Moving on from textbooks

Textbooks have been apart of the educational system since the begining of the industrial revolution, which is what has largely influenced the designed the current school system.

A textbook has been one of the 2 main ways students get presented with the concepts they need to learn, with the other being a presentation by a subject expert(also known as a teacher). The shortcoming of textbooks are several, they include the material being static, not changing in any way based even if the student is 10 or 30 years old, if they are an expert or novice, if the student, if they love the subject or despise it. They are boring, presenting the concepts in ways which are detached from the student and create very little motivation and excitement. A textbook is linear, one page always comes after the previous one, and the student has to flip through and decide how they will progress through the book independently. There is no way to track the progress of a student through, other than seeing their notes. There is no smooth way to get a student to remember the material, they either have to turn to some external tool such as flashcards, or through some ad hoc system of the students own design. Ofcourse they also come with are several benefits such as being stable and consistent, meaning every student learns the same thing, they are easily massproduced, they need only be written once allowing an author to create the content and then leave it. And the biggest one has to be that they are already established as the standard approach within a classroom.

Textbooks were designed for the industrialising society, we are now postindustrial, and need to move to a new design.

Textbooks have been great, but the current year is 2026. We now live in an age where there is access to the power of algorithms, data and large language models(LLMs). These three and more allow us to present and interact with the concepts in completely different ways, which is the foundation of how Asspera is built.

We have discovered the forgetting curve, why shouldn’t we use a spaced repetition algorithm to ensure we don’t forget what we learn. We know that we can pick up patterns and gain insights from data, by simply visualising it. It allows us to see which student in a group is falling behind, show a student their progress over time and create statistics over the performance of an entire class. We can use LLMs to give students feedback on their solutions, give hints on how they can get unstuck and to grade their perfomance.

In 50 years students will not study using textbooks. We need to build the new medium through which they bring new concepts into their understanding of the world. That medium will be Asspera.