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
Providing Pedagogy
In addition to narrative context, the learning objects and media assets in an interactive online textbook need pedagogy--devices or elements that are not part of the narrative and are not in the link per se but that teach about the content and are useful or essential to the learning process or otherwise help students achieve the learning objectives. Minimum pedagogy would consist of learning objectives--what students should know, think, do, and/or feel after completing the module--and a system of headings to structure the scope and sequence and relative salience of the content.
Pedagogy also may include a systematic way to begin and end each module, links to definitional glosses, contextual or historical asides, bibliographic or reference annotations, graphic organizers, chronologies, expository captions for photos and art, questions or problem sets, interim reviews, and examples or applications. The pedagogy you provide may reside on your computer as files to which your course is hyperlinked. Pedagogical elements that hyperlinks themselves provide may include, for example, case studies, profiles, research studies, news reports, or journal articles with thematic content. However the links have pedagogical value to the learner only to the extent that learners are given opportunities to interact with the content and assess their grasp and use of it.
Thus, a link to a document describing ground-breaking research would have pedagogical value to the extent that you frame questions about it (or guide learners in framing questions) and to the extent that you suggest answers to those questions (or provide ways for students to interact to find answers). At the least, you would ask or test why the research was ground-breaking and what knowledge it discovered, expanded, or overturned.
One consequence of providing pedagogy in online contexts is that textbook supplements for students--such as test questions and study guide material--may become integrated into the course rather than provided as separate publications. These components, too, enhance the pedagogical value of online courses.
Labels: e-textbooks, hyperlinks, learning objectives, learning objects, media assets, online courses, online textbooks, pedagogy, writing and developing your college textbook, writing narrative
Online Course Development
My recommendations for developing an online course start with building a working table of contents with textual headings, just as you would for a print textbook. The best structure for online application is a sequence of units of study, which can be presented online as a learning sequence comprised of self-contained modules. Depending on length and complexity of content, a module can function at the level of a unit or a chapter. In any case, text headings serve as conceptual organizers for topics and subtopics within a module.
The more self-contained modules are, the more easily they can be moved in the sequence of instruction or chosen for other customizations with content from other sources. Learning objects, your own or ones you find online (or in repositories such as MERLOT), are self-contained lessons or bits, such as definitions or examples. You can put bits together to help populate sections within a module. Discrete learning objects and modules permit maximum flexibility in constructing courses, but it it critical to functionally interrelate information as well.
I think a serious flaw in online course development is the tendency to unharness information from larger meaning. For this reason it is essential to include pedagogy, such as learning objectives, module openers and closers, discussion questions or critical thinking questions, overviews, summaries or reviews, and glosses for technical terms. Each module should have learning objectives--what students should know or be able to do after studying the unit. There should be one of more learning objectives for each main heading within a module. Among your learning objects should be text boxes or links to brief documents in which you address the question of larger meaning within each module and the conceptual (and logical or historical) relationships between modules.
Consider developing a course in 8 to 14 units or modules inclusive of pedagogy, depending on semester length and course requirements, such as opportunities for assessment or student presentations. The number of modules should provide a practical course load for learners (and for the instructor to administer) at a rate of around one module a week. Getting course content into a finite number of modules is the same challenge you face in having a reasonable number of chapters in a textbook. Highly dense and technical material usually needs a larger number of shorter modules assigned at a rate of two a week. Keep in mind learning theory and research about chunking information for maximum effective learning rate.
Module content consists of the learning objects, bits, personal documents, links, and media assets that you assemble to help students satisfy each learning objective. If you wanted your introduction to economics students to distinguish among financial markets, for example, what would you show them and what would you have them read and what would you have them discuss, etc.? Learning materials you offer them might include choices among podcasts, videos, animations, simulations, news articles, scholarly articles, research reports, interviews, graphics, photos, links, prepackaged lessons, maps, demos, tutorials, blogs, dictionary entries, government statistics, and so on. For teaching effectiveness, the media assets you choose must be somehow endowed with pedagogy and couched in the larger meaning that makes learning anything worthwhile.
Next time: More on finding media assets and endowing them with pedagogy.
Labels: distance learning, e-textbooks, learning objects, media assets, online courses, online textbooks, pedagogy
Advice on Textbook Writing - 2: The E-Textbook Model
Try developing your textbook manuscript using an e-textbook model. Think of your chapters as modules, your paragraphs as nested learning objects or "content". No need to draft in html; just construct a core narrative text (telling the story) and system of headings (organizing the story conceptually). Then tag or keymark the text for links to learning objectives, supporting web sites, examples, problems, articles, images, glosses, questions, activities, source citations, bibliography, etc. For each module keep a log of these proposed links and supporting materials and their sources as a sort of media log, similar to the permissions logs you would keep. (I model this process in chapters 9 and 10 in my 2005 book on writing and developing college textbook supplements, but already I see I must update! Readers' advice for revising that book is most welcome.)
I see several reasons for drafting to an e-textbook model, some relating to exposition and some to the realities of textbook publishing today:
1. Writing a core narrative is good discipline for saying what absolutely needs to be said in a minimalist (and infinitely expandable) way. Some might argue that this is a reductio ad absurdam exercise, and in some hands it no doubt would be. However, expressing what is most important--the key fact, the main point, the basic chronology, the critical argument or proof, the one thing to remember, the so what?--is an expository writer's duty to the learner. Your mission as a textbook author should be based on what you feel is most important for readers to come away with.
2. Core narratives let you draft a whole-book first draft, to schedule and to length, without being overwhelmed with details. At the same time, media logs let you choose the best and most efficient supporting material for your content for each use--in the print edition, in an electronic edition, and in each supplement, including what you can give to your colleagues, the classroom instructors, to help them teach the course.
3. Media logs let you plan for proving or enriching your narratives in limitless ways at many levels of discourse. These ways offer students and instructors greater choice in what they will use to learn and teach the course content. And this is the way education is headed today. For better or worse, knowledge is becoming unpegged from the minds of its creators--at once personalized and globalized.
4. A textbook manuscript constructed this way can be easily deconstructed and its parts repurposed for applications in web interfaces and e-learning or interactive online courses, in both open-access and for-sale environments. Educational publishing for all levels is headed this way. Publishers use particularized textbook and ancillary content as mix and match media assets. A manuscript that can be easily published in any form has clear added value, including in textbook publishing contracts where the granting of electronic rights has become mandatory for publishers even to begin to compete.
5. A manuscript written to the e-textbook model is easy to revise, as the core content remains largely the same except for any new research, facts, or interpretations. Finding new assets to support the content in a revision can be just plain fun, a playground for invention and creativity and also a way to incorporate the contributions of coauthors and students or other contributors.
There probably are more reasons, and I would like to hear them. There is a downside too, of course, especially for the traditionalists among us, but I'm rather excited by all the changes.
Labels: e-learning, e-textbooks, learning objects, media assets, textbook manuscripts, textbook writing, writing and developing college textbook supplements
