Comments on: Book Projects: What Makes A Good Textbook Supplemental Resource Guide for Instructors?

By: Gerald (Jerry) Landis

Gerald (Jerry) Landis — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 00:42:56 +0000

You had an excellent four point summaries.

Have you ever used LIVING TEXTBOOKS which tell a story helping the
student to learn?

Is there such a thing for adult learning?

We are still very child like and learn also by stories.

By: avainug

avainug — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 10:48:26 +0000

Подскажите шооблончег под WordPress 2.6.2, чтобы был похож на ваш tstcpublishing.wordpress.com.

Заранее благодарю)

By: Mark Long

Mark Long — Mon, 19 May 2008 16:34:20 +0000

I totally agree that so many of instructor resource guides are done as an afterthought . . . and hardly ever done by the author(s) who produced the book . . . especially when it comes to test bank questions. This leads, I think, to a common complaint I hear from instructors that test bank questions cover information not actually in the chapter which requires even more work by the instructors to then go back and verify each question. So we’re going back to ensure we can provide the page # in the book for each question in the test bank.

You bring up another good point as well . . . something that we are now getting started with after your comment last week: lesson plans. Especially with our new college freshman orientation text–the first project where we’ve produced most of these materials up front–we’re going back to produce 30-35 lessons plans. But, as you say, it’s imperative that these materials be useful and actually workable in the classroom instead of being, to recall _Cluless_, so Monet: they look good at a distance until you actually get up close to really see the details.

By: enkerli

enkerli — Wed, 14 May 2008 03:17:10 +0000

Supplemental resources tend to be an afterthought, with textbooks published by big names. They’re used as lures, it seems, as they tell the potential textbook adopter that the book is in fact a “complete set of well-designed pedagogical tools.” But they often end up being utterly inadequate.
So, it’s nice that you should think about these tools through a more critical approach. Sure, you want to use them to make the books more appealing to instructors. But you still think about the pedagogical issues surrounding textbook adoptions and that’s a lot more than mainstream publishers seem to be doing.
There’s a lot more resources you could add. Lesson plans, learning objects, SCORM packages, custom websites, primary sources, course outlines, sample syllabi, instructor manuals, audiovisual material, slides, interactive exercises, glossaries, etc. All of these things have been distributed by publishers at one point or another. Again, they’re typically of low quality, having been created as an afterthought.
My advice: make these resources as flexible as possible. Don’t focus on protecting that content. Make that content as easily available and as easy to repurpose as possible. The only exception would be the testbank, which does need to be somehow protected. But if the supplementary material is widely available, is shared among instructors, it can actually convince a number of instructors to adopt your textbook. Viral marketing coupled with the social networking dimension of teaching.
What’s funny is that some big publishers have already understood this (and they tend to be slow). Even McGraw-Hill makes some supplemental content freely available to anyone (though it still restricts the “Instructor Edition” content, which includes material that anyone could use).
Integrating material in Learning Management Systems (Moodle, Sakai, ATutor, Claroline, Blackboard, WebCT…) is something publishing companies try to sell but do quite badly. If you can pull it off, you would have a definite advantage. It’s probably not a good idea to create your own LMS: after all, the best ones (Moodle and Sakai) are Open Source. But you could easily leverage the power of LMS to gain an advantage. For instance, a glossary could be imported into a Moodle course site and make it easy for students to find definitions for common terms (glossary entries can be linked automatically to all occurrences of terms). Exercises could be pre-built as assignments, with grading scales. External links could be added to internal blogs. Audiovisual material could be added as podcast episodes…
What’s best is that much of this could be community-built. If learners and instructors have already built content, why not take advantage of their work and redistribute it (with credit, of course)? If you make the content flexible, other learners will be able to build on this and make your textbooks even more valuable in the process.
Makes sense?