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
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
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
Permissioning Online Resources
Getting permission to use or link to online content is still a gray area in copyright law and application. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf) confirms that you must request permission to use anything you find online that is protected by copyright law, unless a grant of release appears with the material. In that case the author or copyright holder of the published material has authorized its use. A notice may appear such as, "Permission is granted for teachers and students to copy and use this content so long as no fee is charged and this web site is cited as the source". Not all material is protected, nevertheless, including facts, ideas, methods, works in the public domain, many government documents, and so on. Clear explanations of "public domain" may be found online.
The best explanation I have found for determining if you need permission is published by the University of Texas at www.utsystem.edu/ogc/Intellectualproperty/COPYPOL2.HTM. That site also has a clear explanation of the four tests for fair use. Basically, if you are using a lot of original material commercially (online or in print) in such a way that the value of the material to its owner or creator will potentially be diminished, then you must have written permission. Educational use is not fair use if money is involved. For example, if students have to pay for your coursepack or online course, then you must make sure that everything in it is permissioned or falls into the public domain or is defensible as fair use on other grounds.
It used to be that we were supposed to request permission to link to another site before doing so. That practice has been found to be largely unenforceable, however, and is contrary to basic web architecture, which distributes information via hyperlinks. Although link requests increasingly are viewed as a mere nicety, the nuances are still being tested (or threatened) in court cases on trademark infringement. In your online course, use hyperlinks to direct students to other sources of information or media assets, taking care to link to the home page rather than internal pages that may be viewed as more proprietary. Importing hyperlinked material into your web site is another matter, however, and in that case the rules for permissioning apply.
Another gray area is the use of social networking sites to gather information for publication. Private speech is protected, but defining privacy on social sites is troublesome. I recently advised an author to incorporate a waiver into his online questionnaire such that people understand that responding to the questionnaire automatically grants release for him to use it as he sees fit without further consideration to them. I also advised him that the speech of minors is extra-protected and he must have written permission from parents regardless. Also, email is protected speech, and making speech anonymous does not necessarily protect against privacy infringement.
I am not an attorney, though, and my advice cannot substitute for the real thing (which can be found at reasonable cost). My own policy (erring on the side of caution, perhaps) is always to cite sources, include credit lines, observe terms of use (and publish my own), and seek authorization or ask permission whenever I have any doubt.
Labels: copyright law, fair use, hyperlinks, online courses, online textbooks, permissions, public domain
Finding and Choosing Media Assets
In my last post I discussed how to develop a shell for your online course--the structure and conceptual framework for the course you want to teach. You have your units, modules, and headings, along with learning objectives for each module and section in your outline. Now, finding the right media assets to plug into your online course shell is part art and part the luck of discovery.
Recall that media assets include web sites, documents, podcasts, audio files, webcasts, videos, animations, photos, other images, or any of a host of specific files, such as maps or graphics. The best way to find these assets is to start with links you already know or that have been recommended to you by colleagues, and those that are available through your institution, such as library subscriptions to online resources. Then move on to the keyword or key phrase search, preferably trying a variety of search engines.
Evaluating assets for inclusion in your course should be based on the following criteria:
1) Does it directly advance the learner's potential ability to fulfill the stated learning objective for that topic or section? Is the content at the right intellectual level for your audience?
2) Is the source known, credible, authoritative, authentic, literate, accurate, and reliable? Does it cite sources?
3) Can you use it or link to it legally without permission; or can you get permission? (more on this in the next post)
4) Is the web site or link stable and secure? Is it current or routinely updated?
5) Depending on context you also may want to ask, Is it free? Is it free of advertising? Does it require registration or subscription?
Web sites to favor include large or well-known national or international organizations; academic associations; federal and state government sites; online archives of newspaper, journal, or research articles; and open-access college- and university-based repositories.
Web sites to avoid include students' and instructors' pages; personal home pages other than your own; unarchived articles (which tend to disappear); commercial sites with pop-up ads or registration requirements; pages with internal links that are broken or lead to inappropriate content; sites with offensive or salacious content or undeclared bias.
Collect your finds into a bookmark folder, annotating each URL and categorizing it for placement in a section in your course outline. The bookmark folder will help you conveniently hyperlink your narrative text or pedagogy to your assets, or, alternatively, to hyperlink your assets to the learning objectives and headings in your course outline. Providing narrative and pedagogical contexts for your media assets will be the subject of a future post.
You no doubt will find far more resources than you can use in your course. As you develop your bookmark folder, try to choose the right number of assets to correspond with your predicted "time on task" for students to get through a module and satisfy the learning objectives. You may wish to apply the traditional industry standard of a maximum of 50 pages of reading per college course per week, and then reduce this to account for the time needed to study real-time media assets such as audio and video.
Many resources you find will not be conveniently available to you because of permission issues, the subject of my next post.
Labels: media assets, online courses, online textbooks, textbook development
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
