I am very pleased with the amount of feedback I have received on the Medulla project since first proposing it.

One person wrote in to ask why any new textbooks would take on a premade open source core grammar and vocabulary sequence rather than coming up with their own. After all, there would be no point in putting a lot of work into creating a shared sequence if there was no uptake.

Here’s a summary of my response: the business case for new textbooks adopting a single unified standard sequence.

When a new textbook appears on the market, it has to compete with established textbooks. This is an uphill battle because older textbooks are supported by large amounts of auxiliary materials, both public (in the form of published companion volumes) and private (in the form of in-house, teacher-created supplementary materials, which sometimes circulate between schools). Existing pools of resources are mutually incompatible between all textbooks, whether old or new. A newcomer therefore has to work very hard to be a viable, attractive alternative to older series, when switching to a recently published textbook means switching to a diminished pool of supplementary resources.

But if there existed a public domain standard code sequence, multiple new textbooks could team up to collectively create a larger pool of shared resources.

The choice facing every new textbook writer will then be this: do I commit to creating my own core sequence and locking myself into needing to create the first wave of support materials all by myself, while competing against established series that have much larger closed ecosystems? Or do I build on an open ecosystem which allows other textbook authors to expand the same pool of resources?

The first path is risky and labour intensive. There is no guarantee that even a very good new textbook can successfully convert enough Latin teachers to reach that critical mass where widespread adoption drives the creation of materials, and the availability of materials attracts more adoption. Before critical mass is achieved, the textbook faces a vicious cycle: lack of adoption means fewer resources are created for it, and a lack of resources means less adoption compared to bigger series.

The second path (building on a standard sequence) makes it possible for new textbooks to start with an advantage, and accrue more resources in both the short and long term. In an open ecosystem, supplementary resources would not just be made by the authors and adopters of one specific textbook series. Rather, every compatible textbook that enters would bolster the success of every other compatible textbook within the same resource pool. The resource pool would still need time to reach critical mass, but that time could be divided by the number of serious textbook projects that join it.

I have a lot more to say about this project, so stay tuned for updates on it on this blog.