Textbook Authoring in the Digital Age--2
There is a whole new language for the teaching and learning enterprise today, and it is not textbook-based. The very word textbook has become vilified, vulgarized—a dirty word associated (rightly and wrongly) with the profit-taking and business practices of commercial higher education textbook publishers. Expository writing on a course subject for digitized delivery is not even called a textbook. Rather, the product is content—in the form of learning objects, modules, and media assets, offered in the form of an online course or a portal or gateway to new (or newly networked) knowledge. The term textbook will become obsolete or will be narrowly defined to refer only to conversions—non-interactive digitizations of textbooks in print.
Textbook authoring in the Digital Age thus requires a different way of looking at yourself, your mission, and the students. Today, as an erstwhile textbook author, you are regarded not as an instructor but as an SME (subject matter expert). SMEs provide authoritative content and sources, organized into templates that reflect principles of instructional design.
Principles of instructional design for online application have rules and conventions quite different in many ways from traditional lesson planning and pedagogy writing. Words, sentences, and paragraphs are adapted for readers who only skim or scan text, for example. Pedagogy becomes graphical and font-based navigational clues, hyperlink jumps, and concept webs. To set out scope and sequence, you write learning objectives keyed to telescoping outlines (rather than to fixed topical parameters). You create storyboards or content maps, gather and annotate instructional aids, and build networks.
As an SME, what you do is not instruction, however, which is regarded as linear and one-way, but rather conversation (nonlinear and two-way). You design conversations with students, who interact with you (and with each other) as often as you do with them. Students are collaborators in their learning (wikitexts are the ultimate expressions of this). Students also are consumers of the information conveyed in these conversations, information in packages and bits that students use to build and archive their own unique knowledge bases. Students will not be “responsible” for your information, only for their own learning, and they will choose what they will learn, based on the perceived personal or professional relevance and usefulness of that information to them at a given time.
Thus, for better and for worse, there is no canon—not any more. Rather than conveying a body of knowledge by writing a textbook, you are facilitating conversations that enable active (and interactive) elective learning. This learning is self- and socially constructed—the ultimate expression of the postmodern constructivist movement in educational philosophy—a movement buttressed by developments in psychometrics and educational psychology.
Your designed conversations with students may still include evidence-based narratives, but you will develop your manuscripts more like scripts—with settings, stage directions, and special effects in addition to players, speeches, and lines. As odd as it may seem compared to conventional textbook writing processes, screenwriting is appropriate for content that will be displayed on a screen. Your content will be displayed on computer monitors, laptops, PDAs, ebook readers, mobile phones, and any other so-called destructive technologies (so-called simply because they necessitate structural change) that the future holds.
If this sounds a bit like theatre—drawing in an audience to affect the way its members think and feel and potentially the way they act—I think this is accurate. Online instruction, like classroom instruction, is performative, a foundation of edutainment. As in theatre, audiences share or cohabit a cloud of both unreality and suspended disbelief. Witnessing, engaging, and participating is a form of play, a gaming process in which nothing is really certain. Things could go any which way, and I believe this, more transparently than in the past, is the true nature of future knowledge. Perhaps the permanent decline of textbook publishing, in addition to making us more prone to error and confusion, will also make us better actors, more honest and open-minded, with better scripts.
In screenwriting, your principal concern is not with students’ acquisition or mastery of a subject but rather with their experience as participants in a kind of theatre as well as their experience as self-directed consumers of information about your subject—much as they experience restaurant dining or marriage. Yes, I know this sounds a lot like marketing speak—inviting “consumers” to “join the conversation” and “share the experience” of learning, as if they were taking a taste test for Pepsi or Coke. Marketing and advertising jargon and habits of mind infiltrate every crevice of our existence. We live by capitalist precepts as subliminally and stubbornly as true believers do who attempt to live by their holy books. And with the power of a religion, those precepts preempt education along with other social institutions, recasting everything as business models.
I have come to understand that the marketing of information along with the permanent decline of textbook publishing is neither necessarily good nor necessarily bad; it’s merely different—not perverse but legitimately reflecting deep historical changes. There is no tragedy here, not yet, not compared to other changes educators have labeled tragic (or not) in retrospect. Meaningful learning and effective teaching will still take place, only by different names and in different forms, and humans will still inherit our evolutionary capacities for motivation, perception, cognition, communication, and so forth.
As Eugene Kim, media consultant, said about Wikipedia’s need for reform in August 2009, “There is a spirit and a culture that is starting to shift. That is a necessary thing. But the question is how do you scale [“scale” is marketing speak for “change”] without losing sight of your essence?” (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/business/media/ 31link.html?th&em) And that is my point exactly. How do text and academic authors in the Digital Age scale without losing sight of what they truly do?
I think you adapt to the changes, embrace the differences, and flourish through the practice of new ways of creating instructional narrative, context, and flow for online courses and new media. It’s exciting, and that, after all, is where the students are. Educators have always had to find students where they are.
Labels: college textbooks, constructivism, digital age, edutainment, instructional design, marketing of information, online courses, online textbooks, screenwriting, SME, textbook authoring
Textbook Authoring in the Digital Age
On August 19, 2009, I finally saw in print a statement echoing my long-held belief that the business of textbook publishing is truly in a state of radical (some would say, catastrophic) change. The statement was in a Courthouse News Service summary of a suit brought by a group of stockholders against their company, Barnes & Noble.
B&N had just bought BN College, its own spin-off private company, for nearly $600 million. BN College is a chain of more than 600 campus bookstores serving nearly 4 million college students and a quarter of a million faculty members. The stores provide textbooks, ancillary materials, trade books, and other goods through exclusive supply chains, especially Barnes & Noble.
The suit claimed that this acquisition lacks transparency (it allegedly enriches B&N’s CEO, who allegedly has a controlling interest in BN College), wastes corporate assets, and increases shareholders’ exposure to risk (potentially reducing their earnings), because, QUOTE: With used textbooks available on the Internet and rental textbooks available at 40 percent to 70 percent off sale price, the college textbook business has entered ‘permanent decline’ END QUOTE (http://www.courthousenews.com/2009/08/19/ Shareholders_Fight_Barnes_&_Noble_Deal.htm).
There it is: permanent decline (and note that lawyers, not the publishing industry, first uttered these words in print.) I couldn’t agree more and first said as much in 2007 upon news of three precipitous events that struck me as particularly ominous:
1) In 2007 the government responded officially to the CALPIRG price revolt, which started in 2004 and was being strongly reinforced by the mushrooming open access movement. Congress’s Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance called for free and low cost textbooks and facilitated access to used textbooks, textbook rentals, digital textbooks, and textbook lending libraries (http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/acsfa/edlite-index.html). The current international member roll of the OpenCourseWare Consortium (http://www.ocwconsortium.org/members/consortium-members.html) attests to the success of the open access movement, which has reached critical mass alongside the wiki-textbook phenomenon (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/).
2) The Thomson Corporation promptly sold all its higher education imprints. (Thomson Learning had included, for example, Wadsworth, Delmar, Heinle, Brooks/Cole, South-Western, West, and Gale—most of which became Cengage.) In a parallel development, publishers in other parts of the industry began to dump their soon-to-be no-longer-so-lucrative scholarly journals.
3) CourseSmart was founded the same year, in which industry giants (including Cengage)—once to-the-death rivals—suddenly teamed up to try to appear to be complying with public mandates while propping up prices before it was too late. (In addition to Cengage, the CourseSmart club currently includes Bedford, Freeman & Worth, CQ, Elsevier, F.A. Davis, Wiley, Jones & Bartlett, McGraw-Hill Higher Ed, Nelson Ed, Pearson, Sage, Sinauer, Taylor & Francis, and Wolters Kluwer.)
And now that the actual curse has been spat (that the college textbook business is in permanent decline), there is no going back. The tipping point, Malcolm Gladwell would say, has been reached and passed (http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/index.html). The question now is, how can textbook authors survive, perhaps even thrive, in this giveaway Digital Age. I see four essential, broad, brave new world measures (Are there more?):
1) Negotiate electronic rights separately with commercial publishers. Do not sign away any “content”. Demand adequate royalty consideration in textbook rentals, the sale of e-textbooks, and the sale of digitized textbook content (not to mention foreign textbook sales and other deeply discounted sales).
2) Keep alive and find ways to promote and publicize the values of authority, validity, credibility, accuracy, currency, and reliability in the authorship of reviewed expository text. Use the new social media to communicate these values. Develop and disseminate guidelines for assessing the quality of online textbooks and for building them. Promote yourself as an expert. Have things to say, and say them in online forums.
3) Author high-quality online textbooks though new publishing models that will not pauperize you for your efforts. Some entrepreneurial online textbook publishers offer royalties, for example. Some combine both free and monetized layers of access to their textbooks and supplements, allowing them to be profitable. Some also act as academic portals, providing comprehensive web site support for users of their products. Depending on your qualifications and market, ability to invest, and desire to have a business, self-publishing is also an option.
4) Sell your content in bits, as learning objects or modules, for example, or share your content on sites that earn money for you through some means other than sales of your content—through blog subscription, for example, or under the auspices of an organization that has publication grants or does profit sharing through advertising revenues (or other sources of income besides donations).
Thus, the statement that the college textbook business is in permanent decline must be modified. It’s only the traditional business model for commercial textbook publishing that is going the way of the dinosaurs. The world truly needs the stuff of good textbooks. In whole or in part, they are here to stay. Textbook authors need to defend the world’s right to good textbooks along with their right to earn a decent living from writing them.
Labels: ACSFA, BN College, CALPIRG, CourseSmart, digital age, digital textbooks, online textbooks, open access movement, open courseware, textbook authoring, textbook rentals, tipping point, used textbooks
Pedagogy for Media Assets—3
Media assets and learning objects for online courses include activities built on common web site capabilities. RSS feeds can supply a steady stream of relevant current content. A search bar can permit students to search the online course content or go outside to the World Wide Web. A calendar can show due dates, test dates, and other course benchmarks. Internal and external links can lead to articles or readings, a glossary, and other reference materials or course aids or supplements. Polls can work as information surveys or as pretest and posttest assessments.
A course on personal finance, for example, could begin with students responding to a poll on their current financial thinking and habits. Do they have a budget, for example, do they have a savings account, do they have a mortgage, do they carry credit card debt, are they risk averse, do they participate in an employee benefit plan, how old will they be when they retire, etc., etc.? This type of questionnaire serves a number of functions. The respondent begins to focus on key topics and anticipates learning more about them. The exercise activates their prior knowledge, confirms personal relevance and usefulness, and arouses motivation to learn. For the instructor, the poll may provide insight into the learners' levels of knowledge and mindsets about the subject, which may guide instruction. The poll may also be constructed as a test, self-administered before and after the course as a general assessment of learning.
Other built-in capabilities adaptable to online instruction are message boards, discussion lists, and email. The ability of learners to communicate with each other as well as with teachers or mentors is a critical component of effective learning. Learners become engaged through interaction, and interaction may be even greater and more inclusive in online environments than in physical classrooms.
Dialoguing in message strings, attending chat rooms, blogging, or teleconferencing, students can discuss course topics, ask and answer questions, debate issues, and develop collaborative projects. The most inclusive form of online interaction is the wiki, in which instructor and students generate, contribute, and edit course content. The types of communication or interpersonal interaction made available in an online course are limited only by the software and technologies employed.
Open source software has made sophisticated means of communication widely available at low cost. A web site developer could develop a site for an online course in Drupal, for example, or Joomla, Wordpress, or other free software. Depending on the level of technological commitment, an online "course" could be as simple as a blogsite with comments or a series of podcasts (basically slideshows with voice) or webcasts (basically online broadcasts of events), or as complex as an intranet site or academic portal with comprehensive hyperlinked text and multimedia. Like Facebook or MySpace or Linked In, a course can even create its own social network--the ultimate enhancement, perhaps, of the classroom as a learning environment.
The initiation and response patterns that communication technologies introduce also permit the development of test item files with answers, scoring, and answer feedback. Student assessment and course evaluation are key components of any instruction. Thus, just as pedagogy can be added to articles and media assets, pedagogy can be added or incorporated into the very capabilities that are built into software programs for developing web sites.
Labels: academic portal, distance learning, e-learning, e-textbooks, media assets, online courses, online textbooks, open source software, pedagogy, wiki-textbooks
Pedagogy for Media Assets—2
In my work I have found it challenging to locate good media assets to treat pedagogically in aid of learning (and also, alternatively, to find good content to convert into digital media assets). Some fields are more forthcoming than others. For science subjects, for example, the Web abounds with good cheap or free authoritative images, animations, and videos unencumbered by cookie captures, registration requirements, restricted access, random pornography, marketing campaigns, advertisements, pop-up contests, or monetization schemes. In contrast, unencumbered videos and graphics on business and finance subjects are harder to come by. Most are network or cable television news clips, video blogs by amateurs, student spoofs, or storefronts for commercial enterprises.
Images are plentiful online and there are good free or low cost sources. I usually first go to Google Images—Advance Search to find what I'm look for. Depending on the course subject, my personal favorites are the Library of Congress, NASA, and open source sites such as http://www.arthist.umn.edu/aict/html/. Stock photo sites with royalty-free images also can be good sources, but in many cases you must pay for the use of an image to embed it or to download a high-resolution version of it for print publication.
To direct my efforts I always ask up front if there is a photo research and/or permissions budget for the course and if the author has any photos for use, potentially, in the course. I guess I'm thinking here of the author I worked with who had a collection of slides of apes and monkeys, which I had added to the companion web site for his textbook--back in the days when web sites for textbooks were a novelty. Imagine the images, videos, audios, and animations one might assemble today for an online course on primate evolution!
Video repositories such as YouTube and Google Video have search bars, but it often takes too much time to separate the wheat from the chaff. Edutainment or infotainment can be difficult to distinguish from uncontaminated efforts to inquire, inform, or educate. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) (http://www.ted.com/) is an example of the kind of video sources I look for when developing online courses.
Animations also abound, but most gif files are clip art or expressions of popular culture. Educational animations are mainly for elementary and high school school students, although there are wonderful animations for science and medicine. See, for example, http://www.dmoz.org/Science/Physics/Education/Interactive_Animations/. Software and tutorials exist for animating images, maps, and graphics and for creating 3-D animations, but I usually recommend investing in the services of professional digital animators to support important learning objectives using original content.
Good wav and MP3 audio files also exist online, but they may have limited applicability to most textbook subjects. For a literature course I could envision using links to Librivox recordings, for example, of people reading passages from classic works. I always encourage academic authors to record audio files or tape their lectures for use in online courses. Voice recordings of key points, pronunciation guides, or glossary terms and definitions aid the learner. An audiobook is a useful addition or alternative for many students as a content delivery platform. Providing voice recordings also makes online courses accessible to students with special needs.
Embedding files may be the best option for some projects, but care must be taken to obtain permission or, for free sites, to obtain appropriate information for the credits. Citing or linking to a URL is easier and avoids permissioning issues. This is especially true for articles. I always choose sources that do not require subscription or purchase, although in some projects I have encouraged authors and publishers to license the use of articles through repositories such as EBSCO, Gale, or ProQuest.
Google Scholar has proven to be a useful source of articles and there are many other good online open source professional association, university, and government-archived articles. It typically takes me much longer to screen articles for use in a course than to pedagogize them. Articles often provide theoretical or historical or statistical background, but in most subjects the best use of articles, I find, is to provide concrete examples for teaching and learning chapter/module concepts.
There are many good online news sources as well, if you can find stable URLs for them. Ability to update and frequency of updating is an important consideration when linking to news. Some academic portals, for example for college courses on marketing, economics, archaeology, education, astronomy, etc., may benefit from having an RSS news feed targeted to the course subject.
Other than images, videos, audios, animations, articles, and feeds, online courses can have original interactive features that are pedagogically effective and use the built-in functionalities of the Web. These features will be the subject of my next blog entry.
Labels: academic writing, e-learning, e-textbooks, higher education, hyperlinks, media assets, narrative context, online courses, online textbooks, pedagogy, textbook
Pedagogy for Media Assets-1
A year has passed since my last post, I see. Where did the time go? I think I got side-tracked by new opportunities and another career/life-changing transformation, which I seem to undertake every 5 to 7 years (for better or worse). In my last post I promised to discuss finding media assets and endowing them with pedagogy, and this has become especially relevant for me now as I develop more online courses. I have 3 days to catch up on posting before I begin a new contract--so here goes.
First, a clarification of terms. In education, pedagogy refers to teaching, especially instructional strategies. In educational publishing, the term extends to any material that supports subject content, especially material that aids learners in discovering, acquiring, or mastering that content. The material may be on the page (in the textbook) and/or in ancillaries or supplements (in the textbook package).
Textbook pedagogy may include, for example, overviews, outlines, focus questions, headings, key terms, summaries, figures, tables, images, illustrations, cartoons, captions, summaries, review questions, applications, bibliographies, timelines, marginalia, any material especially selected to be set off from narrative text (e.g., boxes), and so on. Pedagogical material that accompanies the text in a supplement or on a web site might be questions or assignments or problem sets in a reader, workbook, or lab manual; practice tests; study guide; slides; animations; links; video; software applications, etc.
Whatever model of learning you prefer, interactivity is implicit in the concept of pedagogy, as an extension of the relationship and communication between teachers and students. I think this implicit interactivity is the principal reason that the Internet has so rapidly become the place where education takes place. The Internet is a natural fit, a true home, a global classroom for teaching and learning for the constructivist and the objectivist, and the Socratic and the didact, alike.
Publishers use the term media asset to refer to digitized text, still images, moving images, sound files, hyperlinks, and user interface capabilities (such as mouseover, drag and drop, poll, chat, email, etc.) that can function pedagogically (can teach). Thus, media assets are pedagogical devices that can be digitized and delivered electronically or online. To function as pedagogical devices, media assets must be chosen and illuminated by people with content knowledge working in an educator role. You must write the question, activity, assignment, or annotation that will transform a media asset into a learning experience or learning object.
For example, the pedagogy for a chapter in a history textbook may include maps, drawn to spec and digitized. Your map specs might include instructions for an interactive key (different colors will show the extent of successive Bantu migrations, for example) or for an animation (moving lines will show the dispersal of groups at different times). The key and animation must address or help to satisfy a learning objective for the chapter (e.g., After reading this chapter, students will identify and trace the waves of Bantu migration, explain the push-pull factors that caused the migrations, and summarize their impacts on the history of sub-Saharan Africa). The map thus appears as a static image (art) in the text and as an interactive image (media asset) on a CD or web site.
But wait! To have pedagogical value, the interactivity must mean more than just being able to learn from manipulating the object. The mind of the learner must be engaged to relate the experience to the concepts and facts expressed in the text in aid of the learning objective. How will this engagement take place? Questioning is by far the most popular pedagogical device used in such a case. The student answers questions about the media asset, relating it to the instructional content, gets answers and answer feedback, and perhaps follows up with an online search or a reading or a discussion or a problem to solve or a hypothesis to test, and so on.
E.g., What dates did the Bantu migrations shown on the map span? What two paths did the first wave of migration take? How did physical and cultural geography affect the spread of the first migrants and subsequent migrations What was the overall extent of spread, and what push-pull factors account for this spread? What impacts did the Bantu migrations have on indigenous peoples? Etc.
So, finding or creating a media asset and endowing that asset with pedagogical value are two different functions that together invite both interactivity and engagement. Together they are greater than the media asset per se, as they embrace the broader intended learning. For example, aside from the specific geographic information your map reinforces, the concept of push-pull factors transfers to other migrations on other continents among other peoples at other times. Your map activity has pedagogical value to the extent that it encourages learners to question or apply this concept.
Labels: academic writing, educational publishing, instruction, Internet, learning object, media assets, open education, pedagogical value, pedagogy, teaching
New Business Models in Textbook Publishing
Digitization, the online delivery of instructional materials, the used book business, the rise of self-publishing, and the open access movement collectively are fundamentally changing the world of higher education textbook publishing. Many are asking, how can the college textbook business remain profitable for both authors and publishers? Authors stand to lose out on advances and royalties, not to mention losing intellectual property. And to survive, publishers must find ways to provide low-cost instructional materials while competing with free online sources and the used textbook market.
Depending on their mission and commitment to a traditional publishing model, publishers' responses have included divesting themselves of their higher education divisions, becoming online rather than print publishers, licensing textbooks to institutions as part of course management software, and slicing and dicing their backlists to provide free or low-cost course content. Solutions also have included a "pay-per-view" approach, selling textbooks by the chapter, and a consortium approach, in which a group of publishers shares a website for retail sales where customers can buy textbooks or mix and match textbook content from a variety of publishing houses.
Publishers' dollars that once went into textbook development and design are now going into web site development, content delivery software, and online marketing. Job boards in the publishing industry now call for workers filling new job categories like the following (from Publishers Lunch, publishersmarketplace.com): online editor, digital workflow associate, digital manager, digital analyst, electronic media editor, online marketing manager, digital publisher, digital community builder, web producer, and digital business developer. Many big houses now offer advances only for projects with the greatest projections of sales revenue, and royalty schedules are kept at the lowest until a book breaches high sales benchmarks. Publishers also increasingly require that authors pay back advances that don't earn out, and books that merely break even are not revised (i.e., get the axe).
What can authors do to continue to derive income from textbooks they have written? They can try to keep their textbook alive in online revisions and adapt or provide content for companion web sites or other digital supplements. They can try to negotiate electronic rights separately from print (and good luck to them). If they get back the right to their existing textbook, they can parse and repurpose text to sell as instructional content. They can self-publish the work as an e-textbook and sell it online. And they can use their existing work as the basis for constructing a new interactive online course that institutions or students pay for. These latter solutions essentially put authors in competition with publishers. How's that for a paradigm shift!
Finally, authors can give away their textbooks or supplements or other content for free online and make money on collateral goods. Some online textbook sites, for example, offer royalties for downloads or print copies ordered or for homework site subscriptions. Some repositories offer to pay for the exclusive or nonexclusive use of content. Some authors offer some content for free on their web sites and deliver other content by paid subscription, or offer fee-based teleseminars, webcasts, or consultations. Thus, though it seems counterintuitive, the irresistible open access movement toward free textbooks is actually suggesting new ways to make money.
In my next posts I will explore those new ways and how authors can repurpose existing text and construct original digital textbooks.
Labels: business models, digitization, e-textbooks, Mary Ellen Lepionka, online textbooks, open access textbooks, textbook publishing
Online Courses, Continued
No, I haven't abandoned my blog--just a very busy spell when I could not make time for it.
I was talking about online course development and have expanded my studies on this topic in preparation for participating in the 2008 convention of the Text and Academic Authors Association (TAA) in Las Vegas, June 19-21. On Saturday I will be in a publisher's Q&A roundtable and also will be giving a presentation on the future of textbooks (e.g., how textbook authors can continue to make money in the digital world of free online content). I also signed up for some 15-minute mentoring sessions with textbook authors on Friday. On Thursday I look forward to attending Michael Spiegler's workshop on writing a textbook. Michael has used my book as a text (Writing and Developing Your College Textbook, 2nd Edition, Atlantic Path Publishing 2008). TAA is a great resource for textbook authors and editors (www.taaonline.net).
Topics for my mentoring sessions cover standard areas in textbook publishing, such as writing a prospectus, finding the right publisher, the publishing cycle and process, textbook organization and headings, apparatus and pedagogy, working with co-authors and editors, and doing revisions. My presentation/discussion focuses on the online environment for instructional materials, however, and is called "Textbook 2.0" (at a TAA member's apt suggestion). The deeper I go into this subject, the more I find out, and the more questions arise--an exciting prospect as I love both the research and the puzzle. I look forward to writing and speaking on this and learning even more.
As it happens I have also been developing online courses for clients, learning by doing and thus discovering both limitations and ways to get outside the box. I've also discovered how expensive it can be to have software written for online course platforms and applications. I don't know much at all about that, as my involvement has been on the soft side, with content, using templates. I have not even had to learn a markup language (html or xml). I think I would like to do that anyway, though, as soon as I get a chance. There seem to be many good tutorials online, e.g., at www.killersites.com.
One platform you can check out without commitment and at no cost is the beta at www.utilium.com. [Disclosure: I am listed as a partner in that venture (though I'm only a consultant and not a legal partner or an investor).] In any case, I think Utilium and sites like it hold a lot of promise for instructor-led development of high-quality custom course content that can be sold or shared, as desired, without permissions problems, but with the full potential of the World Wide Web and, hopefully, the interactive user interfaces of social networking.
I look forward to sharing on this blog more of what I learn about the future of textbooks in a digital world.
Labels: e-learning, e-textbooks, Mary Ellen Lepionka, online courses, online textbooks, text and academic authors, Textbook 2.0, Utilium, writing and developing your college textbook
