Changing Information Delivery

The Rise of the Digital Textbook

Chris Hare

A LabR Learning Resources Publication

Changing Information Delivery: The Rise of the Digital Textbook

Changing Information Delivery: The Rise of the Digital Textbook

First Edition

©2010-2012 Chris Hare, LabR Learning Resources

This digital book is made available as a researched work. The copyright is protected. Distribution of this work is prohibited except with prior permission of the author or LabR Learning Resources.

Dedication

Doing anything of this nature takes time. Time away from your responsibilities, your friends, but most importantly, your family. This digital project, and many others underway, wouldn’t be possible without the loving support of my wife Sandii. She sits at her desk and gently supports me by reading through all this material, providing feedback and ideas, coffee when I am staying up too late and a hug when I am stuck.

Her tenacity to pull me away from my computer when she knows I have had enough or just simply need to re-focus, even for a short while is appreciated.

About This Book

The contents of this book were developed during some research for a Masters degree course. It was expanded and elements were added. The contents were originally developed using the Pages application, which is part of the Apple iWork suite. The book itself was then converted to EPUB format for access to the book from a wide variety of ebook readers.

Copyrights

This book is copyright (c) 2012, Chris Hare and LabR Learning Resources. Apple, iWork, Pages, are copyright Apple Inc. Referenced articles are copyright their respective authors or publications.

This electronic book cannot be freely distributed. It is available from LabR Learning Resources and may not be copied to a webpage or other data sharing services for distribution.

About the Author

Chris Hare’s experience encompasses over twenty-five years in the computing industry with key positions ranging from application design, quality assurance, system administration/engineering, network analysis, and security consulting, operations and architecture educational courseware development. His management career, coupled with in-depth technical knowledge, provides the foundation to integrate the intricate risks of technology to the on-going survival of major corporations.

Chris periodically shares his knowledge in speaking engagements, published articles, books and other publications. He is the co-author of New Riders Publishing’s Inside Unix, Internet Firewalls and Network Security, Building an Internet Server with Linux and The Internet Security Professional Reference. His book credits also include the General Linux II Examination Guide from Coriolis and the Linux Professional Institute, The OPEN SOURCE Handbook from Pike-Fisher and the Official (ISC)2 Guide to the CISSP Exam from Auerbach Press.

Chris has also written a number of articles for Sys Admin magazine since it’s inception in 1992, ranging from system administration and tutorial articles to management and architecture. He has also published management articles in Recruiting and Supervision Today magazine. Chris is now writing for Auerbach’s Data Security Management, Handbook of Information Security Management and Data Communication Management.

Accredited with the Certified information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) the Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) and the Certified Information Security Manager (CISM) designations, Chris has taught information security at Algonquin College (Ottawa, Canada) and sat on the Advisory Council for this program. He frequently speaks on Unix, specialized technology and applications, security and audit at conferences.

Chris spends 50% of his current assignment developing courseware for internal use across his employer's company.

You can visit Chris’ online education website at LabR Learning Resources. LabR Learning resources also hosts podcasts available in iTunes. You can get additional information on this ebook by contacting info@labr.net

The Textbook

Textbooks have not changed much since their inception. They are still limited to text, graphics, illustrations and photographs. With the ever increasing use of multimedia in the classroom and society in general, is it time for textbooks to get a makeover?

Introduction

Textbooks are not new to an educational setting as they have been a fixture in schools for generations. A textbook is defined by the New Oxford American Dictionary as “a book used as a standard work for the study of a particular subject” (Textbook, 2005). This means that for each subject of interest in an educational setting, there are one or more textbooks used to provide the information. The information is then used in a learning context to be transformed into knowledge by the student. With the exponential growth of multimedia services and social networking in society, is it time to change the traditional textbook into something new?

Research Questions

The following research questions guide this investigation:

1.What are digital textbooks?

2.How are they different from their print counterparts?

3.Is the educational system ready to accept the digital media format into today’s classrooms?

Before the Digital Era

Almost every student who has attended school in the last several centuries is familiar with the textbook. According to Wakefield (2009, p5), “textbooks developed out of the need to teach reading and writing to children who had learned to read and write the Latin alphabet”. More modern students would have used these textbooks as the source of the information they had to learn and memorize. Some of the earliest textbooks were catechistic in nature, where the teacher would read a question and the students would recite the answer they memorized from their book.(Wakefield, 2009, p5). The earliest known surviving textbook is from China and dates back to approximately 200 BCE (Heider et al, 2009).

Print textbooks have been the mainstay of the education system since their first introduction. Many factors have changed over the last two centuries. Industry has developed, world wars fought and new advances in technology have led to the Internet and the personal computer, along with the creation of Wikipedia, likely the largest open information provider. No one would call Wikipedia a textbook, but the open and digital format allowing for multimedia use has helped to create the phenomena known as the digital textbook.

Students today are different. They want more control over their learning, which translates into more control over the tools they use to guide their learning (Heider et al, 2009). As methods of instruction have evolved from face to face, to virtual and blended formats (Thierstein, 2009), in many ways the traditional textbook format is no longer satisfying the needs of today's students (Heider et al, 2009).

The Dawning

A lot of factors affect the success of the digital textbook. This chapter looks at the positives and negatives.

The Dawn of the Digital Textbook

No clear date emerges from the literature as to the creation of the first digital textbook. Wikipedia suggests that the first digital textbook program may have begun in Korea in 2008 (Wikipedia, n.d.). Regardless of the specific date of inception, students today at all levels are different than twenty years ago. They are more comfortable with technology, social networks, the Internet and accessing information using these tools from around the world and whenever they want it. The textbooks used in their classroom studies have remained unchanged from their initial appearance. Textbooks are linear, meaning they are meant to be processed from front to back, using the order defined by the author. They are limited to the content types which fit on paper.

Here is a sample image from a new interactive textbook from the Apple iBookstore.

Physical textbooks become dated very quickly (Warren, 2009), are hard to update, and you have to buy the whole textbook, even if you are only interested in a small portion of it (Warren, 2009). With the rising cost of textbooks (Beezer, 2009, Rickman et al, 2009) , new editions with only minor changes (Beezer, 2009) and the rising weight of those same books, publishers are going to have to examine other approaches in order to survive the digital transition (Warren, 2009).

The digital textbook, at one end of the spectrum is a purely digital representation of the printed textbook, with no additional features or capabilities. At the other end of the spectrum is a digital textbook, with multimedia and interactive capabilities.

There are two types of digital textbooks. Open textbooks, are defined as “textbooks that are freely available with nonrestrictive licenses” (Baker, 2009, p1). Closed textbooks are therefore by extrapolation, those which are purchased and have restrictive rights, such as commercially available digital textbooks. The definition offered in Baker (2009) may be too restrictive, as publishers offer the vast majority of their textbooks now in digital formats (Young, 2009a), which is a significant increase from digital textbook availability ten years ago (Woody et al, 2010).

Wikibooks, an open content provider, offers more than 2,300 collaborative textbook projects, representing more than 35,000 pages (Wikibooks, n.d.). Similarly, the digital textbook has exploded at the Connexions project. In 2008, Connexions offered more than 7200 reusable modules (Warren, 2009), with an increase to over 17,000 reusable modules in 2010 (Connexions, n.d.). Working solely from the information here, it would seem that digital textbooks are quickly going to replace the traditional textbook.

The commercial publishers also provide online stores and communities where students can purchase the digital textbooks, such as VitalSource, initially started by McGraw-Hill, and now representing other textbook publishers (Rickman et al, 2009), along with CourseSmart, which represents twelve publishers (Young, 2009a).

There are two major differences between print based and digital textbooks. These are multimedia and interactivity. Unlike print texts, digital textbooks are read using a laptop or custom digital reader, like the Kindle, Sony Reader, or the iPad. Each of these readers uses a device specific format to store and display the text and multimedia content in the book (Rickman et al, 2009). This creates challenges for the students who may not already have the technology used for their specific textbook (Heider et al, 2009). Consequently, driving the digital textbook market towards a common format will aid in the acceptance of digital textbooks.

Is the Digital Textbook Ready for Us?

The design of the textbook, whether digital or print, is important. The design alone can have significant effect on the usefulness of the text and its acceptance by students and teachers alike (Woody et al, 2010). Similarly, the placement of illustrations in the text, along with the types of graphics used have been demonstrated to impact learning (Woody et al, 2010). These concerns should not be underestimated for the digital textbook. While publishers are able to provide more illustrations, video and audio elements into the digital textbook (Warren, 2009), they are typically not numbered in the same fashion as the printed text, making it difficult to find information (Young, 2009b). This is a major problem for classes where some students choose print and others choose the digital format.

The Apple iBookstore as seen on the iPad.

The quality of the digital textbook is improving steadily (Rickman et al, 2009), and the inventory of available digital content is expanding (Nelson, 2008). With development costs lowering, it is possible for anyone to assemble high quality content in a format which is more engaging than print alone and for less money (CoSN, 2009). Despite the lowering production costs, the real development costs for digital textbooks are often still prohibitive (Thierstein, 2009). The digital format development costs are typically associated with the interactive media, audio and video included in the digital textbook.

Are we Ready for the Digital Textbook?

Students and faculty are growing more comfortable with new information delivery methods (Nelson, 2008). However, one of the major barriers to the adoption of digital textbooks and course materials is faculty (Nelson, 2008). Teachers often teach in the same manner they learned. While many know how to use a computer, they do not know how to successfully integrate it into their teaching (Dessoff, 2010). Therefore, that same faculty will have similar problems with digital textbooks. Even students who might prefer the lower cost and digital format advantages will choose the print based version if they believe or know that the professor is using the print edition (Nelson, 2008).

Students, like faculty are experiencing their own learning curve. Students may find that using digital textbooks changes their study habits and strategies (Young, 2009b). This is partly because they will be spending more time in front of their computer or digital textbook reading device. Some of the digital textbook platforms also offer advanced features like annotations, notes and note sharing, requiring students to change how they have taken notes in the past (Young, 2009a). The annotation feature, allowing the student to make annotations directly in the digital textbook, is a nice feature for review.

One survey of librarians identified the following inhibitors to digital textbooks (Warren, 2009):

1.Lack of awareness of the technology.

2.The digital format can be difficult to read.

3.Sometimes the digital textbook platform (reader) is hard to use.

4.Lack of training on the part of students and faculty.

A survey of students (Rickman et al, 2009) from research done comparing the use of physical and digital textbooks reported:

1.Students reported they read more with the physical textbook than the digital one.

2.The use of the digital textbook did not significantly alter their study habits

3.The students felt the digital textbooks were more convenient for accessing and retrieving information.

4.The majority of the students preferred the digital textbooks.

The technology is also an issue. Different digital textbook formats, readers, battery life (Young, 2009b), and yet another electronic device to carry are all factors. Instead of students carrying textbooks and their computer to a class, they may now have additional technology components. Since the battery life of laptops and some of the reader devices is not very good, students may find themselves without their text or having to sit near an electrical outlet to be able to access their device or computer.

Additionally, technology such as Digital Rights Management, which is used by the commercial publishers to protect their interests, is an inhibitor to digital textbook acceptance. This is because students cannot give their digital; editions to their friends or sell them back to a bookstore. Passwords for the digital editions expire and students cannot access their purchases from more than one device (Heider et al, 2009).

Conclusion

The “everything digital” revolution will change every aspect of our world.

With the trend for everything to go digital perhaps this is the right time for a textbook revolution (Young, 2009a). This is partly due to the ever increasing costs associated with the production of print based textbooks and the difficulties of updating them when compared to their digital counterparts. The increasing purchase prices have left schools and students looking for lower cost alternatives (Nelson, 2008). In reality, digital textbooks have the potential to change the way we engage with text (CoSN, 2009). No longer are we limited to the printed word and static illustrations.

While there is great interest in the use of interactive media and digital textbooks, there is still very little scholarly research available regarding the use and effectiveness of the digital textbook as an educational tool (Woody et al, 2010). Consequently, additional research is required to determine the impact and issues associated with the development, deployment and use of the digital textbook. This research is very important as the digital textbook technology has advanced more quickly than our understanding of its present and potential use (Warren, 2009).

Creating an environment where the use of digital media is the norm and a digital learning environment is a cultural change that will require time to formulate and develop (Dessoff, 2010). The reality at this time is that despite advances in the technology, the current research indicates that students and faculty are still more comfortable with the paper books and find them easier to read (Heider et al, 2009).

References

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Beezer, Rob. (2009). The textbook that is truly free. EDUCASE Review, 44(1).

Connexions (n.d.) Connexions. Retrieved October 23, 2010 from http://cnx.org/

CoSN. (2009). Textbook deathwatch. Technology & Learning, 30(26), 28.

Dessoff, Alan. (2010). Reaching digital natives on their terms. District Administrator.

Heider, Kelly, Laverick, Deanna and Bethany Bennett. (2009). Digital Textbooks: The next Paradigm shift in higher education. AACE Journal, 17(2), 103-112.

Nelson, Mark R. (2008). Is higher education ready to switch to digital course materials? the cost of textbooks is driving electronic solutions. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 55(14), A29.

Rickman, Jon T., Von Holzen, Roger, Klute, Paul G. and Teri Tobin. (2009). A campus-wide e-textbook initiative. EDUCASE Quarterly 32(2).

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Wikipedia. (n.d.). Digital textbooks. Wikipedia. Retrieved September 18, 2010 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Textbook

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Young, Jeffrey R. (2009b). 6 lessons one campus learned about e-textbooks. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 55(39).