Textbooks: A Value Proposition

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Textbooks: A Value Proposition

11/13/2007

By Stephen R. Acker

No doubt, there are many unanticipated consequences to moving to a digital textbook realm. Some have been mentioned, and thus anticipated- concerns about the digital divide, technical standards, digital rights management, and resistance of user communities weaned on print. For yet a wider framework in which to consider issues tied to a digital marketplace, read Cliff Lynch’s analysis. Ed Walton’s empirical study (April 2007) also raises important issues. He finds that faculty working with students using digital texts face a new kind of literacy challenge because students scan books as strings of found phrases, jumping over the linear progression of the author’s idea development. Ed argues that we need a new literacy to fully exploit the digital realm.

Editor’s note: Where do you stand on the digital textbook debate? E-mail us at editors@campus-technology.com; select responses will be published in our March 2008 issue.

And in the End

We still have the choice between legislated approaches and market-based approaches to reducing the high cost of textbooks in education. A wide continuum of options is available to faculty and institutions willing and able to change their instructional practices that favor a marketplace solution. By first identifying what the student should learn, an instructor can more appropriately value the content to help students reach those outcomes. The source of these materials can be the traditional for-profit publishers, the start-up companies that privilege the interface through which to construct the learning cycle, libraries, outputs from the minds and processes of the open courseware community, or a combination of the above.

As we move forward in re-developing the learning materials package to take advantage of the digital options available to us, we should celebrate the diversity of solutions that have emerged and ideally wrap them in common, and open, standards, as Rob Abel and the IMS organization would have us do. We may never solve the paradox of context and content (content is most useful within context, context-free learning objects are most re-usable), but thinking of learning objectives as magnets that collect content filings will get us part way down the path of a new, more affordable and more equitable pricing model for instructional materials, once known in the quaint phrase as “textbooks.”

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