and any attempt to shoehorn book content into the iPad in our mind is shortsighted folly.”
Developing a platform that allows this much interactivity required Inkling to create a whole new way to publish content. The company didn’t want its end product to be a book—it had to be a “whole new thing that has video and audio and interactivity and
