Etextbooks.01: Potato, Potahto, Tomato, Tomahto?

According to some, diagnosis the difference between conventional textbooks versus etextbooks is like comparing apples and oranges. I’m not entirely convinced.

Fortress Education recently revised its Introduction to World Religions text for the Inkling enhanced textbook platform. I was a part of the 22-person team whose task was to enhance the conventional textbook’s content and add educational enhancements offered by Inkling. Our team’s objective was shared with Inkling: to improve students’ learning outcomes through built-in learner-based evaluations, decease social features such as shared notes, multimedia additions and links to web-based content beyond the e-book itself.

I was brought on as a pedagogical expert on the project. My vision for enhancements was to prompt curiosity with the existing content: revealing presumptions of the authors, challenging the reader’s sense of the strange and unfamiliar, and showing the “missing links” between theory and data. My assumption is that a field of knowledge becomes exhilarating and engaging when learning about it challenges common sense and received opinion, or, when common sense is qualified or possibly confirmed in a counter-intuitive way. Learners can then obtain a sense that religious studies is an adventurous field of inquiry.

The Inkling etextbook is an example of the current changes in educational technology. In my experience, the changes are largely in the form of delivery. Most ed-tech are mediums by which learning is supposedly better enabled through their enhanced media. Unlike interactive whiteboards or tablets, however, etextbooks like Inkling are presented as “learning solutions” with built-in teaching aids that might reduce study time and improve outcomes by providing problems to solve, simulations to experience and directions towards discovery beyond the e-book itself.

Is there a difference?

But is the Inkling etextbook really different from conventional textboooks? I put that question to my summer research colleagues at the University of Victoria’s Centre for the Study of Religion and Society. Having just begun work on the project, I was brimming with enthusiasm for the merits of etextbooks. What emerged from our discussion, however, was the realization that there are some commonalities that make their differences less about apples and oranges. The assets and drawbacks of both “learning solutions” are almost the same:

1. Limited access – There’s simply no getting around the fact that conventional textbooks and etextbooks are for sale. Etextbooks’ lower costing is mitigated by the fact that to use them there must be devices and internet access. Cost is the bottom line for students, and none of it is for free!
2. Ease of access – Institutional infrastructures can do plenty to mitigate the market-induced scarcity associated with all textbooks, so long as conventional textbooks are place on library’s temporary loan shelf and etextbooks can be accessed for free with library computers.
3. Fragility – Students will appeal to the destructive capabilities of their pets for ages to come. Cats and dogs can damage a smartphone as plausibly as a paper textbook. Conventional textbooks are highly durable compared to the fragility of the devices on which etextbooks depend: the loss and theft of devices or network problems are never faced by the “operating system” of printed paper.
4. Orbiting the same intellectual universe – Very few textbooks used in higher education are or ever will be crowd-sourced. The culture of textbook creation within higher education is that the gold standard for quality is for experts to provide the content and resources. Wikipedia, however, actually offers substantial competition to the typical world religions textbook offerings with its comprehensive and constantly updated content.
5. Knowledge-context skills – Conventional textbooks never helped students navigate research databases or write essays, but neither do etextbooks. The task of fostering responsible scholarship requires learning communities, and the discipline to seek out and discern sources – reliable, dependable and worthwhile sources. Students rarely resist the temptation to “cherry pick” from web-based content to find whatever matches what they think they want. They then fail miserably at situating their information within a broader framework and intellectual context. If anything etextbooks enable and enhance the “picking” temptation simply by being provided on a web-based platform, whereas book-reading forces knowledge context upon students.

What if etextbooks aren’t that special? 

At the end of our discussion, my colleagues and I were pressing the following question: What might we accomplish with etextbooks, given the above, that we are not accomplishing with conventional textbooks? If its simply a case of either/eyether, neither/nighther, well then let’s call the whole debate off.

I think there is a very specific answer to this question, however. And while it will not satisfy all of my colleagues, I think there is a point worth considering. I will take up that question in my next post.

Photo Credit: “you say potato, i say tomato” by eggrole – CC by 2.0

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