Textbooks: A Value Proposition

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Textbooks: A Value Proposition

11/13/2007

By Stephen R. Acker

Mark Nelson, digital content strategist for the National Association for College Stores, buys into the vision of a digital future, but puts the tipping point another five years down the road. The twin forces for change he sees are retirement of the baby-boom faculty, many of whom will never quite embrace non-print, and full emergence of the digital native population, described by Nelson and supported by Project Tomorrow data as students currently squirming in their seats in a sixth grade classroom. Content born digital meet learners born digital…but do we have to live through a five-year gestation? Perhaps; but by then the eBook reader may finally have achieved its promise for portability, contrast, and navigational richness.

Today’s students still typically prefer printed text to eBook readers, and Stacy Skelly, Assistant Director for Higher Education for the American Association for Publishers, puts this preference for print near the top of her list of impediments to digital content delivery. She’s right- monitor glare, dropped network connections, and confounding digital rights management strategies detract from learning, especially if the digital learning environment is just the print learning environment ported to the screen. However, if the pedagogy advanced by advanced faculty creates a different learning environment, different learning outcomes may appear.

Modest Proposals From the Instructional Designer’s Perspective

If the instructional designer’s world-view prevailed, the very first thing on every course syllabus would be a list of learning outcomes associated with that course. Working backward from those objectives, the pedagogy and the learning materials that support that pedagogy would be carefully selected to help the students meet those objectives. Learning materials, whether print or digital, would be focused and organized around the stated learning objectives. Libraries and the web would provide conduits for subsidized or free content for students pursuing a broader array of individual learning goals.

Alverno College’s (WI) Diagnostic Digital Portfolio website is a great place to learn how to describe attainable student learning outcomes. Explicitly stating what you hope students will learn is challenging, but an exercise that offers the most amazing of rewards. What is a learning objective? A behavioral learning outcome consistent with course goals. Revolutionary, don’t you think, to offer students up front a syllabus that specifies demonstrable learned behaviors? Maybe even better than telling students which book will be used in the course.

Kelly Driscoll, educator and founder of Digication, is both a digital pioneer and a teacher who believes in identifying learning outcomes upfront. Digication has been in the business of helping students, and the institutions in which they learn, to build ePortfolios around student learning outcomes. It wasn’t much of a stretch for her and her content partners to think about an expanded system that grouped digital content underneath learning objectives. Digication offers one model for distributing digital content in a focused, cost effective manner.