Professors Control Course Content by Publishing E-Textbooks

Through self-publishing, university faculty members are creating custom course material, saving money and improving their teaching.

“It’s still in its infancy,” said Bryce Johnson, director of e-textbook solutions at Follett Digital Resources, “but we’re seeing a strong desire from different institutions and professors to do this, and we’re very excited about the possibilities.”
 

Create custom course material

By self-publishing, sport psychologist Ron Chamberlain controls the content of his textbook and targets it to his students, who are predominantly freshmen at Brigham Young University. Instead of buying the print edition, about 75 percent of the students in his Performance Enhancement class buy the digital version and read it on their computer through the CafeScribe platform, which is powered by Follett.

And whenever Chamberlain wants to add new ideas into "Ready to Play: Mental Training for Student-Athletes," he does so easily after it's been published.

“I was able to update it through CafeScribe within a day, which is amazing technology to have a new edition of a book out that quickly," Chamberlain said.
 

Earn more, charge less

He also spends less money publishing them. With his original textbook, he printed 3,000 copies and had to store them, so he didn't break even for a while. That's not the case with creating e-textbooks.

“You don’t have to have a bunch of books laying around, you don’t have to have the initial startup costs," Chamberlain said, "and then you can send that savings on back to the students.”

For the past five years, Florida State College at Jacksonville has been driving down the cost of textbooks for its students through the SIRIUS initiative. SIRIUS brings together between 50 and 75 faculty members to create course material and textbooks for classes they're qualified to teach, said Chief Operations Officer Jack Chambers. So far, they've developed 20 interactive general education courses.

The textbooks cost $60.98 in print, but this fall, they will publish online through CafeScribe at a price of $48 each. Eleven other colleges will use them as well.

Before the courses publish, a team of content specialists, instructional designers, quality assurance staff and multimedia personnel review them, as do expert faculty members outside the college. 

And under a new program funded by a $728,000 grant from the U.S. Education Department, SIRIUS is working with a consortium of 10 colleges and universities on the courses. The faculty members in Project DELTA (Disseminating Effective Learning Through Automation) will receive online training, test the current courses and create 20 new courses in the next three years.

Sharpen teaching skills

Publishing textbooks helps professors from different specialties work together, learn from each other and stay up-to-date in their fields. The training courses also help. More than 600 faculty members take online professional development to learn interactive teaching methods that apply in online, blended and face-to-face classes.

All of the educators who develop course material take the training beforehand, and it helps them move away from a lecture-only model, Chambers said. The e-textbooks are already interactive: students highlight text, share notes, create study groups and watch media.

By acting as an instructional designer on some of the psychology courses, Chambers reads new research cited in the books and finds that he's more prepared to teach his classes.

"I feel much more comfortable with my students knowing that I’ve got the latest information," Chambers said, "and that I’ve talked with my colleagues, and we understand some of these things that we hadn’t thought about before.”