Include Textbooks to Reduce Cost of Courses

Roxanne Missingham, Australian National University Librarian writes "Students say textbooks are too expensive – could an open access model be the answer?" (The Conversation, March 2, 2016). To encourage this, I suggest the Australian Government require universities to include the cost of textbooks in course fees.

Where possible I specify open access materials for my students. In one case there was no such book available, so I wrote it: "ICT Sustainability: Assessment and Strategies for a Low Carbon Future" (now used by institutions around the world).

Some open and distance universities include textbooks in the cost of courses. It can be hard for students in remote areas to obtain textbooks, so it is easier for the institution to supply them. Also open universities have as part of their charter to provide access to those who are barred from conventional higher education, due to financial circumstances.

Open access books would help lower costs, but conventional universities and their academics, need an incentive to use them. As textbooks are a cost to the student, not the university, there is no incentive to lower their cost. Where the academic, or the university, receives a royalty from textbook sales, there is an incentive to increase the cost of textbooks. Requiring universities to include the cost of textbooks in course fees would create an incentive to reduce the cost.

Web Based eBook Interface for Young Students?

Another "learning object" I have had to review as as part of a course on instructional design, is an e-book for young readers: "Sk8 for Jake". The content of the book seemed suitable for the intended audience, but the web interface has some problems. Perhaps this would be better as an ePub e-book.

Some routine tests run on the interface:

1. W3C Markup Validation Service: 32 Errors, 12 warnings.
2.  W3C mobileOK Checker: Score of 0 out of 5 (lowest possible score). Failures per severity: critical 4, severe 2, medium 2, low 5.
3. Achecker Accessibility Review for WCAG 2.0 (Level AA) Guidelines: Known Problems (22), Likely Problems (0), Potential Problems (187).

These are some easily fixed problems with the interface. However the major difficulty is that the content of the book appears to be presented as one large image per page. There is no text which could be converted to Braille, or synthetic speech. This makes the entire book inaccessible.
There is an audio option, which has very clear narration and has the option of setting the speed. But I had difficulty operating the audio interface and it does not appear to exactly match the text in the book.

Ebooks for education

Dr McComas Taylor, talked to the ACS e-Learning Special Interest Group last night at the Australian National University on role and nature of the "textbook" in the technology age. McComas described how he created a free open access multimedia electronic textbook: "The Joy of Sanskrit: A first-year syllabus for tertiary students".

The book is the first e-textbook available free for download from the ANU Press. The Joy of Sanskrit is available for iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, open The Joy of Sanskrit by McComas Taylor and Grazia Scotellaro was published in 2014 and is available in a version for Apple computers, iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, plus a separate version for  Microsoft Windows computers. 

Dr Taylor expressed frustration at the need for separate versions of the ebook for Apple and Microsoft computers and hoped that this could be overcome in the future. One of the audience members suggested use of HTML 5 could overcome these problems and make for a more interactive electronic book, with products such as Educanon. The EPUB 3 standard also offer more interactivity.

Dr. Taylor also talked of the frustrations with the process of producing ePub format e-books, where the rendering of the format took a long time even after small corrections to the content. He commented there were good tools for Apple format e-books but not for multiple platform development. 

For reading ePub ebooks, Android tablets, the App epubreader can be used, for Macs,  Bookreader Lite and  Windows, Azardi. I found that Calibre worked well for reading an epub ebook in the Linux operating system (although it is intended for creating ebooks).

Dr Taylor compared the use of  an "off-line" ebook for education, with  an on-line learning management system (LMS), such as the  Moodle system used by ANU (branded "Wattle" at ANU). He pointed out the ebook had the advantage that it needed to only be downloaded once at the start of a course, whereas the student needed a continual Internet connection to use the LMS. The disadvantage was that the ebook could not be as easily updated. The two could be used together with the ebook providing content and the LMS used for interactive exercises and for students to submit work. But Dr Taylor looked forward to advances in the technology which would allow interactive "formative" exercises in the ebook, with the LMS used for "summative" assessment.

Dr Taylor demonstrated an application on an Apple iPhone which allowed the language student to listen to a sample of speech, record their own and the play it back for comparison. He contrasted this with  the Wimba Voice Tools module for Moodle, which while function, was more cumbersome to use.

ps: Another epub ebook used at ANU is my own "ICT Sustainability: Assessment and Strategies for a Low Carbon Future", used for the course Comp7310. But unlike Dr Taylor's ebook, this has no multimedia, just text.

Australian Technical Standards for Online Course Materials

The E-standards Expert Group has issued updated standards for online course materials for the vocational education and training sector in Australia: "VET E-standards for Training" (Department of Industry, 10 April 2014). While aimed at TAFEs and non-government Registered Training Organisations (RTOs), these standards are equally applicable for schools and universities. The standards recommended are not controversial, being commonly used on the web.

What might be less familiar are the formats for packaging educational material, such as IMS Content Packaging (Version 1.1.4) and SCORM 1.2. There will still be difficult decisions to be made, for example, if you have some content, should you package it as an EPUB ebook, IMS or SCORM?

In many cases these standards will not be so important to individual course designers and teachers, as they will have to use what the software provided by their institution supports. However, educators should keep the standards in mind so that their content can be ported more easily from system to system.

In practice I try to use simply formatted web pages for course content. I use HTML in preference to PDF, Powerpoint and DOCX files. This way the content can be converted to other formats as required and can be assembled into e-books and modules, using whichever packaging standard is appropriate.

Video of MOOCs with Books: Technology Plus Traditional Teaching for an On-line Education Revolution

The recording of my webinar "MOOCs with Books: Technology Plus Traditional Teaching for an On-line Education Revolution" is now available, courtesy of the SA e-Leaning Unit of the National VET E-learning Strategy. Also available are the notes and slides. See the National Calendar for other National VET events. My next presentation on ICT trends in Education is scheduled for 4:45pm, 12 November 2013, in Canberra, hosted by the Australian Computer Society. I will be in Perth 23 September to 18 October and available to speak there in person.

Death of The Book in the Digital Age

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra, where Professor Alan Liu, UCSB, is speaking on "This is not a book: Long forms of attention in the digital age". He commented that the lectern provided in the ANU seminar room was designed for paper, not for his laptop and mouse, which tend to slide off (perhaps he needs a tablet computer). Open Journal Systems was mentioned as one of the lively formats which while mimicking traditional book publishing are much more lively.

Professor Liu mentioned "Twitter fiction: 21 authors try their hand at 140-character novels" by the Guardian, which includes a "book" of 140 characters by Ian Rankin and smallplaces by Nick Belardes, with a book  as Tweets.

Professor Liu then discussed several projects to use a computer to analysis the documents which a group of people read. One example was "Making Visible the Invisible" (2005-2014) which displays on a screen at the Seattle Central Library what is borrowed from the collection. Professor Liu mentioned the Research-oriented Social Environment (RoSE) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This harvests books from online sources and creates Facebook-like pages for the authors (Facebook for the dead). Then the historical authors are linked to living authors. He in effect suggested that this collection of information is the book.

Professor Liu argued that the book is a long form of attention work, intended for permanent standard and authoritative use. But the historical "book" was not necessarily read in a linear fashion, nor fixed or authoritative. Presumably it was only with the invention of the printing press with mass production of identical copies bound together would make the book standardized. The Wikipedia suggests the word book is derived from "block of wood", which suggests permanence and authority (as you do not carve a block of wood without thinking about it carefully).

In my view Professor Liu missed the point that electronic documents, plus on-line forums are not emulating just books, but the process of scholarly dialogue. This then resembled a symposium, where scholars present their work and then discuss it. Books, e and paper, are just part of this.

Professor Liu is the author of  "The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information", which is a book. ;-)

MOOCs with Books: Technology Plus Traditional Teaching for an On-line Education Revolution

I will be speaking on "MOOCs with Books: Technology Plus Traditional Teaching for an On-line Education Revolution" in a webinar hosted by the National VET e-Learning Strategy, 1pm AEST 17 September (12:30pm Adelaide time). There will be a face-to-face version of the event hosted by the Australian Computer Society in Canberra, 4:45pm 12 November 2013.

TOPIC: MOOCs with Books: Synchronisation of large scale asynchronous e-learning
PRESENTER:  Tom Worthington,  Adjunct Lecturer, Australian National University

A quiet revolution is taking place in Australia's schools, TAFEs and universities, with education moving on-line. Award winning education designer Tom Worthington will provide an overview of the trends and its implications for education:

1. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS)
2. Social media for education
3. Open Source e-Portfolio software
4. Cloud based Learning Management Systems (LMS)
5. e-Book textbooks
6. Portable course-ware formats

See also:

1. Synchronizing Asynchronous Learning: Combining Synchronous and Asynchronous Techniques
2. A Green Computing Professional Education Course Online
3. On-line Professional Education For Australian Research-Intensive Universities in the Asian Century