Colleges and universities are running eTextbook pilots again this Fall semester, and while the pilots of today very much follow the standard form of “the book,” I believe that two forces will push the evolution of (higher) educational eTexts in new directions.
The commitment to making traditional textbooks electronic appears to be minimal. I’ve heard that the percentage of textbooks that are “born digital” is low. Subsequently the cost of converting a text from print to digital adds to the cost of a book, rather than bringing costs down.
Conversely [WC?] the growth of bundling electronic exercises with texts, from what I have seen, has grown greatly over the years. Publishers market the educational additions directly to faculty, and often deliver the exercises through proprietary learning management systems. This allows publishers to collect more data on student interactions and learning, while decentralizing the educational experience for students (and minimizing institutional control over learning).
Given the potential benefits that publishers might reap from exercises, my hunch is that they will the be locus of evolution in higher education textbooks. By increasingly moving content into exercises, a number of changes are introduced:
- It may be more difficult for instructors to verify the accuracy of materials
- The ownership of the materials may come into question, as XXX
- While an exercise might provide a superior experience for student learning, subsequent referencing of materials could be difficult.
While it’s not clear whether instructors or institutions would buy into this model, they would be wise to include it in pilots [awk].