Dive Brief:
- Mike Qaissaunee, chair of the engineering and technology department at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey, is using a National Science Foundation grant to create a new model for e-book creation.
- Campus Technology reports Qaissaunee’s E-MATE, or E-books and Mobile Apps for Technician Education, project aims to give faculty the tools to create interactive e-books as well as the resources and training materials to master the process, including advice about what to make interactive (not everything, just the most difficult-to-grasp concepts).
- iBooks Author is free and offers a range of templates for Apple-friendly texts, as well as an export option to interactive PDFs that can be built out with BookWidgets or Tumult Hype.
Dive Insight:
As colleges and universities focus more energy on improving student outcomes, improving learning materials is key. Interactive e-books have the power to be more effective across a range of student learning styles. The first time a faculty member teaches a course, he or she can embed interactive content to help explain the concepts expected to be most difficult. In future courses, that faculty member can use data about prior student performance to improve the e-book. Textbook creation is cheaper, as are the sales to students, another area many colleges have focused on as rising tuition and student debt have become national issues.
Besides the interactive e-book model at Brookdale, researchers at Penn State have developed an algorithm to help users create their own textbooks using open educational resources. The program populates the textbook with OER following keyword searches and allows users to edit from there.