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
Advice on Textbook Writing
Well, here's a new series of posts with tips and advice on textbook writing. Some of the topics, such as the following, are ones I forgot to mention in my books, Writing and Developing Your College Textbook and Writing and Developing College Textbook Supplements. Other topics simply will address my pet peeves, such as poor writing habits and, more importantly, the poor habits of mind that compromise textbook organization and content.
In my years of work with textbook manuscripts, I have noticed a pervasive voice-audience pattern that I think reduces the value and effectiveness of textbooks overall. To wit: Authors write as if they alone are teaching the course. Authors also often write as if students have no other information source or recourse for discovering or mastering course content.
That the textbook author tends to assume a godlike role and status should come as no surprise. After all, writing is an act of creation, traditionally performed in private and without interference for some imaginary audience that is both passive and captive. This kind of discourse replicates the lecture model of traditional classroom instruction. Add to this the well-known academic ego and it is easy to see how the authorial voice may become authoritative to a fault. The problem is that authors do not see themselves as adjuncts to flesh-and-blood teachers or their textbooks as instruments in another scholar-educator's work.
As a result, the instructor who adopted the textbook for use in his or her class may be ill considered or cut out of the process. The textbook says every possible thing that can be said about each topic, space permitting, leaving nothing to the imagination and little for the instructor to add! Even the instructor's manual that comes with the textbook has little of interest for the flesh-and-blood teacher to do other than assign the readings and show the videos the publisher provides as part of the package.
The instructors who adopt your textbook are an important part of your audience, not just the student readers. So, if you were collaborating with them to teach a course, one off-site (you, the author) and others on-site (the flesh-and-blood classroom instructors), how might your textbook writing and supplements change? This is interesting to think about. What could you do to help your colleagues in the trenches take the primary role in student course outcomes, teach well, and look good?
The same logic applies to the other part of the audience, the students. How can you help them take the primary or active role in their learning, learn well, and look good? In the 80+ textbooks I have reviewed, I came across only two that systematically asked students questions, required students to frame questions, or modeled any kind of inquiry process. But learning is as much an act of creation as teaching or writing. And students must rely neither on you nor on your classroom counterpart as "the" knowledge-giver.
Sharing power over the reader's mind does not come easily to academic authors, but there is so much information today that your textbook cannot stand apart as some kind of bible for the course for which you wrote it. In the last 10 years filling textbook chapter closers with URLs has become obligatory, but often Internet links are strewn gratuitously, with no clear direction for using outside information in constructing knowledge or skills. Consider, too, the rapid growth of collaborative online teaching, e-learning, and custom or wiki textbooks. Where and how will your textbook--as one source of knowledge and as one voice--take its place in this new world?
Labels: audience, authorial voice, textbook writing, writing and developing your college textbook
