Textbooks Unplugged: or Why you should tell your book rep: “No thanks.”

A few years ago I was approached by a very nice book rep who was excited about the ability of their textbook to create a lot of course content that would be automatically installed in my ANGEL class via a cartridge. It would allow students to access a great deal of supplemental content that was not in the book. Test banks galore. Dogs and cats, living together.

On paper, and with her in my office, it sounded fantastic. The e-book options and looseleaf version of the text were idea to support our campus-wide green initiative. I was smitten.

Unfortunately there were two very big problems.

1. The students had to buy the book and access code directly from our book store. This effectively halted any student’s ability to source the book from somewhere else.

1. It didn’t actually work that well. At about a 10% fail rate, I was having to work with a handful of students, every semester who just couldn’t get it to work. That was during semesters where there weren’t major problems with the cartridge all by itself. That’s when things were WORKING.

But this post isn’t about any one publisher. In fact a lot of publishers are jumping on the LMS integration bandwagon with Blackboard just announcing at Blackboard World 2011 several additional publishers that they had forged relationships with.

Cartridges are nice. I admit it. They’re sort of like templates. They do a lot of the work for you. The problem is that it’s very tempting to let “a lot” become “all” and at that point you’re back to teaching a correspondence course.

For me the problem was that my students weren’t really engaging with any of the extra content and the few elements of content I wanted to use didn’t ever actually work. So what we ended up with was a honeymoon period of frustration at the start of each class. That’s not really getting off on the right foot.

I also have a very hard time looking a student in the eyes after they ask me if they can use a book a friend bought last semester and saying “No, you must buy a new book so you can get the code.” That goes against a promise that I made to myself when I was a young professor. It went something like this.

The Professor’s Textbook Manifesto

I will choose textbooks whose content I value and want to share. I will not require textbooks that are not used with real purpose in the class. I will not support textbooks that flip editions as frequently as they can get away with. I will provide a way for my students who are financially challenged to be able to access the text (even if that is just having a copy on reserve at the library). I will not be afraid to change textbooks simply because it’s a pain in the ass.

And as of this semester I have added:  How a student accesses the text will be up to them, their learning style, their budget, and their personal preference, not the publisher’s, and not the bookstore’s.

Beyond this, I’m no longer comfortable locking the textbook inside the LMS. It is counterintuitive to everything I’m trying to change in my online classes. Hell, in my classes in general.

Tags: ANGEL, Blackboard, e-book, e-text, LMS, Online Learning, textbook