Technical giant O’Reilly launched a new custom publishing and online platform for IT professionals who are also educators. SafariU offers the capabilities to create and customize educational materials tailored to specific class needs. The sources can be original and/or drawn from existing material. This service is at no cost to the instructor or trainer and delivers low cost material to students in as little as two weeks. A SafariU textbook costs 16 cents a page with no extra charge for the cover and binding, plus a bookstore markup. The Pearson Technology Group is a partner with O’Reilly’s existing line of Safari Books Online. The combined resources make available an enormous searchable database of material for educators to draw upon and mix to their students’ needs. The students can then subscribe to the online resources for a course for less than $10 a month. The course syllabus can link to the content of up to ten of the books used in the custom SafariU books, plus supplementary audio, video, text, and other outside resources. The instructors can also participate in a peer network to share resources.

“The books are perfect bound, just like our Safari Books,” a representative told me last evening at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. “We’ve been beta testing this since January, and now it’s open to the world.”

One of those beta testers is Kent Sandoe, an MIS professor with Cal State Chico. Sandoe says, “O’Reilly owns a tremendous quantity of well-written, valuable information. The fact that they’re willing to disaggregate it, allowing a professor to go an re-aggregate the content in a way that is meaningful to students, to a particular audience, to a particular course–that’s revolutionary.”

I asked if the next logical step wasn’t to make courses available online, as in distance learning. The representative didn’t rule out the possibility.