Textbooks in an age of ubiquitous knowledge, competency-based education and MOOCs

This paper concerns the dislocation caused by sustained global economic uncertainly post-2008 and its impact on undergraduate university textbooks in the emerging age of ubiquitous knowledge, competency-based higher education and massive open online courses (MOOCs). The paper posits evidence that textbooks increase the cost of higher education, may be ill-suited to emergent personalized delivery, are being replaced by online open-content resource materials, become less relevant when the nexus between time-serving and course completion is broken, are likely to be replaced by syntheses of online materials as quality elements of instruction, and are unable to serve the transdisciplinary nature of emerging workplace contextualised university courses. The paper concludes that undergraduate textbooks are no longer an integral part of university provision in an era of ubiquitous knowledge and may be an impediment to quality education as universities slowly shift to competency-based education and MOOCs.