Textbooks vs eTextbooks.

I was reading through an article that Stehpen Downes added to his newsletter about interactive e-texts and students. (Smart guy and I appreciate all the work he puts into creating daily updates about education, learning and ed-tech. Well worth subscribing)

The direct link to the article: Spencer, R., Comeau, E., Matchett, B., Biderman, M., Joy, P., Doria, N., & Numer, M. (2020). Interactive E-Texts and Students: A Scoping Review. Canadian Journal of Education/Revue canadienne de l'éducation, 43(1), 258-287.

I found this article to be very interesting from my own context. In our library we are promoting the use of e-textbooks over print textbooks but I find that the trend of publishers is going beyond that of a traditional print textbook in electronic form and they are moving more into the content space. I think they are coming to realise the move away from print but in order to differentiate they are producing interactive content but hosting it on their own platform which requires individual subscription. Which creates issues for us in the Library.

I think the usual assumption is that online interactivity leads to better learning outcomes: better grades, student satisfaction scores, etc. So it was interesting to read that it isn't always the case. Especially if the student isn't confident in using digital technologies. Comes back to the digital divide issue - the use of technology helps the learning process but only if you are comfortable using the technolgy otherwise you could be creating barriers to the learning process.

The other point I was thinking about is how the library supports the student with those resources. We try to purchase a copy of all textbooks to provide students with online access. This obviously helps students as they have easy access to resources and they don't need to purchase a textbook themselves (although we recommend that they do have their own copy). However, with the additional interactivity, it is often difficult to obtain institutional licences. Often the additional interactivity includes quizes, ongoing performance monitoring, etc. but this is all hosted on the publishers online platform and it requires individual logins. While the interactive content may be beneficial to students in the right mind set, the individual logins means a per user subscription model which means an additional cost to the student. Then there are questions of whether this interactivity and ongoing assessment forms part of the official subject assessment which opens another can of worms around data capture, storage, etc.

For the items that fall under institutional licences, the additional content is often removed. The publisher will let us have a digital copy of the textbook 'text' component but all the access to videos, online quizes, ongoing assessment, etc. is not available unless the user purchases individual access.

One option I can think of to help combat this is to set up Single Sign on over ezproxy - the removal of a generic IP base access model means that individual logins can be supported on publisher platforms but it requires a great deal more moving parts and I find the contract approval process gets a lot more involved.

My opinion is that online interactive resources are beneficial to the learning process however there are a lot of factors to consider before applying that statement across the board.

Image credit: Sik-life - Pixabay