November+23,+2010

**More on eTextbooks for K-12 and Higher Ed**
Reviewing E-Books; the Benefits and Drawbacks of Virtual Textbooks //Rhea R. Borja, Education Week, Digital Directions, June 13, 2008; print version June 9, 2008//

K-12: Pros and Cons of e-Textbooks // Mark R. Nelson, // // The Cite, Tuesday, June 24, 2008 // The author of The City Blogspot reviews Reviewing E-Books; the Benefits and Drawbacks of Virtual Textbooks in the following article.

This article, which appeared in an earlier issue of Education Week's Digital Directions, offers an interesting review of the benefits and drawbacks of digital textbooks in the K-12 space.

Pulling a couple ideas from the article of relevance to higher ed ― the article provided some "tips" for getting digital textbooks adapted in K-12. However, with a little modification, these could provide good tips for college stores interacting with their campus administrations and faculty as well. Here is a quick attempt at a revision for our audiences:

__TIPS__ 1. Get the administrative green light. Do the administrative leadership and faculty in your institution understand the positive impact virtual textbooks can have on learning? 2. Identify an on-site advocate and expert. You need staff member at each store or elsewhere on campus to keep faculty focused and to train and support them in e-textbook integration. 3. Build a technical-support team. Faculty need classroom hardware and software support so they can focus primarily on creating and teaching academic content, rather than troubleshooting technical problems. College stores should be part of this support team by becoming familiar with the e-textbook options available to students and faculty 4. Showcase the results of using e-textbooks. Faculty need to see how digital books can help improve instruction at a faster rate than traditional texts. 5. Share ideas and lessons learned. Are other institutions using virtual textbooks? What have they learned? Same is true at the college store level -- some stores are more successful than others at selling e-textbooks. How can we improve our sharing of best practices? 6. Solicit feedback from faculty curriculum experts. They can look beyond the bells and whistles and measure the usefulness of the e-textbooks’ interactive features.

Arranging a demo with faculty technology or curriculum committees could be effective avenues to engage faculty, librarians, and IT staff in this discussion. The article has a number of other interesting points -- addressing topics of cost, preparedness, expectations of publishers, and new entrants. Many of these issues reflect some of our own challenges.

An interesting read.

The End of Textbooks? //David Rapp, Scholastic, November/December 2008// What's stopping districts from ditching paper textbooks for good? Bureaucracy, budget woes, and inflexible teaching methods.

Excerpt: … The higher-education market, unlike the K–12 arena, has begun to embrace e-textbooks. To bring thousands of major publishers’ higher-education e-textbooks to market this fall, CourseSmart is using an e-book platform by Tennessee-based Ingram Digital. This effort will create the largest inventory of e-textbooks ever. But this supply will be marketed almost solely to colleges and universities—markets that are accustomed to cash-strapped students buying their own books and balking at the skyrocketing prices.

Relatively speaking, the K–12 e-textbook market remains moribund. It’s not for lack of quality product, says William Chesser, the vice president and general manager of Ingram Digital Education Solutions. Particularly in recent years, e-textbooks for the K–12 market have become content-rich teaching tools.

“Ten years ago, even eight years ago, in that market, a lot of what you’d see would just be a reproduction of the book,” Chesser says. “E-textbooks weren’t taking advantage of the things that a computer can do. What you’re seeing in the last few years is the development of multimedia content that’s linked to external systems—assessment systems, homework management systems, that kind of thing.” And the multimedia aspect will only get better. “My sense is that a lot of the effort in K–12 has been concentrated on systems that support teachers, systems that are ancillary to the content itself—with less effort to translate paper text into an e-book alternative,” he says.

The biggest challenge for the makers of e-textbooks is to find a way to break into the K–12 market. “There’s no question that higher-ed is out front,” says Chesser. “But from my point of view, it’s much more about the business models than it is about the technology.”

Chesser, a former assistant director of K–12 teacher training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says there are three main hurdles that have made today’s K–12 e-textbook situation so problematic.

Hurdle #1: The textbook-adoption cycle Hurdle #2: Truly ubiquitous laptop computing Hurdle #3: Wider adoption of distance-learning teaching models

The Time is Now for Digital Textbooks //Osman Rashid, O’Reilly Radar, September 21, 2010// Excerpt: …Barriers to digital adoption exist on three levels, and they will not fall away overnight. But by understanding them, and dealing with them intelligently and collaboratively, we can create an environment where the pursuit of academic goals, a reverence for tradition, and an embrace of technology can exist healthily together.

The first obstacle is structural… The second gating factor is emotional… The third hurdle is political…

Three events are needed to overcome these barriers:

1. The development of a device that honors the textbook while incorporating a full digital experience. 2. An open platform that encourages innovation. 3. The development of extraordinary applications that will push education to new levels of pedagogical discovery.

It will also require the full participation of publishers, educators, and administrators in this process.

As for the political obstacles, these will fall away. Advocacy groups will realize that they can't make textbooks a battleground anymore. The open world of the Internet has changed the game forever. It's no different than brands learning they can no longer control the dialogue: any shopper can go to Walmart.com or Amazon.com and read negative consumer reviews of products being offered for sale. Not long ago, experts said it was impossible for merchants to allow that on their sites.

So despite the obstacles, I believe we have reached the point of punctuated equilibrium and change will happen. I wake up every morning increasingly excited by the potential for transforming the education system.

We've spent decades on distracting debates about issues like the role of technology in the classrooms. Meanwhile, we've been failing our young people. As evidence, look to this recent The New York Times article: "The United States used to lead the world in the number of 25- to 34-year-olds with college degrees. Now it ranks 12th among 36 developed nations."

Let's encourage the spirit of innovation in higher education that we need to succeed in a global marketplace. Digital textbooks are a critical first step.

Textbooks’ Digital Future //Newsweek, September 12, 2010// E-books may be replacing hardbound versions in college classrooms.

Excerpt: …. There are already digital textbooks available, and their numbers are expected to grow: according to Simba Information, which provides data and research on the media industry, they represent less than 2 percent of textbook sales today, but will reach 10 percent by 2012. But in 2010 the offerings were pretty meager. CourseSmart, a San Mateo, Calif., company collectively owned by five of the biggest textbook publishers, has 6,000 educational titles for sale in digital format. But its electronic books are little more than scanned versions of printed works. A CourseSmart e-book includes some neat functions, like search capability and digital note-taking, but for the most part, it has few advantages over a traditional textbook other than weight and price. (CourseSmart books usually cost less than half the price of a new printed book.)

That’s where a company like Inkling comes in. Inkling, a 20-person San Francisco startup, and its competitors—including New York City’s ScrollMotion—are working with the textbook publishers to bring their books onto the iPad, iPhone, and other future devices. The aim, says Inkling’s MacInnis, is to harness all the advantages of a multitouch, Web-enabled slate. That means chemistry students won’t just see an illustration of a benzene molecule; they’ll spin and rotate a three-dimensional model of one. Biology students won’t just read about the cardiovascular system; they’ll see video of a beating heart, narrated by a world-class heart surgeon.

Interactivity, though, is only part of the story. Bringing texts onto a digital platform provides an opportunity to make the book as social as the classroom. With Inkling’s technology, for instance, a student can choose to follow another’s “note stream,” or view a heat map of the class’s most-highlighted passages. Professors get real-time information on how much of the reading assignment the class actually did, or whether a particular review problem is tripping up large numbers of students. All that comes on top of the cost savings: even these advanced digital textbooks will cost less than their print equivalents (with most of them in the $99 range) and some will even come “unbundled,” allowing students to buy the individual chapters they need most for a small fraction of the cost of a full textbook.

Textbook publishers stand to lose some revenue if individual chapter purchases catch on, but they hope to more than offset the loss by attracting new customers. Big publishers like McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and Cengage are locked in a longstanding battle against the used-textbook market, which now totals about $2.2 billion, according to Simba, and from which they earn no revenue. Online textbook-rental companies like Chegg.com offer lower prices than the publishers, and reach a wide customer base. But traditional publishers think technology will be their salvation. There’s no such thing as a “used” e-book, and digital textbooks are the center of a whole ecosystem of services—such as homework-management systems and video-capture technology for recording lectures—that publishers hope will be profitable. “We’re becoming a software service company instead of a textbook company,” says Peter Davis, president of McGraw-Hill Education.

But what about the students? Are manipulable molecules just digital eye candy or real improvements to the learning process? “Technology is never the silver bullet, but it can sometimes be the bullet,” says Diana Rhoten, an education researcher and cofounder of Startl, which invests in innovative education companies. She notes that different students have different learning styles. Some are just fine reading text, while others prefer audiovisual aids, and kinesthetic learners need to interact with something. “In a digital book, I have all of those modalities available to me,” she says. “That is huge. Customization is going to have a great impact on learning.” And if it means getting an A in organic chemistry, paying $500 for an iPad seems like a smart choice.

College E-Textbook Market to Grow 50% in 2010, New Simba Report Finds //Simba Information, August 20, 2010// While the Simba publication referenced in the article above, E-Textbooks in Higher Education is very costly, this article offers some insights.

Please Tell Me Where the Tipping Point Is //Patrick Higgins, Jr., Chalkdust 101, November 2, 2010// Excerpt: …Publishing is upside down right now, in all forms. Magazines and newspapers are struggling to remake themselves into viable options that readers and consumers still feel they need, and education publishers are beginning to feel that pinch as well. In a recent article at Xplana, Rob Reynolds spoke about what he feels are "Nine Important Trends in the Evolution of Digital Textbooks and E-learning Content".


 * The increased disaggregation of content and the breaking up of the traditional textbook model
 * A proliferation of e-content and e-learning apps that support content disaggregation and new product models
 * A merging of the current rental market and the e-textbook market
 * A wide range of license/subscription models designed to respond to consumer demands around price and ownership
 * The growth of Open Education Resource (OER) repositories
 * The development of a common XML format for e-textbooks, shared by all publishers and educational technology players
 * The importance of devices and branded devices
 * The development of e-commerce and new product ecosystems that challenge the traditional college bookstore
 * A move from evolution to innovation and revolution

Free Digital Textbook Initiative Review Results //CLRN, California Learning Resource Network// This is a not-to-miss site. To quote Governor Schwarzenegger: //"From government to non-profit organizations, teachers to textbook publishers, we all have a role to play in leveraging 21st century technology to expand learning and better serve California's students, parents, teachers and schools. This initiative will ensure our schools know which digital textbooks stand up to California's academic content standards - so these cost-effective resources can be used in our schools to help ensure each and every student has access to a world-class education."//

This may say //California//, but the excellent information in determining the value of many digital textbooks is applicable to your state, as well.

CLRN provides the reviews and recommendations regarding all the books listed. For example here is an excerpt from one review: Publisher: CK-12 Foundation Title of Program: CK-12 Probability and Statistics (Advanced) CLRN Review: http://www.clrn.org/search/details.cfm?elrid=8502 Download URL: http://cafreetextbooks.ck12.org/math/CK12_Prob_Stat_Advanced.pdf Standards Met: This program meets all 19 Advanced Probability and Statistics content standards. Standards Not Addressed: All standards are addressed. Standards Met With Comments: All standards are fully addressed. The full review for //CK-12 Probability and Statistics (Advanced)// can be found [|here].

TextbooksFree.org The copy cited below is only a portion of this site. Don’t miss this section that points to available completed textbooks and another on other helpful textbook development sites.  eduCommons will help you develop and manage an open access collection of course materials. Global Text Project **, **originated by Dr. Richard Watson at the University of Georgia. OpenTextBook.org is a registry of textbooks and text book material that is open in accordance with the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD). FlexBooks has HS science, math, engineering, and technology textbooks. Wikibooks offers over 30,000 open-content textbooks. Flat World Knowledge is a commercial digital-textbook publisher offering free open textbooks. Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources was founded by the Foothill-De Anza Community College District and the League for Innovation in the Community College. The Free Textbook Project helps in creating and sharing educational materials.  **__Textbook Development Sites with helpful textbook materials__** CK - 12 Foundation provides learning segments that can be combined into books. Connexions, from Rice University "... is a rapidly growing collection of free scholarly materials and a powerful set of free software tools to help, //authors// publish and collaborate, //instructors// rapidly build and share custom courses, //learners// explore the links among concepts, courses, and disciplines. View an in-depth introduction to Connexions in the TED2006 presentation by Connexions Founder Richard Baraniuk." California Open Source Textbook Project (COSTP) is a collaborative, public/private undertaking. It has been created to address the high cost, content range, and consistent shortages of K-12 textbooks in California. Open Educational Resources Commons ** is a teaching and learning network of shared materials, ** from K-12 through college, from algebra to zoology, open to everyone. Open of Course is a multilingual community portal for free online courses and tutorials. TED2006 an in-depth introduction to Connexions presentation by its founder Richard Baraniuk. Open Educational Resources (OER) Index Open Education Resource Center for California provides support for community college educators.